Corporation is buying back its own houses

Dublin Corporation is buying back its own houses at full market value years after selling them to former tenants "for buttons", in order to help meet the city's spiralling demand for social housing.

Two houses in Cabra, sold in the mid-1970s for £712 each, were bought in 1996 for £50,000 and £56,000 respectively.

Another house in Finglas, sold in 1982 for £4,000, was bought back in 1995 for £42,000, more than 10 times the price.

Other random examples include a house in Crumlin, which was sold by the corporation in 1971 for £2,300 and bought last year for £50,000, and one in Ballyfermot which was sold in 1978 for £2,700 and bought back in 1996 for £43,000.

The practice of selling off local authority houses to tenants is a State-wide policy designed to promote a high level of home ownership.

It was accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s by "giveaway" offers, one of which was billed as "the sale of the century."

"The tenants were getting them for buttons", one senior official told The Irish Times yesterday. But now, with 5,500 applications on its waiting list and a very limited supply of sites to build new houses, the corporation has had to buy back houses at market value.

Since 1993 it has bought nearly 900 houses, the vast majority of them built by the corporation itself. Some of these would include houses sold less than a decade ago at bargain prices. In most cases, however, they would be cheaper than building new houses.

The corporation now intends to expand its purchase scheme to include "suitable private areas", including individual flats in some of the many apartment blocks built in the inner city since 1990, having first surveyed these buildings to see if this is viable.

It points out that the Docklands master plan requires that 20 per cent of the 10,000 new housing units to be built in the area must be social housing, and suggests this might be extended to other residential developments in the city with 10 flats or more.

The number of applicants on the corporation's waiting list is about 5,500, an increase of 37.5 per cent on the figure for 1996.

Of these 59 per cent are single parents, 22 per cent single people, 12 per cent couples with children and 7 per cent couples without children.

An "extremely high percentage" of prospective tenants are dependent on social welfare, and the corporation believes many single parents have been encouraged to move out of their family homes by a combination of housing and social welfare entitlements.

In a discussion document on housing policy, it says there is a need to review the effect of benefits such as the living-alone allowance, as well as allowances for fuel, phone rental and ESB bills in order to minimise "avoidable demand" for housing.

The corporation is also running out of housing land. After building 300 new houses this year, it says a further 400 could be provided in 1999 on sites in its ownership. But all remaining land for social housing in the city will be built on by the end of 2000.

And with land in the city now selling for premium prices, acquisition is no longer economical. The document says: "Clearly the scope for accommodating the demand for social housing in the city is limited and the issue therefore must be addressed in a regional context".

Options include assigning part of the corporation's house-building allocation to Fingal, South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown county councils or building more houses in these areas and having them managed on an agency basis by the three councils.

It is also looking at the "empty nest" syndrome, which has left more than 1,000 family-type houses occupied by one or two people.

An incentive scheme to encourage them to move out to "high-quality, well-located" senior citizens' housing is being examined.

The corporation will also be "actively promoting" the rural resettlement scheme, even to the extent of making part of its housing allocation available to rural counties to enable Dubliners on the waiting list to move out of the capital altogether.