How Cork City Council deals with derelict sites
With carrots and sticks, and slowly
Firstly, thanks to everyone who read and shared the first issue of Tripe + Drisheen about the scourge of derelict sites and vacant houses around the city.
There was a great response, with generous and informative feedback too. Keep it coming, please. One nugget: a reader suggested that as well as Dutch courage and resolve, perhaps what is also needed in Cork are Dutch planners! (And maybe while they’re here, the could build a flood defense for the city:)
On dereliction and vacant properties, there’s a palpable frustration equalled by an appetite to tackle and solve these twin problems, all the more so as it would alleviate many other significant problems Cork is facing.
Separately, there’s also an appetite for reporting, as opposed to ‘content creation’. This takes time, and currently there’s no dime in it, but it’s heartening to see.
For this week’s newsletter, a follow-on from last week, I interviewed Fearghal Reidy, who oversees derelict sites as the director of strategic and economic development for Cork City Council.
Fearghal replaced Pat Ledwidge, who worked at the city council for nearly 40 years before retiring in 2019. Fearghal represents some of the new blood in the council.
Prior to joining the city council’s senior management team, Fearghal worked for Waterford City and County Council in various roles.
He readily agreed to the interview, with one caveat: that we would talk about sites in general, and not specifically. So here’s that interview, with one caveat: I did ask about 44 Cornmarket Street - that orphan of urban despair and dereliction on the Coal Quay, that’s in the city council’s charge. And Fearghal did answer…ish.
The Sad Lives of Derelict Sites
One specific and critical thing that Fearghal does in his job at the city council is sign off on a site or property that will be added to the city’s derelict sites register. Effectively, that’s putting a landowner on notice that they could lose their property, and at the very least it makes them liable to pay levies to the council.
As Fearghal explained, a property comes into dereliction for a wide range of reasons.
“A lot of them are very personal to particular families or circumstances. Sometimes it might be developers hoarding sites, and then there might be just a range of other reasons.”
“By their nature, they’re difficult,” Fearghal said, referring to the background drama which goes on behind the scenes of a boarded up house or derelict site, and which could be playing out in the courts, revenue and amongst family members and former business partners. Or the process might have stalled entirely, with a derelict site in a kind of permanent state of limbo.
Of the 96 sites on the city council’s derelict sites register, Fearghal said the council is “actively working” on 95.
From the list of 95 sites, some of them are being sold, “which is always promising because it means hopefully the new owners are purchasing to develop them.”
Others have active planning permission, “showing intent to do something.”
And the others - the ones that have “been left there” - “the council is monitoring them carefully.”
For adherents of the “use it or lose it” school of action, which maintains that local authorities should get off their ass and take ownership of derelict sites and property, Fearghal had some good news.
“What you will see over the next number of months is more CPOs,” he said. Currently, the council is pursuing compulsory purchase orders on 17 sites, or nearly 20% of the total on the sites register.
Separate to this, the council has a target list of 70 sites that they are going to inspect, some of which are undoubtedly on this Twitter thread by Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry.
The city council’s derelict sites team is made up of a multiagency task force, with staff drawn from housing, property and planning policy. But what I don’t know, because Fearghal didn’t provide an exact answer, is how big the derelict sites team is. As with many things, size matters: theoretically, a bigger team would be able to spend more resources on moving derelict sites off the register and back into use.
CPO Already
In 2019, the same year Fearghal arrived in Cork from Waterford, the council adopted a a policy to work with the private landowners of derelict sites and find a way of moving them off the register.
“If that’s not working and there’s no sound back from them at all, say for two or three years, which is a fair time considering the complexity often in sites, but if there’s nothing back in a fair time, then we start considering CPO.”
However, Fearghal has a message for the “CPO people” (aka “the use it or lose it people”).
“People often throw out CPOs as a solution to everything,” Fearghal said, adding that it’s “understandably a difficult process because you’re actually compulsorily purchasing people’s property.”
“And as we know in Ireland, property rights are highly valued and in legislation strongly safeguarded. To that extent a CPO is a difficult process - it’s not a straight forward process, and it’s not a panacea to everything.”
“In terms of property rights, it’s a last resort.”
Besides the taboo element of the state taking property off a landowner (especially here in Ireland) - and even if that landowner has effectively disappeared, or absconded - a local council faces significant other hurdles to clear on the route to a CPO: purpose and budget.
Fearghal said the council are trying to look at a model that will work across the whole portfolio of sites, one that will be sustainable and that allows the council to invest in derelict sites as they dispose of them.
“But it’s a challenge,” Fearghal admitted.
“And the other challenge I’ve seen and heard around is ‘if you collected all the derelict sites levies you’d make a fortune’”.
“That’s correct, but then again a lot of the reasons derelict sites are derelict is because they’ve been left there.” For all intents and purposes, some sites might as well have no landowner. The problem is, they do.
(The levy on derelict sites rose from 3% to 7% in 2020, and it’s applied to sites one year after they are registered. Collection of the levies varies widely from year to year. The Examiner reported the city council collected just under €40,000 in derelict sites levies in 2017. By mid 2020, they had collected €140,000 for the same year.)
Carrots + Sticks
Another aspect of Fearghal’s job is meeting with people who own derelict sites, and just as every site is different, so too are the owners, some of whom are not the archetypal villain waiting for the next property boom so they can cash in (arguably that property boom has arrived).
