Yesterday bought the tragic news that a two year old boy had died on an unfinished estate near to Athlone. He had followed his pet dog in through a gap in the fence and drowned in a pool of water. His family have my deepest sympathy and condolences.
The death is likely to focus attention back onto unfinished estates and what is happening with respect to them. Minister Hogan has already asked Westmeath County Council for a report on the estate in question. Our working paper, which sets out the issue in detail can be found here.
Unfinished estates have been posing problems since the start of the crash and building work largely stopped on developments. The Department of Environment survey in 2011 revealed there were 2,876 unfinished estates in the county. 2,066 have outstanding development work. 1,822 of these have no development activity occurring.
Problems facing estates include incomplete development work, security, health and safety, antisocial behaviour, lack of finance to address issues, lack of sense of place/community, planning and building reg compliance, and negative equity.
We are five years in since the start of the crash and two years on since the announcement by Minister Finneran of the setting up of the unfinished estates advisory board by the Dept of Environment. That Board only reported in June 2011, with Minister Penrose setting out how the government would tackle what was supposedly an urgent issue. The Manual followed a few months later.
The solution was: (a) a 5 million fund to tackle health and safety issues on the worst of the estates; (b) Site Resolution Plans (SRPs). SRPs are stakeholder groups that plan how to tackle issues on an estate by estate basis (stakeholders would be Local Authorities, developers, banks, residents, estate management companies, etc).
The fund is not adequate to address the issues facing estates and is principally aimed at tackling significant health and safety concerns in a low cost way (filling in, fencing off, pulling down unsafe structures, etc). Here, it must be acknowledged that many of the worst estates have been fenced off (as was the case in Athlone), though often vandalism has opened up gaps and on-going repairs are not necessarily as timely as they should be. Nevertheless, €5m is a paltry sum and for that kind of minimal investment one would have thought that high priority health and safety issues would have been addressed already.
SRPs are non-mandatory and voluntaristic, time frames are suggestive, there are no conflict resolution mechanisms, local authorities are being given no additional resources to manage the process, and the issue of lack of finance and insolvency is ignored. SRPs are likely to be slow and haphazard. The aim is to have 300 SRPs in place by the end of 2012, which hardly suggests a speedy response given the number of estates with outstanding development work (a handful per local authority).
Basically, there has been an inadequate response to the issue. The fund is too small and SRPs are a limited effort, minimal cost approach to unfinished estates that tries to use existing legislation to resolve issues (but largely avoids court cases). It gives the impression of policy-at-work, but to a large degree pushes the problem down the road to be corrected at a later date by the market. In the meantime, estates wither on the vine and residents live with the consequences of worst features of the housing bust.
We are long past the point of needing a proper policy to deal with the issue of unfinished estates, one that is backed by finance and stronger powers to local authorities to compel developers/banks to complete works. A one-off report concerning the estate in question might suggest that action is being taken, but it simply delays further any real change to how unfinished estates are being addressed by the state.
This is an issue that has been for too long kicked down the road; it’s time for a more proactive, muscular strategy. €5m is 0.16% of the €3bn we’re about to pay back in Anglo promissory notes. It’s a paltry sum in the grand scheme of things and the people living on them or near them deserve better.
Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
February 24, 2012 at 2:14 pm
Again, the implication is that this is a problem to be solved by the government. This is a legal issue. That property is (or was) owned by someone. Although it may have been in the name of a corporation or limited liability entity, behind it all are live, breathing humans. The money funded to develop the estate was likely issued by a bank, not a government entity. Officers of the bank are live, breathing humans. They made the decision to fund. If the property was foreclosed, it is now the institution’s problem. They are responsible for the consequences of not seeing to it that the estate is properly preserved and protected. Those people must be identified and held accountable. As is the case now in the U.S., the world’s most recent addition to global socialism, when there are problems and losses, the new paradigm is to transfer losses and liabilities to the people, the taxpayers, and let government worry about it. When there are profits, naturally they stay private. Privatize profits, socialize losses. Ireland is broke. Where do you think all this money is going to come from? As you are forced to endure drastic austerity programs, millions are being funneled into the banking system to pay interest on “bailouts”. When you run out of money to do that, more is printed and loaned to the government to, yup, pay interest. This is the worst, most drachonian form of bankruptcy; the bankruptcy that is never recognized. The inevitable consequences are consistently postponed, made infinitely worse by politicians (and the general populace) who don’t have the courage to say enough is enough. Say no to more bailouts and put that money to better use. Yes, the markets may react negatively, in the short run. In the long run, those same banks will be back, knocking at your door to loan you new money in a new round of prosperity. I’ve managed hundreds of millions in problem real estate loans for some of the largest banks in the U.S. I know how it works.
February 24, 2012 at 3:05 pm
It is the government’s role to oversee and enforce planning issues. They need to get on and do that. In the absence of legal actions and the time that would inevitably consume there are pressing health and safety issues on these estates that need to be dealt with right now. They need to get on with that and stop waiting for market correction – that is not coming any time soon. I’m not proposing that they finish off estates. I am proposing that they take developers/banks to task and in the mean time protect citizens from potentially lethal hazards.
February 24, 2012 at 4:07 pm
It’s an incredibly difficult and frustrating situation, to be sure.
February 24, 2012 at 4:37 pm
Sometimes I’m sad I left Ireland. Then I read something like, and suddenly I’m not.
February 27, 2012 at 10:39 am
It is noted that part of the solution was the provision of a “5 million fund to tackle health and safety issues on the worst of the estates”.
The criteria for draw down under this funding are extremely limiting. To qualify, an estate must fall into Category 4: “where there is no construction activity on the site, where efforts to contact the developer or site owner have been unsuccessful, where no receiver has been appointed, where serious public safety issues are present and efforst to compel the developer and or site owner to address such issues have been unsuccessful”.
In many of the worst estates, the developer or site owner is contactable. This automatically disqualifies them as Category 4.
It is also noted that “€5m is a paltry sum”. While it may be a paltry sum in contemplating addressing the enormous issue of the very many unfinished estates in the country, it is my understanding that there are so few estates which qualify under the criteria above, that the cap of €5m has not been an issue to date.