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Anyone know anything about Rutland Ct, the PPP which replaced Mountainview flats?

  • 24-02-2018 9:33pm
    #1
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,797 ✭✭✭✭


    Some of ye might remember the Mountain View flats complex on Summerhill Parade / Buckingham Street. It was one of the familiar 1970s DCC developments, in the same style as those on Dominick Street, Fitzgibbon Court, Matt Talbot Court etc. It was torn down in the mid-2000s - for reasons I'm not completely clued in on, it was possible to refurbish the other blocks from this era to a modern standard, but this particular development had become too dilapidated to be saved and was entirely demolished instead.

    The redevelopment was originally planned to involve several phases, but because of the PPP collapse in the late 2000s only phase one, consisting of around 50 new flats, was completed. The rest of the site lay empty for almost a decade and is now being developed as the Primary Care Centre for Dublin 1, thus abandoning the plan to replace more of the demolished housing.

    What I'm curious about is the phase one redevelopment which did take place, and the Rutland Court complex which resulted. They took an interesting approach to achieving a high density while avoiding some of the design elements which is regarded as having contributed to bleakness and anti-social behaviour - one thing they did was to use the natural slope of the land to give every unit its own dedicated on-street front door (or sometimes up its own dedicated flight of steps) where the previous complex was the standard DCC "balcony access", with one central stairwell and a row of front doors on each balcony. As far as I know, it was also redeveloped as a mixed-tenure development as opposed to a fully social housing development, although information about this is extremely scarce.

    What I'm wondering is: Can anyone who lives locally confirm whether or not this development was a success? I'm curious about various markers of success / failure - quality of housing, quality of life for people living there, design issues, antisocial behaviour, etc. The previous complex was fairly notorious as a dangerous no-go zone for quite a while in the mid-2000s, and I remember walking through that street on the way home from a school tour of Croker at one point and being roared at by randomers from balconies, and seeing a few burnt out cars and that kind of sh!te. Did the redevelopment - which was hailed as a big increase in security due to the new layout - solve these issues?

    Essentially, is the complex itself decent to live in now in terms of both structure and social culture, and is the street still regarded as a no-go zone or did redevelopment improve it?

    Essentially wondering whether the type of redevelopment employed was a good decision policy wise, and whether this is the type of social housing development we should be lobbying our politicians to build more of in order to get us out of the housing mess we're in, but at the same time avoiding the creation of new socially deprived and dangerous neighbourhoods a la the former Mountainview complex on that site, which end up becoming places people don't actually want to live in.

    Any info on this and how it's panned out since it was built?

    The old complex:

    6.jpgP2CRR3g.png

    What it looks like now:

    51-226x300.jpg7-226x300.jpg


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