Social housing but not in my neighbourhood

Elessar

Developer not providing social housing at Ballsbridge site

The developer behind an exclusive new housing development in Dublin will not be providing any social housing on-site.

In the move, approved by Dublin City Council, Chartered Land developments has bought a block of apartments in Ringsend for social housing rather than provide such housing at its prestigious new Lansdowne Place development of apartments and penthouses in Ballsbridge.

The arrangement, described by the council’s deputy chief executive Brendan Kenny as the “the first and probably the most extreme example” of its kind, underlines the difficulties local authorities face in achieving a “social mix” in wealthy areas.

This recent article in the IT really irritates me. A developer building housing is able to squeeze out of the social housing rules (10% mix I believe in all new housing builds) because, lets face it, wealthy suburbs want nothing to do with low income families.

In a way I'm in two minds about it, on one hand I know that when you're building €1m+ apartments, you're not going to be able to sell them at such a premium when social housing tennants will move in next door for little to nothing.

On the other hand every other housing project in the country will have to comply with the rules and mix social housing with regular price builds. I can't see a developer in tallaght buying piece of land somewhere else to keep the poor away anytime soon. It reaffirms an enormous class divide in Irish society, a hypocritical "I'm all for social housing but not on my doorstep" mentality. Whats worse is there are councillors quoted in that article defending the whole thing.

Black_Ninja

Planning Part V regulations allows for the following since 2015:

• build and transfer the housing units within the application site
• transfer units on other land within the functional area of the local authority
• grant of a lease of houses within the application site or the function area, or
• a combination of the above

so this is really a non story.

wakka12

Well they're right, some people shouldn't get high priority central highly sought after apartments for half nothing when everyone else has to pay huge amounts of money for them. I don't claim to have an answer ..^ but that sure isn't it

I don't get why private developers have to provide social housing anyway, it should probably be up to the responsibility of a government body. Maybe the developer should have to give a piece of land to the government to building some social housing on. But a develop shouldn't have to provide luxury D4 apartments to social housing tenants.

Social housing should be adequate...just adequate, not luxurious at all. As thats what the tenants only have the money to afford.

mikemac2

Elessar wrote: »

On the other hand every other housing project in the country will have to comply with the rules and mix social housing with regular price builds.

The developer complied with the rules, nothing shady at all. Sorry OP, I’m not feeling the outrage

There would be more outrage if DCC was paying towards the Ballsbridge 24 hour concierge for their tenants. Now that’s wasteful spending

Peregrine

51 apartments at €800k a pop = €40.8m

53 apartments for €25.5m plus a €2.7m contribution = €411k per unit with €15m leftover to buy more social housing.

I've been vocal against creating ghettos but I'd be far more annoyed if the council was buying social housing at €800,000 per apartment in Ballsbridge. Hardly the most efficient way to solve a crisis. Even €411k in Ringsend (still in the most prestigious post code in Dublin) is too much.

andekwarhola

To be fair, buying units in some of the most expensive areas in Dublin isn't really a prudent use of local authority finances and with the crisis we have, if you can get more units up, that's better.

For all that, I still think integrated housing is the way to go most of the time. Large scale local authority housing estates have proven to be a failure.