Yes they somehow think appartments = hideouts for drug dealers / scrotes / etc, and not places for students / workers for example…
Who wants to live in an apartment in Ireland anyways?
Builders can’t make money building them. Says it all.
Townies love 3 bed semis and culchies (sorry) love dormer bungalows
It’s just the truth. Downvote away
Families are getting smaller, and we need homes for a lot more single folk too.
GOOD apartments, energy efficient ones with mod cons and local amenities, are a good idea. But I expect they’ll be badly delivered and take way too long.
Ballymun towers were a quantum leap for those who had been living in awful tenements and back to backs in the city centre. Suddenly they had dry and warm. Too warm it turned out cos the district heating system was not well run. The many problems associated with the area came through neglect by the city & state rather than the height of the buildings.
I guess I’ll copy this comment from the other thread:
The reason Ballymun turned to shit wasn’t apartments.
Ballymun flats were created to accommodate people who lived in city centre slums, but were being moved so those slums could be cleared. The reasons Ballymun “failed” is because:
(1) many of those who lived in the slums were unemployed/desperately poor
(2) They took established communities, broke them up and then dumped them in Ballymun, with no social supports or sense of community
(3) There was a lack of opportunities – adding to the fact that most people from the slums were uneducated and unskilled, there was also a significant lack of jobs in the area
(4) There were no facilities or things to do, resulting in further isolation and anti-social behaviour
(5) The buildings were not maintained, so when lifts broke down people were often stuck in them or trapped in their apartments, leading to further isolation
(6) Drugs snuck in. And in an isolated area full of unemployed/poor people with nothing to do, no jobs, no opportunities and no sense of community, they tend to spread like wildfire.
Ultimately, what Ballymun proved, was that you can’t just throw up huge apartments blocks with no planning, amenities, jobs or investments. But of course the government didn’t learn from that, and now we still have ghost estates in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Priory Hall didn’t help either. Lots of people have the idea that apartments are somehow inferior particularly for families.
60% of renters in Vienna rent from the government. It works very, very well there.
There are detailed reports on what happened in Ballymun.
It wasn’t the fault of the flats. Or the people. It was a lack of maintenance and that the rest of the planned services were never built.
Ballymun flats were v.modern for their time by all accounts
The social sciences around community development/support have moved on in last 60 years beyond recognition….surely it’s a better solution than sticking people into hotels/renting off cuckoo funds in perpetuity
Hot take. “Slums” are better than mass homelessness.
Large scale social housing also doesn’t automatically lead to antisocial community. Lack of infrastructure and opportunities does.
I think it makes a lot of sense for people staying in hotel rooms. Houses are really expensive if you havnt noticed
Yeah it really annoys me. Even government tds use that excuse. Like that’s an inditement on them if any new social housing ends up as ballymun 2.0, that’s not a valid excuse!
We just need to stop fucking talking about homes only. If you are on social welfare you need a roof over your head, if you are just poor you need a roof over your head. They don’t need to be 3 bed, 3 bath A rated houses.
The government shot itself in the foot by forcing all new builds to be A rated and continuing to use them as social housing. My hot take is that 10% of houses built should be affordable housing where affordable housing is where a couple on the median salary can buy them. For social housing I think the bar should be much lower. I think it could be for instance an apartment, 2 bed, 1 bath with no parking space. What about for single people who need social housing setting them up in a coliving place?
All that being said though the issue here goes well beyond the housing market in general but into speculation, market manipulation of rents, dereliction, AirBnb and holiday homes in general. Housing is a right not a privilege and not someone else’s commodity. Electricity has value but is a right for every person living in Ireland to get the ESB to connect them to the grid, we should treat housing with the same requirement.
Were the ballymun apartments populated thereby housing people? If yes, then it should be tried now.
If there was a famine, you would feed people.
There is rampant homelessness, so why the hell are we not housing people?!
If you had a choice of being homeless or living in a Ballymun style apartment, tell me what your choice would be?
Ballymun may have been far from perfect, but there were lessons learnt.
Unfortunately it won’t happen again due to EU budgeting rules. Housing charities are the ones most likely to try doing this again…..but it’d be on a much smaller scale.
Social housing areas based around housing had the same issues.
There is no way to solve it.
Keep the state out of private estates and at least reward people for accepting no state funding.
