Regional taskforces could help cities bring vacant homes back into use, says report
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Regional vacancy taskforces to back up local authorities who feel “understaffed and under-resourced” could help cities such as Cork and Waterford to bring vacant homes back into use, a new report has recommended.
The new vacant homes tax could be ringfenced to fund “integrated regional units tasked with creating and implementing ambitious strategies for the wide-scale reactivation of vacant land and properties”, it also says.
is a new report from Trinity College researchers Kathleen Stokes, Cian O’Callaghan, and Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn.
While the report found that on a national level, vacancy was a by-product of Ireland’s planning system and property market, it noted regional differences in what leads to homes being left empty.
The challenges in tackling vacancy in cities like Cork and Waterford can be very different from those in the capital, lead researcher and associate professor in urban geography Mr O'Callaghan, told the .
“Dublin is a very hot market with a very active interest in development,” he said.
Dublin City had a vacancy rate of 6.96%, Waterford City had a vacancy rate of 7.1%, while Cork City had the lowest vacancy rate of 5.4%.
“Where Cork has returned to development activity after the global financial crisis of 2008, it has really been in areas like the docklands, so developments have really been on larger greenfield and brownfield sites, funded by international finance,” Mr O’Callaghan said.
“Where you see vacancy in Cork are these more infill sites concentrated in inner city areas and they may be heritage sites and protected buildings.”
A post-2008 shift in how development is financed towards big international investors had profound impacts on vacancy in the second city, he said, where big investors were not attracted to the kind of sites where vacancy was occurring in Cork: Often infill sites with heritage and conservation concerns.
“Those international actors are not that interested in developing those sites; the level of rental return does not incentivise their development,” he said.
In Waterford City, the local authority had taken a “proactive, pragmatic” approach and had used a government repair and lease scheme to intervene with landowners to bring homes back into use, the report notes.
The scheme part-funds the renovation of vacant homes by property owners, who then lease the property to the council for use as social housing.
Waterford City and County Council had completed 142 such projects between 2017 and 2022, while Dublin City Council had only completed two, and Cork City Council just one.
But Waterford’s distinctive market conditions, where residents are leaving the city in favour of seaside towns like Dungarvan and Tramore and where there is not substantial interest from investors, had led to the local authority being able to take advantage of the scheme, Mr O’Callaghan noted.
Mr O’Callaghan and his fellow researchers interviewed council staff, property developers, and people working in planning for their report, which they hope will go on to inform policy change.
Some 163,433 houses and apartments, excluding over 65,000 additional holiday homes, lay empty on census night 2022 according to the CSO.
Some 48,000 of these had also been vacant in 2016 at the last census, while 23,072 homes had been vacant in 2011, 2016, and 2022.