The Player Wills site has been sitting vacant for years, but there’s an effort underway to get Dublin City Council to take it over and develop cost-rental and affordable housing on it.
The Residential Tenancies Board now offers accreditation to landlords if they volunteer for a day-long training and test. Some say it should be compulsory.
They are often gated, and offer no routes for pedestrians to cut through to get where they’re going. Developers say that’s for security reasons, others say it divides the city.
Patrick Nelis visits the Residential Tenancies Board most days, sometimes twice a day, to argue cases for tenants. He didn’t always do this. He used to work with horses.
Academic Michelle Norris says the scheme to sell homes to tenants should be suspended given the current housing crisis. But some Dublin city councillors aren’t so sure.
As of December 2017, the owner of this building was Martina Investments Limited, a company registered in Guernsey, and owned by two companies in the Bahamas.
There’s an inflexibility to rezoning industrial land, wrote a Department of Housing official in an email in February. “Its been represented to me quite a few times.”
In 2017, emails and memos from officials at the Department of Public Expenditure suggest they were unconvinced of the need for affordable-housing schemes.
Most of the complaints to the council since the beginning of 2017 are still being looked into, and less than a quarter of the properties are back under long-term leases.
If they’re going to make an impact, they should be focused on the issue full-time – and not just be existing staff members now endowed with an extra title, says Francis Doherty, of Peter McVerry Trust.