A country with low population density, and 1% population growth predicted to fall in the next decade definitely needs to build high rise accommodation. Don’t demand the government restricts vulture fund activity in the property market or penalise dereliction more severely. High rise is the answer… 
It wasn’t just ballymun, all social housing/Council estates had the same faults. It’s worse if you ended up getting the more problematic social housing users next door who they couldn’t put anywhere else.
Thr issue is always social, and parental. Teenagers don’t go to school, have no hope for their future, start small robbing crisps from shops then start moving product for the gangs. I’ve seen it first hand.
If their parents had day a drinking or drug problem it got worse as their parents just wanted them out of sight so it wouldn’t interrupt their distractions from reality.
We need these apartment style blocks of housing. Population has grown so we’ve no other options right now, but there needs to be more than just facilities there needs to be social workers, care and education.
Ballymun became what it was due to a general lack of funding and neglect, not because they were tower blocks.
We could, you know… follow the central European model of a self contained community, with shops and outles in or near the housing? No no too complicated, lets stick to the gouging two tier system we have.
The problem with Ballymun was they allowed them anti social elements to continue to stay there when they should have kicked them out. In doing so the problem just grew and ballymun could never have a good name.
> /r/Ireland: “the Georgian skyline is ruining housing in Dublin! Fuck it bulldoze Dublin 1!!”
#
> **property developers:** “banks won’t finance us to build apartment blocks because the profit margins are too low in Ireland… Georgian what? What are you on about?”
#
> /r/Ireland: “fucking Georgians!!!”
#
> **property developers:**: no honestly the problem is a fairly complex combination of cost of living, building regulations, finance friction on the developer end *and* on the customer end an-
#
> /r/Ireland: “fuck sake why am I cursed to be the only one who understands this problem: Nazi local councillors preventing all housing construction over 3 foot tall because they worship the georgian skyline!!”
Affordable housing should be the priority, not social housing
Switzerland have strict rules about noise disturbances in apartments. If you could be guaranteed peace and quiet between 10pm and 7am, an apartment would be an ok place to live. But I’d absolutely dread living in an apartment here.
One off houses for everyone so is it? Of course apartments make sense for volume and medium affordability to construct. I say medium as it could be cheap, but not in Ireland today.
Nimby cunts, it might cast a shadow on my Bush that I dont give a fuck about
It’s this simple Dublin is extremely low density , if they want to keep it that way they’ll have to move the critical infrastructure somewhere more working class, grand your 60year old, single glaze house is worth a million quid, dockers and welders need to live near their work, the organs of the state need to function despite the stellar house prices
Big spending in rosslare port these day surely its a silver lining
HEROIN
Apartments were invented for wage slaves.
[removed]
The people were the problem. That’s why government policy now is to settle the people in housing estates shared with the rest of us. Estates with just those people will go to shit no matter if they’re high rises or terraced houses, and we know this. Government policy is that we couldn’t possibly subject them to living with each other.
Ah but sure it really was the height of the buildings that caused Ballymun’s failure. Definitely had nothing to do with the complete lack of amenities or maintenance, no not at all..
I’m in Sao paolo at the moment visiting friends. They live in a 19 floor tower which is part of a complex of 4 towers.
The first 2 floors are parking for everyone with loads of visitor spaces, the next floor has a communal area with pool, bar, fitness centre, remote working suites, a beauty room that has different specialities visiting each day (hair, nails etc) there is a creche, a room to use for kids parties, a room to use for adult parties, a tennis court and a crazy golf course, there’s a kitchen and dining area you can hire caters for, a 24hr concierge, a cinema room, a teen hangout room and finally they even have a hobby room with tools, workbench etc for DIY projects. They paid just over €200k for a beautiful 2 bed, the service charge is meaty for their income but the services are worth it. There is no reason we can’t do similar here.
All well and good until one has to live among people awarded social housing in general.
If they raised the income to say 100k for a family then i would get on board a mixed housing plan
The lesson in that was that the housing needs to be mixed and infrastructure needs to come with it. It’s not that hard, Austria and Finland does this perfectly https://youtu.be/d6DBKoWbtjE
All of these points basically boil down to uneducated, unskilled and poor people being thrown together with nothing to do. This will make any cheap housing scheme fail. That’s why cheap apartments never work.
Just don’t put them all in a single pile with no access to amenities, transport or shops.
The problem wasn’t that they were apartments, it’s that they were isolated apartments and *nothing* else causing the local teenagers end up feral.
