City Hall Cork. Picture: Larry Cummins
CORK City Council built just three houses in 2016, a figure described as ‘disgraceful’.
Despite the ongoing housing and homelessness crisis in the city, figures revealed by the local authority at last night’s meeting of Cork City Council showed that just three new units were built last year. Two of these were at Cappanoole in Mahon, while the third was at Tory Top Road.
However, the local authority is set to deliver hundreds of new units in 2017 as several long-awaited projects commence.
Sinn Féin councillor Thomas Gould slammed central government for the state of social housing in Ireland.
“This is not the fault of Cork City Council but austerity policies that were forced on us by the European Parliament and the German government — we should have been building houses, hospitals and roads during the downturn, creating jobs and avoiding the situation we are currently in.”
He continued, “We built three houses in 2016. That is disgraceful.”
“My worry is that when we have returned the vacant units to stock early this year that we won’t have finished building the new units and we will have nowhere to house new applicants.”
He said the housing list is growing faster than the city can house people.
In December 2016, 34 people were housed by the city, but 47 new people came onto the list.
“We still have more new applicants than we housed. We currently have 4,719 applicants on the housing list, and we built three houses.”
The city’s housing department moved to answer Mr Gould’s concerns.
A spokesperson pointed to the huge range of projects planned for 2017 and beyond, and noted that new builds are not the only source of housing units for the city. They said they are on course to exceed annual targets set across the various methods of delivering additional units.
The spokesperson said: “We returned 840 vacant houses to stock. We bought 170 in the acquisition programme across the city.
“There are 137 in construction, 257 in planning, 38 affordables complete.
There are a further “115 either complete or underway through the capital assistance scheme, 162 in the regeneration scheme and the competitive dialogue results are yet to be announced, so we will exceed our target — and it looks like the department will pay for the extras.”
On the southside of the city, 93 units are under construction at Sheridan Park on the Tramore Road and Deanrock, Togher.
A spokesperson for the city’s housing department also confirmed that a further 169 units will be announced at ‘a number of locations on the south side of the city’ shortly.
These are in addition to recently announced housing schemes at Boyce’s Street and Gerald Griffin Street, as well as the ongoing work at the Knocknaheeny Regeneration Scheme, the next phase of which was given the green light by councillors last night.
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