There has been a lot of discussion about the ghost estates that haunt many towns and villages across the length and breadth of Ireland. We’ve been trying to find a way to identify them without having to perform an extensive survey. One solution is to use GeoDirectory (the Irish national address database produced by An Post and OSI).
New buildings are eligible to be entered into the database when the initial walls of a property are raised. Data entry is undertaken in a cyclical manner where all rural areas in the country are surveyed once a year and all urban areas are surveyed twice a year. Most new buildings are initially entered as completed but those that are not are classed as ‘under-construction’ and remain flagged as ‘under-construction’ until it is determined that the building is completed through a future survey. Completed buildings that are unoccupied are classed as ‘vacant’. It is therefore possible to determine housing estates where properties have been started but have not been finished, and where finished property remains vacant. (As a test we have carried out a number of site visits in the Dublin and Kildare area and the method seems robust – for example, Hemmingway Park, Clane, Co Kildare, see Figure 1).
The map (Figure 2) shows estates that entered the database prior to and including 2007 which still had more than 30 percent of units flagged as ‘under-construction’ or ‘vacant’ in Q3, 2009. The size of the circle represents the total number of units in an estate, and the wedges represent the proportion of property that is ‘under-construction’, ‘vacant’ and ‘occupied’.
The data reveal that there are 74 estates across the country where over 30 percent of the houses have been under-construction or vacant for over 2 years. These ghost estates comprise 3180 dwellings, 1287 of which are occupied, 1023 under-construction and 870 vacant. The average ‘under-construction/vacant’ rate for these estates is 59.5%. These figures do not include estates with less than 10 properties or estates where all the houses are complete but remain empty.
Given that these estates have remained unfinished for 2 years or longer, and their developers have either gone bust or into hibernation, it seems likely that they will remain incomplete for some time to come. For those people unfortunate enough to have purchased a house on one of these estates, not only will they be coping with few neighbours and negative equity, but also the effects of living on a building site and often without basic amenities such as street lighting and footpaths.
Clearly partially constructed ghost estates are going to be a haunting presence in the Irish landscape for some time to come.
Justin Gleeson, Peter Foley and Rob Kitchin
January 12, 2010 at 6:58 pm
[…] email.Some interesting new research on ghost estates by Ireland After Nama (IAN) can be studied here. The resultant data map is also worth viewing – the full image is at this […]
January 12, 2010 at 7:28 pm
Brilliant stuff, well done!
January 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Good!
January 14, 2010 at 12:15 pm
It’s a reasonable start but I think we could develop this further by undertaking site visits and visual inspections of the current condition of these estates and others across the country.
If anyone is interested in having a look around their local area and providing some comments and photographs of developments I would be happy to compile the results
January 14, 2010 at 12:19 pm
You might also check out the following short film: http://vimeo.com/3269259
January 18, 2010 at 1:06 pm
[…] Justin Gleeson, Rob Kitchin, Vacancies | Leave a Comment Since posting on the number of under-construction ghost estates in Ireland last week, we’ve been asked how many vacant houses there are in Ireland. There is no […]
January 20, 2010 at 10:43 am
[…] two sources – our analysis of Geodirectory with respect to under-construction ghost estates (see here) and a number of site visits to ghost estates in Kildare and Dublin. We have now found another […]
January 22, 2010 at 1:42 pm
[…] Commentaries | Tags: ghost estates, Nama, Rob Kitchin | Leave a Comment Since our post on ghost estates a couple of weeks ago I’ve been starting to think a bit about these estates and NAMA. Any […]