The shortage of flats in this country is not primarily due to Ballymun. The main reason is semi-Ds are cheaper to build
39 comments
Ah yes socialism, that always works
Yes they somehow think appartments = hideouts for drug dealers / scrotes / etc, and not places for students / workers for example…
Who wants to live in an apartment in Ireland anyways?
Builders can’t make money building them. Says it all.
Townies love 3 bed semis and culchies (sorry) love dormer bungalows
It’s just the truth. Downvote away
Families are getting smaller, and we need homes for a lot more single folk too.
GOOD apartments, energy efficient ones with mod cons and local amenities, are a good idea. But I expect they’ll be badly delivered and take way too long.
Ballymun towers were a quantum leap for those who had been living in awful tenements and back to backs in the city centre. Suddenly they had dry and warm. Too warm it turned out cos the district heating system was not well run. The many problems associated with the area came through neglect by the city & state rather than the height of the buildings.
I guess I’ll copy this comment from the other thread:
The reason Ballymun turned to shit wasn’t apartments.
Ballymun flats were created to accommodate people who lived in city centre slums, but were being moved so those slums could be cleared. The reasons Ballymun “failed” is because:
(1) many of those who lived in the slums were unemployed/desperately poor
(2) They took established communities, broke them up and then dumped them in Ballymun, with no social supports or sense of community
(3) There was a lack of opportunities – adding to the fact that most people from the slums were uneducated and unskilled, there was also a significant lack of jobs in the area
(4) There were no facilities or things to do, resulting in further isolation and anti-social behaviour
(5) The buildings were not maintained, so when lifts broke down people were often stuck in them or trapped in their apartments, leading to further isolation
(6) Drugs snuck in. And in an isolated area full of unemployed/poor people with nothing to do, no jobs, no opportunities and no sense of community, they tend to spread like wildfire.
Ultimately, what Ballymun proved, was that you can’t just throw up huge apartments blocks with no planning, amenities, jobs or investments. But of course the government didn’t learn from that, and now we still have ghost estates in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Priory Hall didn’t help either. Lots of people have the idea that apartments are somehow inferior particularly for families.
60% of renters in Vienna rent from the government. It works very, very well there.
There are detailed reports on what happened in Ballymun.
It wasn’t the fault of the flats. Or the people. It was a lack of maintenance and that the rest of the planned services were never built.
Ballymun flats were v.modern for their time by all accounts
The social sciences around community development/support have moved on in last 60 years beyond recognition….surely it’s a better solution than sticking people into hotels/renting off cuckoo funds in perpetuity
Hot take. “Slums” are better than mass homelessness.
Large scale social housing also doesn’t automatically lead to antisocial community. Lack of infrastructure and opportunities does.
I think it makes a lot of sense for people staying in hotel rooms. Houses are really expensive if you havnt noticed
Yeah it really annoys me. Even government tds use that excuse. Like that’s an inditement on them if any new social housing ends up as ballymun 2.0, that’s not a valid excuse!
We just need to stop fucking talking about homes only. If you are on social welfare you need a roof over your head, if you are just poor you need a roof over your head. They don’t need to be 3 bed, 3 bath A rated houses.
The government shot itself in the foot by forcing all new builds to be A rated and continuing to use them as social housing. My hot take is that 10% of houses built should be affordable housing where affordable housing is where a couple on the median salary can buy them. For social housing I think the bar should be much lower. I think it could be for instance an apartment, 2 bed, 1 bath with no parking space. What about for single people who need social housing setting them up in a coliving place?
All that being said though the issue here goes well beyond the housing market in general but into speculation, market manipulation of rents, dereliction, AirBnb and holiday homes in general. Housing is a right not a privilege and not someone else’s commodity. Electricity has value but is a right for every person living in Ireland to get the ESB to connect them to the grid, we should treat housing with the same requirement.
Were the ballymun apartments populated thereby housing people? If yes, then it should be tried now.
If there was a famine, you would feed people.
There is rampant homelessness, so why the hell are we not housing people?!
If you had a choice of being homeless or living in a Ballymun style apartment, tell me what your choice would be?
Ballymun may have been far from perfect, but there were lessons learnt.
Unfortunately it won’t happen again due to EU budgeting rules. Housing charities are the ones most likely to try doing this again…..but it’d be on a much smaller scale.
Social housing areas based around housing had the same issues.
There is no way to solve it.
Keep the state out of private estates and at least reward people for accepting no state funding.
