Dublin City Council will introduce its new lottery system next month in an effort to allocate 176 affordable homes among its waiting list of some 4,500 applicants.
The new homes - mostly apartments - represent the first tranche of about 781 new homes the council hopes to allocate in the full year.
Applicants will, after next week, when the new lottery system is introduced, be sent a newsletter outlining where the new affordable houses are being provided. They will also be asked to fill in a form on the newsletter indicating the new homes for which they wish to be considered, and to return it by early next month.
The council will then hold "an automated lottery" by the end of next month, after which winning applicants will have to satisfy usual criteria that they can afford the new homes.
Melissa Peavoy of the council's affordable housing unit said the first lottery would involve 176 new homes - mostly apartments which would all be completed within the next six months.
She said there were "about 4,500" applicants on the council's books seeking affordable new homes.
The council has not as yet decided whether to hold the lottery quarterly or twice yearly, an issue which may depend on the speed at which new homes come on stream.
According to a report to be presented to members of the city council tomorrow, the council anticipates it will have at its disposal 154 new homes at the former MacCabe's site at Finglas Road, under the Government's affordable housing initiative.
Other new homes coming on stream under this initiative at Harcourt Terrace have been transferred to South Dublin County Council for allocation, as part of a swap which provided city council applicants with homes in south Dublin last year.
The council hopes to allocate 169 new homes under its own 1999 affordable housing strategy. This scheme has attracted significant interest from potential beneficiaries, with about 2,438 applications being received. To date, 337 housing units have been completed and sold, with a further 539 under construction.
The council says the number of new homes coming on stream this year under part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 will be 458. Tomorrow's report points out that last year "saw real growth in the number of part V homes coming to the market at locations throughout the city including Cork Street, Kilmainham, Parkwest, Barrow Street, Docklands, Coolock, Finglas and Artane".
The report says affordable housing applicants can finance their new home through a shared-ownership loan from the council or private financial mortgages. Of the mortgages available, the council cites the Bank of Ireland and the EBS as being willing - subject to suitability of the applicant - to supply a private mortgage of up to 97 per cent of the value of the property.
However, while the Government has said it was pleased local authority housing had reached a 20-year high point, there was criticism of the strategy from some voluntary sectors yesterday. Fr Tony O'Riordan of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice said that "an analysis of trends in social housing output reveals that Minister Noel Ahern's positive view of the increase in both social and affordable housing provision is too optimistic."
He said that in the 1970s and 1980s, local authority housing provision was as high as one-third of all new homes but was now less than 10 per cent.
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