Future of council housing

I can say that it improved the physical living conditions of many. It’s well known that the build quality of public housing in places like Coolock and Finglas built in the 50’s and 60’s is far superior to much of their private sector contemporaries. However, I don’t think you can say much architecturally about e.g. Jobstown, Ballymun or Darndale, the latter two were experiments inflicted on the working class, which failed. Miserably.

The main problem was the sheer scale of some of the estate building, which gave rise to monotonous landscapes. Tallaght is massive, Finglas sprawls. I guess land assembly and ownership patterms coupled with a housing emergency at the time, led to this pattern. Build what you can as soon as you can. If you look at what happened in the old Dun Laoghaire Borough area, much smaller and disparate patterns emerge. With the exception of Sallynoggin, no major local authority development exists, and it’s unfair to single out Sallynoggin to be honest. Even Ballybrack’s council provision isn’t that big. Especially compared to the likes of Ballyfermot or Neilstown.

This gave rise to a far more diverse, ever changing urban landscape, whereby you cycle or drive past large mansions next to your typical grey estate of terraces. Then you have your average suburban private housing estate next to local authority flats, or whatever. Deansgrange and Kill o’ the Grange/Monkstown are two areas where this is most obvious. In that regard Council housing provided diversity in the urban grain, and adds to the overall feel of the place. Some of my favourite housing in this area is in the back streets of Dun Laoghaire town centre, where rows of redbrick terraced housing, maisonettes and flats are literally stacked into the narrow streets, with direct frontage, yards without gardens, and little space for cars. The exact opposite of Tallaght, and far more attractive. And around the corner lie Victorian mansions, either owner occupied or sublet.

Socially the public housing program has been of mixed success at best. And I don’t blame the authorities too much for the failings,. They responded to a slum crisis in the city, whereby people actually died as a result of a house collapse, as best they could. As mentioned above, the quality of the housing is generally good. However as I’m sure we’re all aware, the social element failed drastically in some areas. Also in the case of Darndale and Ballymun, the architecture compounded the social failings.

Building vast sprawling estates to house the urban poor could be regarded as the biggest failure in government thinking post-war. Not just in Ireland, but across Europe. But they could be excused moreso, as their cities had been destroyed. For a family from a tenement in Summerhill, to be displaced to Old Bawn, or Finglas, seperated from their neighbours they used to live on top of, unserved by any shops or community facilities, in a landscape built for a car they never owned, was a huge mistake which came home to roost spectacularly. It related directly to the argument that higher densities are essential for community creation, amongst other things. It could have been done better, but so could almost everything.

As for the future, well I’d like to know if Part V is ever gonna be allowed to play the part it was intended to play in housing provision in this country. It’s been watered down and abused by the govt/developers so much at this stage that it’s meaningless in relation to it’s initial intentions. It has to be implemented properly to ensure a healthy social mix and prevent ghettos, of all class types. Sadly, it’s never going to be in the developer’s interests to do so.

I’d like to see smaller estates and a diverse housing base. I’d like to see different architects used thorughout the sector, as was done in Ballymun’s Regeneration, instead of vast monotonous estates, and the exact same house types being built in Bray as in Ballyfermot. I’d like council estates, if such are to be built, to consist of traditional family houses, townhouses, family sized apartments, even some taller buildings, with an emphasis on community services and diversity of stock.

I no longer want to see a new suburb develop that is tarred from the outset, as a sink estate, a problem area, disadvantaged. I don’t think that will ever happen again, due to policy, but moreover the economic situation. It is essential that this money is directed towards building in the right place. There is no point isolating social housing for short term monetary benefits. Ballymun was a harsh lesson in that regard.

I look forward to seeing how and where they target this investment

I would be surprised if local authorities comission the building of any houses – my expectation is that the policy of buying in new-build estates and apartment developments will continue.

@Andrew Duffy wrote:

I would be surprised if local authorities comission the building of any houses – my expectation is that the policy of buying in new-build estates and apartment developments will continue.

I didn’t know that they were doing this. Dublin city council at least has completed several new developments in recent years such as Blackhall Place and Bridgefoot Street.

