Cautious welcome for consultative guidelines on ‘ghost estates’
José Ospina, head of the Carbery Housing Association.
The staff of Charles P Crowley & Co, Accountants, pictured outside their award-winning premises at The Granary, New Road, Bandon – from left – Maria Murphy, Sharon McAuley, Ashton Hackett, Kieran Banks, Charles Crowley, Ann Harte, Karen McCarthy, Susan Gallagher and Jessica Whooley.
BY CONOR POWER
THE Carbery Housing Association has issued a cautious welcome for the consultative guidelines on ‘ghost estates’ that were issued recently by the government.
CHA chief José Ospina says that one of the main recommendations is to be welcomed – namely that the 9,854 houses in the country that are incomplete become a priority, outlining in its report a variety of proposals to bring these properties to completion and use. In doing this, there would, he says, be a heavy reliance on the intervention of local authorities and other factors, including voluntary housing associations and co-operatives.
José Ospina has seen all this before. His benevolent Carbery-based association is now all of ten years old. Their various attempts to develop social housing for rent have, he says, been scuppered by lack of support from the local authority and from local politicians, who ‘have blocked planning approvals and land transfers to our association.’
By 2003, Ospina says, Cork County Council had already calculated that round 50% of new households could not afford to buy or rent without subsidy in the open market. At the same time (and before it), CHA were repeatedly warning the local country and town development authorities that the policy of promoting primarily speculative housing for sale through continued zoning of private development land was misguided.
Their warnings fell on deaf ears and the rest is a painful history with which we’re all too familiar. The ghost estates today stand as a testament to policy-makers ignoring such advice.
The question of why local government ignored the likes of the Carbery Housing Association has a lot to do with the general political thinking of the day.
Captialism, it seemed, was winning the day and it didn’t make sense for many to be associated with anything that smacked of ‘socialism’ or ‘social housing.’
With this latest government initiative, there does seem to be a recognition of the structural problems of housing policy on a national level. In a recovering market, what place will an organisation such as CHA have?
‘If you think what would have happened if some of the surpluses that went towards investing in more private housing had been channeled towards social housing … at the moment, you would have maybe 100,000 homes being rented by people, instead of 100,000 homes being empty and waiting to be sold.
‘So I think that it balances the market out. It makes up for the drops in the market and apart from bringing people who shouldn’t be paying high prices out of the private market temporarily, I can’t see that it does any harm to the market at all.’
Mr Ospina has vast experience in social housing, having worked for over 20 years in such a capacity in the UK – one country in which, he says, there are a lot of examples of social housing policy that serve as useful models for the Irish market.
For further details, see www.carberyhousing.eu. Carbery Housing are organising a fundraising event on January 29th at the Working Artists’ Studio, North Street, Skibbereen, featuring poetry and an exhibition of paintings of empty houses.