A country with low population density, and 1% population growth predicted to fall in the next decade definitely needs to build high rise accommodation. Don’t demand the government restricts vulture fund activity in the property market or penalise dereliction more severely. High rise is the answer… 
It wasn’t just ballymun, all social housing/Council estates had the same faults. It’s worse if you ended up getting the more problematic social housing users next door who they couldn’t put anywhere else.
Thr issue is always social, and parental. Teenagers don’t go to school, have no hope for their future, start small robbing crisps from shops then start moving product for the gangs. I’ve seen it first hand.
If their parents had day a drinking or drug problem it got worse as their parents just wanted them out of sight so it wouldn’t interrupt their distractions from reality.
We need these apartment style blocks of housing. Population has grown so we’ve no other options right now, but there needs to be more than just facilities there needs to be social workers, care and education.
Ballymun became what it was due to a general lack of funding and neglect, not because they were tower blocks.
We could, you know… follow the central European model of a self contained community, with shops and outles in or near the housing? No no too complicated, lets stick to the gouging two tier system we have.
The problem with Ballymun was they allowed them anti social elements to continue to stay there when they should have kicked them out. In doing so the problem just grew and ballymun could never have a good name.
> /r/Ireland: “the Georgian skyline is ruining housing in Dublin! Fuck it bulldoze Dublin 1!!”
#
> **property developers:** “banks won’t finance us to build apartment blocks because the profit margins are too low in Ireland… Georgian what? What are you on about?”
#
> /r/Ireland: “fucking Georgians!!!”
#
> **property developers:**: no honestly the problem is a fairly complex combination of cost of living, building regulations, finance friction on the developer end *and* on the customer end an-
#
> /r/Ireland: “fuck sake why am I cursed to be the only one who understands this problem: Nazi local councillors preventing all housing construction over 3 foot tall because they worship the georgian skyline!!”
Affordable housing should be the priority, not social housing
Switzerland have strict rules about noise disturbances in apartments. If you could be guaranteed peace and quiet between 10pm and 7am, an apartment would be an ok place to live. But I’d absolutely dread living in an apartment here.
One off houses for everyone so is it? Of course apartments make sense for volume and medium affordability to construct. I say medium as it could be cheap, but not in Ireland today.
Nimby cunts, it might cast a shadow on my Bush that I dont give a fuck about
It’s this simple Dublin is extremely low density , if they want to keep it that way they’ll have to move the critical infrastructure somewhere more working class, grand your 60year old, single glaze house is worth a million quid, dockers and welders need to live near their work, the organs of the state need to function despite the stellar house prices
Big spending in rosslare port these day surely its a silver lining
HEROIN
Apartments were invented for wage slaves.
[removed]
The people were the problem. That’s why government policy now is to settle the people in housing estates shared with the rest of us. Estates with just those people will go to shit no matter if they’re high rises or terraced houses, and we know this. Government policy is that we couldn’t possibly subject them to living with each other.
Ah but sure it really was the height of the buildings that caused Ballymun’s failure. Definitely had nothing to do with the complete lack of amenities or maintenance, no not at all..
I’m in Sao paolo at the moment visiting friends. They live in a 19 floor tower which is part of a complex of 4 towers.
The first 2 floors are parking for everyone with loads of visitor spaces, the next floor has a communal area with pool, bar, fitness centre, remote working suites, a beauty room that has different specialities visiting each day (hair, nails etc) there is a creche, a room to use for kids parties, a room to use for adult parties, a tennis court and a crazy golf course, there’s a kitchen and dining area you can hire caters for, a 24hr concierge, a cinema room, a teen hangout room and finally they even have a hobby room with tools, workbench etc for DIY projects. They paid just over €200k for a beautiful 2 bed, the service charge is meaty for their income but the services are worth it. There is no reason we can’t do similar here.
All well and good until one has to live among people awarded social housing in general.
If they raised the income to say 100k for a family then i would get on board a mixed housing plan
The lesson in that was that the housing needs to be mixed and infrastructure needs to come with it. It’s not that hard, Austria and Finland does this perfectly https://youtu.be/d6DBKoWbtjE
All of these points basically boil down to uneducated, unskilled and poor people being thrown together with nothing to do. This will make any cheap housing scheme fail. That’s why cheap apartments never work.
Just don’t put them all in a single pile with no access to amenities, transport or shops.
The problem wasn’t that they were apartments, it’s that they were isolated apartments and *nothing* else causing the local teenagers end up feral.
The shortage of flats in this country is not primarily due to Ballymun. The main reason is semi-Ds are cheaper to build