“I’ve been in meetings with people who own derelict sites, who we are applying the levy too and you know they genuinely are frustrated in terms of trying to find a way to pay our bill, pay architects and find solutions for the derelict sites. And I really do feel for them, it’s not straightforward.”
“Any normal person, like you or me, to be landed in this on top of your daily life, it’s a tall order.”
What Fearghal wants to do is give derelict site owners more “carrots”.
Last week, I quoted an economist who works in the housing industry who said:
In a purely efficient market, the owners should be incentivised to sell them to people who want to either live in them or develop them to make them inhabitable.
Essentially, Fearghal wants to deliver more incentives to get to this point.
“We don’t have sufficient carrots…to help people remove dereliction and bring the houses back to use.”
The route to delivering those “carrots“ lies through funding.
More broadly, Fearghal said the council has tendered for a new wide-ranging city centre study which will look at international best practices on how cities are revitalized, especially in terms of living in the city “and the fabric of the city including dereliction and vacancy and looking at models on how it’s addressed elsewhere and see if we can apply them here.”
From that study, which is expected to get underway within a month, Fearghal said the council will be better able to shape the form and function of these incentives.
Studies, commissions and conferences can lead to solutions. But are there barriers to action actually built in to our planning regulations?
After the first issue of Tripe + Drisheen, a prominent city centre business man dropped me a line to say he believes "draconian" fire regulations are to blame for high vacancy rates in the city centre. And of course, vacancy over prolonged periods ultimately leads to dereliction.
"I can say that the entire homeless issue in Ireland could be solved in 18 months if we were allowed use these spaces," he said. "We appear to be the only country in Europe with such restrictions."
Indeed, Cork City Council held a conference entitled "Unlocking Upstairs," with the stated aim of examining upper-storey vacancy in the city centre, in 2019.
Held at the Nano Nagle Centre, it seemed to ask all the right questions:
Why are so many upper floors in the city centre vacant during a housing crisis? Fully occupied buildings, lively streets and thriving inner city businesses is the urban ideal. What is preventing us getting there?
Data collected by Cork City Council suggests that there are some 260 buildings in Cork City with a total of 423 vacant or under-utilised upper floors. The majority of these are located in the “heart of the city”, where 140 vacant upper floors were identified – this could potentially create up to 400 new homes, right in the city centre.
The event saw experts in "building control, fire regulations, disability access, architecture, housing, planning, economics and development" address the problem of upper-storey vacancy, with several participants highlighting the problems posed by what were characterised as inflexible fire and disability access regulations in accessing the upper floors of Cork's narrow city centre buildings.
But how much has changed since 2019? How many of those empty spaces are now homes? To quote the council: “What is preventing us getting there?”
I hear you
When I asked Fearghal if he and the city council hear the frustration and anger that foments on social media and is channelled their way via tags, tweets and online comments about dereliction, vacant homes and holding the city council accountable, he was forthright.
“I think we all share a sense of frustration in terms of the derelict sites and the vacancy in the city. People on social media, I would share broadly their frustration and I would appreciate when they do alert us to derelict sites.”
I’ve always said that we’re available all the time for people to just pick up the phone and tell us. That’s always a route to us. And I don’t see why people wouldn’t.
But in terms of… sometimes the solutions are expressed in very simplistic terms to what is in fact a very complicated issue. So, sometimes I think they lack appreciation of the complexity of it.
Knowing the internet, some people will take offense at Fearghal’s point that their rapid-fire reactions on social media are “simplistic.” Nonetheless, longterm problems such as dereliction are rarely fixed by the medium of Twitter, which is not to take away from its power to highlight a problem.
That said, information is a two-way street. If people are outraged, and the council is listening, could the council not develop a transparent and easily navigated system that provides information about property and land on the derelict sites register, and what actions the council is undertaking?
Yes, it’s a complex process moving sites off the register, but people are frustrated that they know very little to anything about these ‘dark’ sites. Knowing that the council is, for example in a mediation process with the landowner, and having an idea of the timeline, and what will happen next, well, these are all steps in civics and understanding how our city works.
And finally…42-44 Cornmarket Street
Prior to our Zoom call Fearghal had told me he didn’t want to be “site specific”, but in journalism sometimes you agree to agree, and then don’t. Besides, 42-44 Cornmarket Street isn’t exactly a state secret, rather they are unloved long-term derelict sites, one of which, no 42, the city council owns.
The good news is that referring to no 42, next to the Paint Well building, Fearghal said: “We will be coming forward with proposals on that alright.”
As for no 44, the longest ‘remainer’ on the infamous derelict sites register, Fearghal said he was aware of its longevity, but “didn’t want to get into it”.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter; thanks to Fearghal for his time .
There were a few updates I wanted to post about, based on info I received from last week’s newsletter and also some movement on derelict sites and Twitter polls, but I’ve taken enough of your time, and mine. I’ll drop this info in a thread this weekend, so feel free to comment in there.
And finally, finally - do send tips, story ideas, info etc.
Collecting 140,000 for 100ish derelict sites is hardly going to be a "stick" to anyone.
Living City initiative largely ineffectual as "carrot". Where do you go?
This was really interesting. Lots of excuses to be honest. Everything appears too 'complex'. We need more of a can do attitude to be honest.