The advertising catalog promised a new residential development, with a creche, tennis court and a mini golf course, minutes from the bustling center of the Irish town of Longford.
But as the leaking sewerage, pot-holed roads, lack of street lights and abandoned half-built houses around his home testify, the Silver Birches estate is far from what karate teacher John Killane had hoped for his family.
Wiring and abandoned building materials are scattered across the site making the grounds a dangerous playground for his children. Some of his neighbors also complain of rats coming to a nearby pool.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He and his wife say that with the developer in liquidation and with property prices slumping, there is little they can do but wait for help from the local council.
“This, which is a family home, is now slowly but surely turning into a derelict,” the 45-year-old Killane said. “If I were to try and sell my house right now, I’d say I would be laughed off the face of the earth.”
With more than half of its 50 houses empty or unfinished, Silver Birches has been dubbed a “ghost estate” — one of 620 residential developments around Ireland that are a haunting legacy of the former Celtic Tiger’s property boom and bust.
After two years of austerity, Ireland still faces a slow climb out of recession as it tries to deal with the fallout of a crash that left an estimated oversupply of at least 100,000 housing units as the cost of rescuing its exposed lending sector mounts.
The government set up a “bad bank,” the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), to cleanse commercial banks of shaky property loans worth a nominal 81 billion euros (US$106 billion).
It says the body, which would eventually become the country’s biggest landlord via the non-performing loans it buys, is an essential tool to clean up the stricken housing and banking sectors. It aims to make a profit over its 10-year lifespan.
While NAMA still has to finish transferring the loans and conduct an inventory of properties, it is still unclear if stalled projects can be rescued or what avenues of recompense, if any, may be available to buyers such as Killane. The government is considering options like social housing, but it could also wipe the slate clean and bulldoze some estates.
“The ones closer to Dublin will probably be occupied over the next few years, but I think particularly in some counties far away from Dublin, we’ll see hundreds of units vacant for a long period of time,” said Ciaran Cuffe, a minister of state whose portfolio includes planning, heritage and horticulture.
Ireland enjoyed a decade-long property boom when developers were lured by generous loans from banks to build houses on cheap land to serve a stream of workers who, rather than pay sky-high prices in Dublin, preferred to pay slightly less and commute.
But the 2007 bursting of the bubble plunged Ireland into its worst recession on record, leaving an estimated 300,000 unsold or unfinished residential houses. Cash-strapped developers abandoned projects still in progress, leaving owners of overvalued homes surrounded by bleak, deteriorating sites.
Almost 200,000 homeowners are facing negative equity, when mortgage holders have to pay off loans exceeding the value of their homes, by the end of this year, official figures show.
“I am stuck with a house that nobody would ever consider buying and I will be in debt for the rest of my life,” said one housewife on a “ghost estate,” declining to be identified.
The mother of two said she would be lucky to get 200,000 euros for a home for which she paid 320,000 euros three years ago, but with houses in her isolated complex badly finished, she hardly sees buyers lining up.
“I feel I have been conned,” she said.
With house prices still falling, cut-price house sales are becoming a feature of the severely depressed housing market as more construction companies go into receivership.
The pace of decline in house prices slowed to 1.7 percent in the second quarter, a survey showed on Thursday, while prices have fallen 35 percent since the peak at the end of 2006.
The National Institute for Regional Spatial Analysis, which advises the government, on Thursday called for an independent inquiry into the “catastrophic failure” of the planning system, like the one carried out into Ireland’s banks.
It said planning failures contributed to the property bubble and crisis, with planning driven by demands of developers and speculators, and ambitious localized growth plans, while tax incentives encouraged the excesses.
It said one in six houses in Ireland is now uninhabited for the majority of the year.
A signaling system malfunction disrupted high-speed rail (HSR) services beginning at 8am today, with trains temporarily reduced to three northbound and three southbound trains per hour as authorities conduct inspections. The malfunction occurred on a section of track in Miaoli County during pre-operation checks early this morning, forcing northbound and southbound trains to use a single track, the HSR operator said. The regular schedule has been replaced with three hourly trains offering only nonreserved seating in each direction, stopping at every station, it said, adding that business class cars would still have reserved seating. Departures from terminal stations are scheduled at the top
DRONE CENTRAL: Taiwan aims to become Asia’s democratic hub for drones, with most exports focused on high-quality military-grade models, an official said Taiwan’s drone industry is expected to expand significantly by 2030, producing 100,000 units per month and exporting half of them, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Current drone production capacity is about 15,000 units per month, but the industry can quickly scale up as demand increases, Industrial Development Administration Director-General Chiou Chyou-huey (邱求慧) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s drone output grew 2.5-fold last year to NT$12.9 billion (US$408.3 million) under a government program to develop the uncrewed vehicle sector, he said. The Executive Yuan in October last year approved plans to invest NT$44.2 billion into domestic production of uncrewed aerial
VERBOSE VESSELS: A CGA cutter and a China Coast Guard exchanged verbal barbs for more than a day in Taiwanese-controlled waters before the Chinese vessel left The Taiwanese and Chinese coast guards had a standoff near the strategically located Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the north of the South China Sea, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said yesterday. The two sides engaged in intense radio exchanges over sovereignty claims during the 33-hour standoff. China Coast Guard vessel 3501 eventually left the restricted waters, 26.6 nautical miles (49.2km) west of the Pratas Islands, at 5pm yesterday, the CGA said. Lying approximately between southern Taiwan and Hong Kong, the Taiwan-controlled Pratas are seen by some security experts as vulnerable to Chinese attack due to their distance — more than
WARNING: China should stop engaging in actions that undermine regional peace and stability, as it would only build resentment among people across the Strait, the CGA said China has deployed more than 100 navy, coast guard and other vessels in waters from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea and the western Pacific since US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) met in Beijing, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said yesterday. “In this part of the world, #China is the one & only PROBLEM wrecking the #StatusQuo & threatening regional peace & stability,” Wu wrote on X. In a separate post, he said Beijing was coercing Taiwan’s maritime domain, calling it illegal and provocative, after the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) expelled a
RSS