By Hannah Weir
The Republic of Ireland’s housing situation is the result of decades of overlapping policies acoss construction, land use, tax and infrastructure which was further poisoned by the financial crash of 2008. The North and the wider UK didn’t quite embed so much public and private investment into construction and the housing market, hence the crash fell harder south of the border. The scarring from this rears its head today in the form of rocketing rents, thousands of substandard and derelict properties, as well as an urban infrastructure that has long been highlighted as unfit for modern day living. The fear now, as students and families now struggle to find quality housing in Belfast, is these mistakes have duplicated. Belfast may be hurtling towards the same fate as renewal and regeneration efforts ramp up.
Increasingly in the UK and and Ireland, policymakers have relied on the private market to resolve housing issues. It is widely accepted now that in order to accommodate and acclimate Dublin’s new thriving multinational tech industry, glistening new apartments built in overhauled and renewed parts of the dublin docklands were erected. It was a deliberate act in cultivating a particular archetype of globalised city which formulates the blueprint for urban renewal in most of the Western world….
The Gown Online 