In the north inner-city, tenants of 15 years evicted so council can buy their home
Dublin City Council is buying 40 homes in the Northbank apartments. It is not clear how many tenants have been evicted for the deal to proceed.
There are lessons to be learned from Amsterdam, London and Birmingham on how local authorities can effectively build lots of homes.
“I believe this application is the definition of developer-led planning,” said Fine Gael Councillor Ray McAdam, at a meeting of the Central Area Committee on 22 July.
The cross-party group of councillors’ vision is unrealistically expensive and “totally contradictory to government policy”, a council official said.
For one tenant, advertised rents for similar apartments in a neighbouring block are much lower than hers, raising the possibility of a downward rent review.
Almost 400 of the apartments proposed for former council land at O’Devaney Gardens would not have adequate daylight in living room-kitchens, shows a daylight sunlight report.
Car-parking fees and service charges are why it looks like rents have gone up 59–85 percent in less than four years in some apartments in the south inner-city.
“It can be damaging to people’s mental health to live in an apartment that gets no sunlight and has inadequate daylight,” says architect Orla Hegarty.
A receiver sold Shannon Chance’s apartment in Smithfield to a big company landlord for a price well below what she says she’d have paid to buy it herself.
Landlords are left to self-regulate their use of the tenants’ data hoovered up through the apps and systems in big rental complexes – unless someone brings a complaint to the Data Protection Commission.
At a meeting of the council’s housing committee, a council official gave a rundown of how the council is trying to up the number of homes it builds – and why it opts for other routes to get social homes too.
These were some of the issues Dublin city councillors discussed at their May monthly meeting on Monday.
Dublin City Council has been granting temporary permission, in some cases for years, for some complexes built for students to be rented to others.