In some countries, state housing support is entirely provided via rent and mortgage subsidy, avoiding the state assuming the role of landlord. I suspect this might be a better arrangement.

In some countries, state housing support is entirely provided via rent and mortgage subsidy, avoiding the state assuming the role of landlord. I suspect this might be a better arrangement.

I agree 100%. Building council houses may have made some sort of Keynesian sense when the country was in the state it was in years ago. Also, at the time the national housing stock was in a terrible state with the worst property consigned to the rental market. With little or no social welfare, the conditions for those who couldn’t afford to buy a home was terrible. None of these conditions currently exist. The private sector is pumping out about 100K new builds a year, rents for decent accomodation are reasonable and the welfare system provides plenty of financial support, particularly for families.

There are many disadvantages to having housing built by councils. Efficiency is very poor. But the worst is the creation of social ghettos – the consequences of which are still with us particularly in the bigger cities like Dublin, Cork and Limerick. We copied the UK’s model which suffers similar localised social deprivation. There is also something extremely unfair about the method of allocation which is effectively hereditory. Depending on your parents, you might be lucky enough to live in a council house off Adelaide road (probably worth well over a million euro) or Stephen’s Green or unlucky enough to end up the worst part of Neilstown, Jobstown, Darndale or Moyross (where you can buy a house for 3k). If you then apply for a council house, you are given priority for housing in your area. Mobility for council tennants is limited which adds to the disadvantages faced when competing for decent jobs.

The German model, I believe, simply provides decent rent support. As a result, welfare recipients are dispersed and they suffer no stigma as a result of having a bad address. Most importantly, they maintain the freedom and independence enjoyed by people who pay their own rent. Obviously, proper tenancy legislation is vital.

In the long term, our system actually disadvantages the people it supposed to help; the children of people who are dependent on the council to provide housing are far more likely to find themselves in the same position. Thus we have families who for generations have been dependent on the state for almost everything.

There is certainly an argument for aiding housing acquisition via the social welfare system. A growing reality in Ireland, to use that awful phrase, is that we’re all middle class darling. The middle ground has bloated so much in recent times that it encompasses a sizeable majority of the population. And to blur the lines even further with regards income and means testing etc, at the same time we have a housing market that pushes ownership of a house beyond the means of many people earning very reasonable incomes.

So it has now got to the stage where not only is affordable housing a ridiculous lottery, but increasingly so too is social housing with its ever-burgeoning waiting lists of tens of thousands of young people and families in particular trying to get somewhere to live.

As jimg mentions, you have the entirely inequitable situation where some people are put to the pin of their collar to scrape together enough cash to put a deposit or mortgage down on a new house, whilst a neighbouring development of social housing, often in a prime location, is available to a select few who either grew up there, or who are lucky enough to be near the top of the waiting list, or indeed even on the waiting list at all.

No doubt there are arguments in favour of retention of the social housing model, and there’s nothing worse than someone who’s been relatively lucky waffling about such matters, but the reality is that social and/or affordable housing are real issues that face every young person starting out in life in Ireland now. The model hasn’t changed, and yet society has altered drastically around it. Access to education has enormously improved, as has the availability of employment, cheap credit and wider social mobility. The reality of a mass group of people dependant on the state has diminished substantially in recent times.

If we do stick with it in some shape or form, I agree with alonso that the small cohesive scheme/estate in otherwise ‘middle class’ areas is the best way of pursuing it, rather than the mass disasters of old. Below is the new face of social housing outside of Dublin: a new estate of roughly 40 houses of mixed design erected in Co Louth in what is a thoroughly comfortable, well-off village.

Designed by Van Dijk Architects (they hold almost a monopoly in Co Louth :)), they’re arranged in a mixture of terrace, semi, two storey and bungalow type, in a reasonably dense formation about four minutes walk from the local village, with the school almost across the road.

They’ve been laid out with curved roads, landscaped areas and green expanses (the grass naturally isn’t looking great at this time of year), and planted with semi-mature trees, all on a visually interesting slightly sloped site. Monotony is not part of this plan.

