AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Gazing upwards as I walk down my local high street I am looking, not at the sky, but at the first and second floors above the shop fronts. Some house offices, a few are apartments but many wear a general air of neglect. Piles of boxes and torn net curtains look out of the grimy windows rather than people.
Back in the day it wasn’t so; in a thriving market town families once lived over the shops they owned. Now this vacant home story is repeated again and again in towns and cities around the country, Kilkenny City being no exception.
But could new life be breathed into these neglected spaces?
Martin Markey, CEO of the 400 member Irish Hardware Association (IHA), believes that it could and sees a huge opportunity in these former homes. Based on a report carried out for the IHA on the possibility of bringing over-the-shop premises back into use, he says these properties might help solve our housing crisis. This at a time when new builds seem unable to rise above 35,000 a year and economic forecasts suggest that we need 70,000 extra homes annually.
The IHA scheme suggests extending the vacant property refurbishment scheme to include over-the-shop premises. Introduced in 2022, owners who have bought vacant properties built before 2008 may qualify for a grant of €50,000, with a possible top-up of €20,000. Turning over-the-shop premises into homes could also benefit centres that have been hollowed out, especially since Covid, by the spread of development and shopping centres in the countryside. “Reviving vacant above-the-shop properties is a vital step towards breathing new life into towns and villages across the country,” Markey says in the report.
The genesis for the idea came from an earlier report on vacant property carried out for the IHA and where the introduction of grants to make these buildings home-worthy has been a big success. “At the moment, the appetite for the vacant homes grant is huge,” Markey said last week on the Pat Kenny programme. “We think it’s going to be about 20,000 – it’s at about 11,000 at the moment. We would say we will see similar in terms of above-the-shop properties. Between empty homes, as in single houses, and above-the-shop property units, there’s about 40,000 units available to us,” he said.
It sounds great in theory but could it work in practice? Damien Curry, joint director with his wife Emily-Ann of Canice Architects, specialising in conservation and sustainability, is well aware of the potential opportunities. The Kilkenny-based firm participated recently in a project to create a garden studio and artists’ residency from a disused 18th Century latrine at the back of the Butler Gallery. “You can find forgotten spaces,” affirms Curry. The project features in the Reason Of Towns exhibition currently on tour around Ireland.
“The difficulty with high street properties is in getting them up to fire standard and then the issue of having an independent door can be difficult, given the heritage aspect in a place like Kilkenny but it’s not impossible,” points out Curry. Other disincentives include the fact that in the vacant property scheme new owners have to pay up front before they can avail of grants and the slow pace of bureaucracy.
Kilkenny County Council’s Housing Department have had an encouraging 248 applications up to December last and have two administrative staff and two technical staff working on the scheme.
Without finance, though, reviving over-the-shop properties, “doesn’t make sense and all the rest is going to fall away,” Markey admitted on Kenny’s programme.
The IHA report found that 55% of owners of the properties wanted to renovate them and rent them as homes while 23% wanted to renovate and sell. To remove some of the disincentives involved, the report proposed a number of measures including a three-year stop on capital gains tax, a more flexible and enhanced grant scheme, simplification of fire and planning regulations, and flexible building standards for older properties. In other words, unblocking the planning logjam which bedevils progress on housing.
Living over the shop in the heart of things sounds appealing. Let’s hope it sounds appealing to new Minister for Housing James Browne too.
