Dublin's twentieth-century social housing policies: tenure, ‘reserved areas’ and housing type (original) (raw)

Tackling the urban housing problem in the Irish Free State, 1922–1940

Urban History, 2018

ABSTRACT:At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.

Policy Differences Within the United Kingdom: The Case of Housing Policy in Northern Ireland 1979?89

Public Administration, 1991

This article examines, through a case study of housing, the extent to which national housing polides under the Thatcher government were modified or deflected at the N. Ireland iegiona! level. Three aspects of housing policyhousing expenditure, public sector rents and the 'right-to-buy' legislation are considered and the roles of key actors within the temtoria! community described. Although similarities with GB housing policy emerge, there is evidence of a distinctive regional approach. Factors which influenced a N. Ireland-specific policy approach are considered and the potential for variance in the future outlined. Michael COMOIIY is a Professor and Colin Knox a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Administration and Legal Studies in the University of Ulster at Jordanstown.

Vacancy and housing in Dublin: 1798-1911

Irish Geography, 2016

The related issues of vacancy, redundancy and dereliction in the city, raise questions about the conflict between private profit and social use, between exchange values and use values. This paper offers a typology of the causes and forms of vacancy and is the first attempt to map this phenomenon for nineteenth-century Dublin. It also reviews some of the contemporary debates about the management of empty and decrepit buildings and sites. The charge of wastefulness was weighty and suggested strategies that are relevant yet today. These include compulsory purchase, a tax on emptiness, informal occupation, and the temporary appropriation of un-used spaces for socially-useful purposes

Tenure Mixing to Combat Public Housing Stigmatization: external benefits, internal challenges and contextual influences in three Dublin neighbourhoods

Tenure Mixing to Combat Public Housing Stigmatization: external benefits, internal challenges and contextual influences in three Dublin neighbourhoods, 2018

Combatting stigma in public housing is a key concern among policy makers in the Republic of Ireland and internationally and this paper critically assesses the mechanism most commonly employed to achieve this – ‘income mixing’ or ‘poverty deconcentration’ of public rented neighbourhoods by encouraging households with a wider mix of incomes to live there. This is most commonly achieved by ‘tenure mixing’ - providing private housing alongside public housing on the grounds that occupants of the former tenure tend to have higher incomes than occupants of the latter. To do this the paper draws together empirical research on three public housing neighbourhoods in Dublin - Ireland’s capital and largest city - and insights from the critical geography and urban studies literature, to critically examine the effectiveness of tenure mixing as a public housing destigmatizing tool. The analysis presented here demonstrates that tenure mixing often produces contradictory results – in terms of reduced external stigma but heightened internal or within neighbourhood stigmatization. It links these outcomes to the policy and socio-economic contextual factors which we argue which play a central but underappreciated role in shaping the implementation of tenure mixing and its impact on public housing stigmatization.

Tenure mixing to combat public housing stigmatization: External benefits, internal challenges and contextual influences in three Dublin neighborhoods

Cities, 2018

Combatting stigma in public housing is a key concern among policy makers in the Republic of Ireland and internationally and this paper critically assesses the mechanism most commonly employed to achieve this-'income mixing' or 'poverty deconcentration' of public rented neighbourhoods by encouraging households with a wider mix of incomes to live there. This is most commonly achieved by 'tenure mixing'-providing private housing alongside public housing on the grounds that occupants of the former tenure tend to have higher incomes than occupants of the latter. To do this the paper draws together empirical research on three public housing neighbourhoods in Dublin-Ireland's capital and largest city-and insights from the critical geography and urban studies literature, to critically examine the effectiveness of tenure mixing as a public housing destigmatizing tool. The analysis presented here demonstrates that tenure mixing often produces contradictory results-in terms of reduced external stigma but heightened internal or within neighbourhood stigmatization. It links these outcomes to the policy and socioeconomic contextual factors which we argue which play a central but underappreciated role in shaping the implementation of tenure mixing and its impact on public housing stigmatization.

From Asset Based Welfare to Welfare Housing? The Changing Function of Social Housing in Ireland

This paper examines a distinctive and significant aspect of social housing in Ireland— its change in function from an asset-based role in welfare support to a more standard model of welfare housing. It outlines the nationalist and agrarian drivers which expanded the initial role of social housing beyond the goal of improving housing conditions for the poor towards the goal of extending homeownership, and assesses whether this focus made it more similar to the ‘asset based welfare’ approach to housing found in South-East Asia than to social housing in Western Europe. From the mid-1980s, the role of Irish social housing changed as the sector contracted and evolved towards the model of welfare housing now found in many other Western countries. Policy makers have struggled to address the implications of this transition and vestiges of social housing’s traditional function are still evident, consequently the boundaries between social housing, private renting and homeownership in Ireland have grown increasingly nebulous

21st Century Housing for Northern Ireland

NIPSA Research Report, 2020

Ten years since the property crash in the wake of the global financial crisis, there is a growing housing and homelessness crisis in Northern Ireland. In the past five years there has been a nearly 60 per cent increase in those officially recognised as being homeless. The policies put in place by the Minister, on behalf of the Stormont Assembly, have failed to deliver the numbers of new build homes which are required to meet the needs of citizens. Housing policy is bankrupt and cannot provide decent affordable homes for the whole community. It is also six years since one of those flagship policies was announced by the then Minister in charge of housing, Nelson McCausland, when he unveiled his plan to take the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) out of the public sector. The intervening years have seen opposition to this policy, as we detail in section 5 of this report, and political indifference towards addressing the funding requirements of the NIHE. Instead a series of increasingly reckless ideas about how to privatise the NIHE had been advanced. Analysis of the latest proposal, to turn the NIHE into a housing mutual (or co-operative) body, is the main focus of this report.

Financing the Golden Age of Irish Social Housing, 1932-1956 (and the dark ages which followed)

University College Dublin, Geary Institute for Public Policy, Working Paper, 2018

The period from the early 1930s to mid-1950s was the golden age of social housing in the Republic of Ireland. During these three decades social housing accounted for 55 per cent of all new housing built and the proportion of Irish households accommodated in this sector increased to an all-time high of 18.6 per cent by 1961. Unlike the rest of Western Europe the expansion of Ireland’s social housing sector did not coincide with a golden age of welfare state expansion. Indeed the Ireland’s social housing sector began to stagnate and contract just as its welfare state commenced a late blossoming in the 1970s. This paper looks to financing arrangements to shed light on these atypical patterns of social housing sector expansion and contraction. The argument offered here is that initially the arrangements used to fund social housing in Ireland were very similar to those used in the other Western European countries which constructed large social housing sectors during the twentieth century. However, as this century wore on, the influence of the socio-political pressures which has constrained the growth of the wider Irish welfare state came to bear on the model used to fund social housing and precipitated the end of its golden age.