All houses have robust well-finished stone walls (if cemented to the hilt) and ‘arty’ entrance gates, with a sense that this development has been designed to last as a coherent unit, not be tampered with with whims of frilly PVC facias and balustraded front walls.

Still, I wonder how long it’ll be before the first gate is painted 🙂

The architect’s touch is evident with resolved chimney stacks and an overall decent sense of proportion. The design may be as predictable as anything else going up about the place, but with social housing the very first thing people seem to want is an appearace of ‘normality’ – this really came to the fore with Ballymun residents as I recall.

Thankfully the crucial ‘artery’ walls of the estate are also well-finished – no breeze blocks or spirit-crushing pebbledash facing the public domain as we see almost everywhere nowadays. There’s also no cul-de-sacs, with many pedestrian access/exit points.

Great pity about the galvanised sodium lampposts however, from an aesthetic, energy and safety perspective. We really have to get out of the public lighting rut we’re in in this country.

Facing the main road the estate has been arranged in a traditional gable-fronted manner, with step-down properties which work very well. Not that I’ve ever understood people getting heated over upholding a tradition barely a couple of hundred years old which is entirely subjective to the landscape, but it’s attactive in this instance.

A bungalow semi.

A terrace(ish)

Many of the houses merge in a typical miasma of rear gardens and boundary walls and fencing.

It’s frustrating to see so much space to the front of homes wasted on gardens solely in existance to provide a driveway for two cars – I refer to all housing estates on this. The whole attraction of suburban living essentially comes down to the provision of a back garden; nobody wants the front anymore. As such, why not provide multiple parking spaces at the end of each road, neatly landscaped, while simultaneously saving space for increased density and generating a more cohesive streetscape-based community?

Black PVC is still used for facias, but thankfully timber windows throughout.

The interiors seem to be of a slightly lower standard than a private development, but not by much.

Even the public elements are very well finished.

This estate however is not without controversy, located slap bang in an area full of €400,000-€500,000 houses. The howls of anguish from certain residents were as embarrassing as they were typical.

But it does bring home a point that does make people sore: all around are new private estates going up with young couples taking out hefty mortgages trying to get onto the ‘ladder’, or paying exorbitant rents in investor properties, whilst those lucky enough to be on the housing list (and good luck to them) are in equally new houses even closer to all amenities, paying little more than a peppercorn rent to the local authority that would make your jaw drop. Even relative to the ‘affordable’ housing included in this scheme, the social element comes across as the better ‘deal’.

Now that there’s an almost indistinguishable difference between the built quality of social and private housing, and such a large section of the population is now facing the same hard reality of trying to find somewhere to live, it’s only inevitable that people will begin to ask questions as to the equitability of the provision of housing-by-lottery by local authorities.

This is an interesting post for me to compare with what’s happening here, as we’ve just finished our first social housing project:
http://www.murraydunloparchitects.com/wip/telford-rd/index.htm

Glasgow has handed over the building and running of social housing to the Glasgow Housing Association. Thereby removing the burden of new build and the upkeep of housing stock from the council itself. For Glasgow it has meant they can now focus on other regenretion projects, like the river, where as before they were throwing their money into a black hole keeping poor property maintained

This project is in Edinburgh and at £1.9million was funded by a £1.25m housing association grant provided by Edinburgh City Council with the balance funded by Manor Estates Housing Association. The total cost per square metre was £1530, compared to an average for the area (Lothians, Borders, Forth Valley & Fife ) of £1305 and a national average of £1129 for all housing association new-builds in 2004/05. The Telford March cost include land costs which are more expensive in Edinburgh than the rest of the region. Rents are £255 to £276 per month, depending on the size of the unit.

An elegant scheme alan – nice choice of brick in particular, with the injections of cedar adding further warmth and interest, while also tying in nicely with the otherwise blah tan brick of existing stock. The ‘opening up’ to the south principal seems to works well from what I can gather of the site orientation, with depressing blank elevations also minimised. The 7th image comes across a bit bleak, but you can’t satisfy every element I’m sure.
What are the windows: typical power-coated aluminium? Why that choice over cedar-clad out of interest?

