Handing over 57 affordable houses to the Cluid would be an act of “stupidity” by the Galway City Council, which should follow Dublin’s lead and introduce a rent to buy Scheme instead.
This is the view of Independent councillor Catherine Connolly who said such a proposal is will not solve the problem of more than 3,000 households on the housing waiting list.
Cllr Connolly said the current number of empty affordable houses is “unacceptable”, but she argues they should not be handed over to a voluntary body for five years, given the possibility of“dubious protection for tenants”, “no option to buy”, and that doing this would produce no rent/income for the city council.
Cllr Connolly said now that Dublin City Council is going to dispose of its empty affordable houses by way of a rent to buy scheme there is “no obstacle” to Galway doing the same thing.
Labour councillor Niall McNelis has also called on City Hall to introduce a rent-to-buy scheme similar to the one in Dublin. He said such a scheme would need to done in a structured way, backed up by “hard data on property values and house prices”.
“Buyers will only look at purchasing home if they have confidence in the market,” he said. “That confidence can only be created by access to accurate and reliable data and this can only come about by the creation of a national house price database.”
