Stand Up For Housing Justice In Dundrum On Saturday, November 6th
Brian Leeson has announced that a ‘Stand Up For Housing Justice’ protest will take place outside the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum at 1pm on Saturday, November 6th. The Éirígí representative for the Rathdown area made the announcement as it was revealed that the English property company Hammerson are planning to built almost 900 Buid-To-Rent apartments on the site of the old Dundrum Shopping Centre.
Speaking from Ballinteer, Leeson said, “After a sham-consultation process, which always had a pre-determined outcome, the LDA brought their proposal to build 1,259 homes on the Central Mental Hospital site to An Bord Pleanála for a pre-application consultation in June.
The proposed LDA development would be overwhelmingly made up of one and two bedroom apartments, including an unknown number of tiny studio apartments, in blocks up to eleven stories high. Just 55 traditional-style houses are included in the LDA plan for the 27 acre site.
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Éirígí housing protest in May 2021 outside the vulture-owned Fernbank apartments in Dundrum
Incredibly the LDA have gone into consultation with An Bord Pleanála without revealing any information about the tenure of their proposed development. So we have no idea how many of the proposed homes will be kept in public ownership and how many will be sold off into private ownership.
The LDA plan for the CMH site has too high a density of housing, with too many studio, one-bed and two-bed apartments. It seems the LDA are more worried about hitting their national targets for new homes built than they are about the development of a new balanced, inter-generational, stable community in Dundrum.
We in Éirígí believe that the CMH site is suited to a development of approximately 1,000 homes made up of low-rise apartment blocks and traditional housing. We believe that about 300 of these homes should be ear-marked for older people from the greater Dundrum area who want to down-size from larger houses that could then be occupied by larger, younger families.
All of the housing in a future CMH development should be kept in permanent public ownership as part of a new system of Universal Public Housing. This would ensure that thousands of local people would be able to access affordable, secure housing in the Dundrum area for decades into the future.
We are organising the protest at the CMH on Saturday, November 6th to give people an opportunity to publicly show their opposition to the LDA plans for this hugely important piece of public land.
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Éirígí housing protest in Dec 2019 outside the vulture-owner Herbert Hill apartments in Dundrum
But the protest is also about the wider housing crisis locally and nationally. The news that Hammerson intend to build up to 900 Build-To-Rent apartments on the site of the old Dundrum Shopping Centre is just the latest example of the vulture takeover of housing in our community.
The Vulture Landlords are now on track to own up to 8,000 homes in Rathdown within a few short years. This equates to about one in five homes across the constituency. This cannot be allowed to happen.
I am asking those who are directly affected by the housing crisis and those who care about housing justice to join the protest on November 6th. Nothing is going to change if people chose to stay at home and wait for the next general election to vote in a new government that might take a different approach to housing.
It could be three and a half years before there’s a change of government, by which time almost all of the remaining land in the greater Dundrum area will already have vulture-owned housing built on it.
Now is the time to build a tidal wave of pressure on the current government, to force them to radically change their approach to housing - to put the needs of families and communities ahead of the rampant greed of land speculators, developers, bankers, estate agents, landlords and the host of other housing parasites that have grown obscenely rich off the back of the housing misery of others.”
The ‘Stand Up For Housing Justice Protest’ will take place at 1pm on Saturday, November 6th outside the Central Mental Hospital in Windy Arbour, Dundrum. The event is open to all. Bígí linn.
Are you on Facebook? Here’s a link to the event page for the protest.
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