On 12 May, a row of five derelict homes collapsed onto a busy street in Dublin, narrowly missing two passers-by. This lucky escape shines a light on the inherent market failures that have led to a blight of dereliction in every village, town, and city, a blight which drains value from our communities.

Failure to address dereliction creates private wealth for a few and public squalor for everyone else. It keeps properties off the market, which reduces supply, driving up prices and rents. This directly benefits existing landlords, creditors, investors, and speculators who increase their wealth through this manufactured structural scarcity.

Extensive damage as the buildings collapsed along the canal.

These most recent collapsing homes demonstrate again that hoarding and speculation is not just accepted as normal, it’s actually incentivised and rewarded through reduced taxes, rapidly rising asset values, and the lack of sufficient deterrents.

These five homes were bought by the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), but the body had not developed them over many years. It received planning to demolish them and build offices, but this had not yet come to pass. The result of these long, slow processes is that buildings become dilapidated and, as we can see, can collapse.

Land flipping

The high levels of dereliction in our capital are not surprising, considering Dublin already has one of the highest office vacancy rates in Europe. One of the greatest causes of dereliction is the practice of land flipping. This is the act of buying properties, letting them go derelict, using this as justification for demolition, gaining planning, and then speculating until they can sell at the highest price.

Land flipping has become acceptable over the years, and it has resulted in large swaths of derelict land banks sitting in urban settings, inflating land prices to unviable levels.

The homes on the canal were empty and decaying for 35 years, enough time to raise a family and see these children grow up and start a family of their own. In those 35 years, Dublin City Council has had ample time to enforce the Derelict Sites Act 1990, to eradicate the danger of buildings collapsing onto our streets. Yet they only officially registered these homes as derelict two years ago.

In those two years, DCC should have collected the €140K dereliction levy imposed on the CIF and have initiated any Compulsory Purchase Orders. You only need to walk the streets around these five homes to see that there are many, many more empty and derelict buildings, stalled development land banks, and decaying heritage in the area. These are derelict buildings in busy commuting and residential areas in our capital city, left to rot in the real world while the predicted ‘value’ piles up on some spreadsheet somewhere.

This hoarding is one of the most cynical and unwelcome impositions of business over communities, up and down this country, and so many councils in Ireland are doing nothing to address it. It is only a matter of time before another building collapses, seriously injuring someone if councils do not rapidly increase their enforcement activities in this country.

Some councils are doing it right

Luckily, some councils in Ireland have already taken a leap forward and have shown us what is possible. Between 2015 and 2018, Louth Council acquired 92 derelict properties, which it turned into social homes. They found that this was a cheaper and quicker process than building new homes. It was a hugely promising change of direction but, for some reason, the programme was abruptly abandoned, which is unfortunate.

A more recent example is a case studied in a report by the Housing Agency, showing how Limerick Council has become the leader in ending dereliction. They are Compulsory Purchasing over 300 properties, inspected thousands, and now have the largest Dereliction Registry in the country. Limerick Council achieved this by creating a multidisciplinary team to build up staff skills and expertise. They initially used Urban Regeneration Development Funding and went on to create a revolving fund from collecting the Dereliction Levy and from selling renovated properties on the open market.

Limerick Council has also found that their mere act of stronger enforcement is having a rippling effect. Now that owners know hoarding is no longer tolerated, that they do risk paying big fines and losing their properties, they are either selling or renovating their derelict properties before the council has a chance to enforce the laws against them.

Unfortunately, Limerick Council has also encountered some owners who will stretch the laws just so they can let their properties collapse onto the street. Risking the lives of pedestrians as they walk past, just like a modern-day Bull McCabe, who will do anything to hold onto his land. This is why financial penalties alone are never enough, wealthy owners can afford to pay any fine or are more likely to fill up the courts with solicitors to ensure they are exempt from the law.

Time for political will

To end dereliction, we need to enact a series of new measures that involve small legislative changes like the updates to the Derelict Sites Act currently being pushed through the Seanad by the Greens, Social Democrats, and Labour.

But more importantly, ending dereliction will require significant shifts in political mindsets as well as wider societal culture.

We need to learn from other countries like England and Scotland’s Compulsory Sales Orders, Canada’s extremely effective Vacant Homes Tax, and Barcelona and Amsterdam’s Compulsory Rental Orders.

We also need to look to other jurisdictions where community-led custodianship — including informal use of vacant spaces, sometimes through squatting — has successfully fostered the cultural and social revitalisation of areas.

This may sound subversive or extreme, but there have been high-profile and somewhat successful cases where this practice worked with the right intentions. It’s a sign that when communities band together for the greater good of the area, change can be positive.

One such example is a building called Can Masdeu in Barcelona, which was a leper hospital in the early 1900s, left to rot. The community took charge of Can Masdeu in the early 2000s in a non-violent way and have managed to run the building as a housing collective.

Another one, in London, Grow Heathrow, ran as a collective with a community garden for several years as a protest against the expansion of the airport, while in Copenhagen, the Christiania ‘squat’ ran for many years as an eco-village on the site of an old barracks, where up to 1,000 residents lived. It became a tourist destination.

What examples like these illustrate is how communities in bustling cities, just like in Dublin, had grown utterly fed up with the practice of speculative land flipping and its impact on their environments.

We need the political will now to finally tackle this destructive and damaging behaviour. The first move that will make a huge difference overnight is to lock in planning approvals to the original owner only. This would mean that the owner is the only person who can actually build what’s been approved, rather than sitting on the land with planning in order to eventually sell to the highest bidder. A moratorium on office and retail construction and planning would also unlock precious land and labour resources towards home building instead.

All Irish Governments (since the foundation of the state) have chosen to protect the wealthy, who hoard a finite resource indefinitely. This needs to stop now. We are a country, a people, living on an island in a time of great global volatility. We have a housing crisis, not a housing ‘issue’, a crisis, and it demands a government response that is determined and forward-thinking. We must discard the old model of land speculation and hoarding. It has never worked and will never work for this country, and the government has been elected by the whole country, not just by the wealthy.

Will these five collapsing homes in Dublin finally be the straw that breaks the dereliction back? Will 2025 be the year all construction stakeholders take responsibility for the market failures they have presided over?

We live with Dóchas.

Jude Sherry and Dr Frank O’Connor are founders and creators of the anois agency and they run the #DerelictIreland campaign.

Source: The Journal.