Two vacant Dublin City Council-owned buildings in the heart of the city centre are to be sold to a travel agent after proposals to use them for social housing were dropped.
The buildings are on a prominent corner site at the entrance to the new car-free plaza which runs along Liffey Street towards the Ha’penny Bridge on the north side of the river.
The two storey redbrick buildings at 30 and 31 Liffey Street Lower, dating from the early years of the 20th century, were leased by the council to various businesses, including phone and gaming shops and barbers, in recent years.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, they have been largely vacant and classed as derelict by the council’s valuers.
The council last January put the buildings, which sit on the corner of Liffey Street Lower and Strand Street Great, on sale with a guide price of €550,000. Zoning for the site allows a mix of uses including retail, restaurant, and office, as well as hotel, residential and cultural use.
There was significant interest in the site and Chapville Ltd, a company owned by travel agency Cassidy Travel, were the chosen bidder with an offer of €725,000. As part of the sale the company must submit planning permission to redevelop the buildings within six months and if any apartments are developed, the council would have first option to buy them.
The sale of any council land or buildings requires the approval of city councillors. Last May, in advance of the local elections, councillors decided not to approve the sale and asked that the potential of these buildings to be redeveloped by the council for social housing be assessed.
The Liffey Street buildings had been assessed by the council’s adaptive reuse unit, which was established two years ago to turn vacant commercial buildings into homes. The unit has a remit to buy private commercial properties for housing, but also to convert council-owned buildings to new homes.
As the buildings were on a busy commercial street, any redevelopment “should include for a retention of commercial use at ground floor level”, noted a report from Fiona Craven, adaptive reuse programme manager.
“The building was assessed for its potential to include residential units on the upper floors and it was considered that it may have been possible to create two apartments on the upper floors”, funded through the Department of Housing.
On the opposite side of Liffey Street, there are three storeys of apartments above ground-floor shops, built in the 1990s as part of developer Liam Carroll’s large-scale Bachelors Walk apartment scheme.
The Social Housing Investment Programme “does not provide funding for non-residential aspects of development proposals and so if a development is to include mixed use such as commercial on the ground floor with residential use above, an alternative source of funding must be secured to support the commercial aspect of the development”, said Ms Craven.
“Projects that are reliant on multiple sources of funding have a greater risk of failure,” she said. Given this and “the fact that only two apartment units would be created from redevelopment of this property” it was determined the limited resources available for the programme would be better spent on “other properties that posed [a] lesser risk and a greater outcome with respect to apartment units”.
Councillors have this month agreed to the sale of the buildings to Chapville. The new cycle and pedestrian plaza, with a repaved surface, planting, seating and cycle spaces, is largely complete and will be officially opened next month.
