Housing activists postered dozens of vacant and derelict sites as well as buildings across Cork city to highlight the problem ahead of a ‘walking festival of dereliction’.
As the Irish Examiner reports, by scanning a QR code on the posters it takes you to an open letter to Cork City Council calling for new and urgent measures to end dereliction and for the construction of more public housing.
The campaign is the work of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATAU) — a group set up to represent communities and tenants, including renters, council tenants, mortgage holders and people in emergency and precarious living situations.
The group’s Cork members are also planning a ‘walking festival of dereliction’ later this month, in association with urban designers Jude Sherry and Frank O'Connor, featuring some of the vacant and derelict properties they have featured in a long-running Twitter thread which has helped shine a spotlight on the issue of dereliction and how to tackle it.
👀👀👀👀 make sure to pay attention to derelict buildings as you're walking around Cork City this week. Scan the QR code on the posters and sign our open letter to end dereliction! pic.twitter.com/wMQv2dF0Qv
— CATU Cork (@CatuCork) September 8, 2021
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CATU spokesman in Cork, Ruadh MacCárthaigh, said the poster blitz and ‘walking festival of dereliction’ is part-protest, part-educational.
“We believe that many of the vacant properties are owned by wealthy people who can afford to sit on them, and who are waiting for property values to go up,” he said.
'Use it or lose it' tax proposed
CATU has called for a punitive vacant property tax, to force property owners to “use it or lose it”, and for state intervention in the form of Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO), for those who don’t.
“We think council could CPO these properties and convert them into public housing, and use the vacant property tax to fund those CPOs.”
He was speaking as the National Homeless and Housing Coalition (NHHC) held a protest in Cork city today calling for an end to the housing crisis.
The NHHC is supported by Sinn Féin, People Before Profit, Solidarity, Travellers of North Cork, and CATU Cork.
The NHHC said rents and house prices in Cork are continually increasing.
