Council’s empty houses as homeless crisis spirals

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column with Dara Bradley 

Galway is in the grips of a homeless and housing crisis. The word ‘crisis’ is bandied about too often, but in relation to housing, the city is indeed at crisis point.

Galway City Council is spending €350,000 monthly on emergency accommodation to house people who are officially homeless.

That’s on average €350,000 every month going to B&Bs and hotels and other accommodation providers to put roofs over the heads of families and people in dire straits.

It sounds glamorous living in a hotel, but the opposite is the case – no cooking facilities, no certainty or security of tenure, nowhere to call your own, drifting from one hotel room to the next depending on availability, fearing you’ll be moved at weekends when a stag party arrives or a crowd of Yanks check-in.

The psychological scarring that the stigma of not having a place to call home will have on a generation of homeless children in our city will be felt for years to come. Try doing homework when you don’t have a home.

The problem is getting worse. In June and July, 120 Notices to Quit were issued to people on the City Council’s housing waiting list. Anecdotally, and from the first-hand experience of wonderful organisations like Cope Galway and Galway Simon, landlords in the private rental sector are fleeing the market, and issuing more eviction notices.

Short-term lettings, such as Airbnb, are adding to the problem, as is high demand from students of the third level institutes, GMIT and NUIG.

The cost of dealing with the crisis is spiralling. Last month, councillors voted to take €280,000 from the Council’s revenue budget – that had originally been earmarked for additional staff – to put towards homeless services. And the Council also approved a €5 million overdraft accommodation budget.

While the homeless crisis continues to deepen, the Council continues to do nothing with houses it purchased a decade ago.

In response to a query from Independent Galway West TD, Catherine Connolly, the Chief Executive of the City Council, Brendan McGrath has confirmed that five properties on Lower Merchants Road in the ownership of the local authority are vacant/derelict.

The Council bought houses 17 and 18 at Lower Merchants Road in 2007, and at 19, 19A, and 20 in 2008. This was after they bought number 15 to build an art-house cinema.

Numbers 17, 18, 19, 19A and 20 were acquired, “with the purpose of developing them as cultural/arts venues”, he said.

In August, Mr McGrath said the Council was progressing a “significant enhancement and extension to the City Museum” with a grant application submitted to Fáilte Ireland.

“It is intended that the City Museum project will copper-fasten the role of this part of the city as a cultural quarter, and the future uses for the houses at Lower Merchants’ Road will be considered in this regard, potentially as studio spaces for artists,” he told Deputy Connolly.

Well, the new museum announcement came and went this September without mention of these empty houses. Using them as “studio spaces for artists” is a lofty aspiration, but it is time the Council used their derelict properties to house homeless artists.

For more Bradley Bytes see this week’s Galway City Tribune