As always, the decent treatment of the public domain makes it, with the service areas nicely finished off in matching brick walls etc.

It’s funny how the original mansion block design there, as seen across the UK, was transplanted almost lock, stock and barrel over to Ireland. In spite of the current tattiness and probably poor build quality, they still hold a certain charm in looking solid and well-proportioned, and no doubt appealing in a dolls house stereotype kind of way to an innate understanding of what a house, whether housing 10 or 100 people, should be.

we have a couple of very talented young Irish architects in the office, one of whom, Stephen Doherty from Donegal was the project architect Graham. I agree about the 7th image, it does look a bit bleak.

It was an attempt to show the project warts and all I guess, my fault. Can’t stand those glamourised art shots, architects often use , without any people or sense that it is a real place. It’s in a pretty rough area of Edinburgh, yes Edinburgh……….hard to believe I know

Anyway. Yes the windows are powder coated aluminium and we used timber to compliment the brickwork and soften it up . I was also thinking that the housing in Co. Louth could be in Glenrothes or East Kilbride………..apart from the gates of course. Scots are a bit more anal, just a bit too showy. Aye, ye’ll have hud yer tea?

😀

Lets face it, they could be in any suburb in these islands, only with a token Oirish reference with the bookend gables – but that’s the nature of modern housing development and design isn’t it.

When I compare the relatively sprawling estate here to the medium-high density of your scheme, it’d make you despair at the element of waste with this prime site, so fantastically close to all amenities. The opportunity to sustainably increase density in an area stuffed to the gills with ribbon development has been missed to a degree. I suppose though, if anything other than traditional housing was proposed there’d be uproar in the community, unlike the precedent of height at your site, so it would have been an uphill struggle from the very start.

I think the architects did well within their brief however – it’s not patronisingly happy clappy as is often the case with similar social housing schemes.

Just reading the figures, a total of 61 social houses were built, at a total cost of €11.5 million, working out at €190,000 per house (presumably including all site works too). A futher 6 affordable houses are featured in the scheme – I’d imagine the posh semis…

…while 5 sites have interestingly been left vacant off to the right (as barely visible above), near the estate entrance and green area with matching stone walls and gates, for private house projects. It’s notable that social residents are bundled together in terraces at the far reaches of the estate, followed by the ‘buffer’ of affordable semis mid-way, and finally private houses right at the entrance to the estate…

Sorry alan, I meant earlier why you chose alu windows over cedar-clad windows? Or a$k a stupid question?
The alu looks great nonetheless.

What are bookend gables?

There are a couple of more complementary photos of Alan’s Telford Drive houses here:
http://www.architecturescotland.co.uk/buildings/108/Telford_Drive.html

One of the odd things about council housing in the past in Dublin was that everyone could always tell it apart from private housing – and from a long distance. This enhanced the ghetto effect. Hey look everyone: ‘Poor people!’ At first I thought this was the intention: to degrade the residents by branding them, but of course the intention was never malign on the council’s part. Council schemes were driven by different forces to commercial developments. The council could build any scheme no matter how fanciful or awful and people would have to live in it whereas the developer had to appeal to the taste of his clients and minimise the risk of ever doing anything new.

The council schemes were tainted by association with poverty but in retrospect, at least some of them were quite attractive and progressive and, being paid for by the state, I doubt any of them came cheap.

The older Oliver Bond scheme and some of the city centre blocks have a Dutch feel to them. Then there were the weird Spanish style houses with blocky door and window frame surrounds (some beside the Frescati centre). But there were many, many more that were just dire. Those chicken coop blocks with an external cylinder fire escape and the Darndale circuit board style housing come to mind.

Anyhow, is the state’s involvement in residential architecture at an end?

Is there a book that covers council housing in Dublin?

@Frank Taylor wrote:

Is there a book that covers council housing in Dublin?

Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping The City & Suburbs By Ruth McManus

Also, Ireland and the New Architecture: 1900-1940 by Sean Rothery.

I am sure others will know of a few more titles which might be of more specific use to you, but these are two that came to mind emmedietly.

Thanks Phil