Cork's North Main Street shows how slowly dereliction is resolved, even when councils use their powers
This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.
There is a particular kind of failure that no single decision causes. Work was due to begin last night on taking down Nos. 62 to 65 North Main Street in Cork, a terrace that has stood empty and decaying for more than a decade. The council is acting on an engineers' report that found loose and missing masonry, rotten embedded timbers, cracking and displacement, and corrosion in the temporary system holding up the retained façades. The engineers described an immediate public-safety concern and a credible risk of partial collapse. On that advice, demolition is plainly the responsible course. The harder question is how it came to this.
The chronology is worth setting out. The four buildings were entered on the derelict sites register in December 2015. In June 2019, No. 63 partially collapsed, and the council stepped in with emergency works, removing the rear structures of Nos. 63 and 64 and installing a steel frame to hold up the street front. It then moved to acquire all four properties compulsorily, and An Bord Pleanála confirmed the acquisition, finding each structure to be in a ruinous and dangerous condition. The properties vested in the council in 2022. A tender for development proposals was launched in May of this year and has now been ended because of the latest engineering advice. Eleven years after registration, the site is about to become a cleared plot, with no developer in place.
This is not a story of simple inaction. The council used the tools the Derelict Sites Act 1990 gives it: registration, emergency works and compulsory acquisition. Each step was lawful and, by the standards of the Irish system, reasonably pursued. That is what makes the case instructive. If a city council that does what the legislation asks still ends up demolishing a terrace in one of its oldest streets more than a decade later, the problem lies less with any one official than with the pace and sequencing of the process itself.
For practice, three lessons stand out. The first is that time is not neutral for derelict buildings. Every winter of water getting into old masonry and timber narrows the options. The temporary steel frame installed in 2019 was a holding measure, and holding measures corrode. A façade that might have been retained in 2016 or 2019 may not be safe to keep in 2026. The question of what to do with a site has to be answered while there is still a building worth saving.
The second is that acquisition is not the same as regeneration. Vesting the properties in the council in 2022 solved the ownership problem, but it did not supply a scheme, a funder or a builder. A tender launched almost three years after vesting suggests that the end use had not been settled when the acquisition began. Councils pursuing derelict sites should, where they can, have a realistic redevelopment route worked out in parallel with the legal process, whether that means their own housing programme, an approved housing body, a State agency or a private partner.
The third concerns the wider city. Derelict buildings on a main street are not only a private loss. They depress neighbouring property, deter investment and send a signal about how a place is cared for. North Main Street was the subject of an anti-dereliction protest last year, a reminder that the cost is felt well beyond the four addresses concerned.
There are fair counter-arguments. Compulsory acquisition interferes with constitutionally protected property rights, and it is right that it should be subject to proper procedure and independent confirmation. Old buildings in poor condition can be genuinely difficult and costly to save, and no council can be expected to underwrite every one. And it may be said that a cleared, publicly owned site in a city centre is not a bad position from which to start again.
All of that is true. But it is not an argument for accepting an eleven-year cycle as normal. The legal powers to tackle dereliction already exist, including the derelict sites levy and compulsory acquisition. What is too often missing is the speed, resourcing and forward planning that turn those powers into new homes and active ground floors.
The test now is what follows demolition. The council says it remains fully committed to securing the redevelopment of this key city centre site. A clear timetable, a defined end use and a funding route, published soon, would show that the lesson has been learned. A fenced-off gap on North Main Street for another decade would show that it has not.
No comments:
Post a Comment