City centre 'not meeting full potential':Upstairs space is untapped resource

FOR generations, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker ran their businesses on city and town streets, and then they went home, up the stairs, to where they lived ‘above the shop’.

While their shops remained in the city, the owners and their families gradually moved out, the upper floors in towns and cities now filled with stock, or empty and in disrepair.

Empty upper-floor units in Cork City centre are not a new issue. In 1994, an action plan published by Cork Corporation (now Cork City Council) cited upper-floor vacancy as a “serious problem”, with some floors having “not been used for decades, since owners who lived above their shop moved to the suburbs”.

Today, Cork City Council’s newest Development Plan for 2022-2028 shows that upper floors are still “often lying vacant”, and that the city centre is “not meeting its full potential” as a place not only where people can work and socialise, but also live. A capacity study of Cork city published in February found that underutilised sites in the city centre could be developed into 487 housing units.

So why are so many ‘above the shop’ spaces still empty?

It isn’t for lack of demand for housing. Daft’s rental report for the second quarter of 2022 highlighted a 97% reduction in the availability of rental homes across the country in the last decade, while rents soar by 12% year on year.

At time of writing, there are only 14 rental properties advertised on Daft in Cork city centre, with single-digit numbers available in some towns.

According to the Housing Agency’s 2021 summary, there were 6,738 households on the waiting list for social housing in Cork city and county.

Additionally, Cork city will have to deliver housing for 6,250 people every year for the next 20 years to meet projected population growth.

SCHEMES AND INCENTIVES

A number of schemes are available to property owners through both Cork councils, to incentivise renovation of upper-floor ‘above the shop’ spaces into accommodation, most notably the Repair and Lease Scheme.

Both Cork City and County Councils offer up to €60,000 upfront to property owners to refurbish vacant ‘above the shop’ units. The value of repairs is then offset against agreed rent in a long-term lease with the council, who will use the property for social housing.

However, as reported by this paper in June, there has been a disappointing uptake of the scheme by Cork property owners.

Independent Cork County councillor Ben Dalton O’Sullivan proposed a motion in June for the council to further promote the Repair and Lease Scheme.

“When you go into county towns like Midleton, Youghal, or Carrigaline and you look up above the shops, there’s buckets of empty spaces,” Mr Dalton O’Sullivan said.

“If you take one small walk around Cork City and look up, the amount of empty floors above the shops is unbelievable,” he told The Echo.

“I would say 70% of the problem is awareness,” he added, as he continues to call for greater promotion of the scheme to property owners.

Green Party city councillor Dan Boyle said that successive schemes haven’t taken off because they haven’t lasted long enough or haven’t offered enough of an incentive.

“There’s been a number of schemes since the 1990s, and while there’s an initial good take-up, these sorts of schemes have a limited timeframe, and they’ve never really been refined enough to see how they work better, on a more long-term basis,” Mr Boyle said.

“I think they’re too unambitious in what they’re doing. They’re there to give a policy response to something that needs to be done, but not being backed up with sufficient resources to allow them to gain critical mass,” he said.

INERTIA

John Murray, director of Sherry Fitzgerald Lettings in Cork, said that the problem is the inertia of the shop owners that have upstairs space.

“A shopkeeper might be operating fine using rooms upstairs for storage or maybe as an office, and too busy working seven days a week to take the opportunity to sit back and think, ‘Okay, I could do it’…. Maybe they need someone to present it to them that a one-bed apartment in Cork City centre is going to make anything from €1,000 to €1,500 a month, and that store room that’s never used could be converted and bring you a rental income,” Mr Murray said.

While every property refurbishment project is different, Mr Murray estimates that converting upper floors into rented accommodation could make a return in as little as three to five years, and with funding of up to €60,000 available through the Repair and Lease Scheme, there’s “no reason” not to redevelop above the shop.

“I would love to see every shop and pub that’s wasting space upstairs storing boxes and rubbish that they’ve kept for 20 years moving it out, redeveloping, and renting out,” he said, adding that agents such as Sherry Fitzgerald are equipped to handle every step of the process on property owners’ behalf, from renovations to managing tenancies.

FIRE SAFETY AND BUILDING REGULATIONS

Conforming to building refurbishment regulations when dealing with old buildings, many without a separate entrance to ‘above the shop’ accommodation, can prove difficult and expensive.

Robin Knox, a fire-and-building regulations consultant who has worked on many heritage projects in Cork, said that trying to meet strict regulations when renovating an older building can be a “major stumbling block” for ‘above the shop’ living.

“Living over the shop has been around for centuries without any problem at all… and we never did have the advantages of emergency lighting, or fire-alarm systems,” he said.

Mr Knox said that for protected or listed structures, of which there are many in Cork City, there is an acceptance that the structure cannot be altered to meet every modern regulation, and that compensatory measures can be used to bring that building back into use.

However, for older buildings that don’t quite meet the threshold of protected or listed, ‘above the shop’ renovations can be prevented by overly prescriptive regulations.

Mr Knox said that focusing regulation on making a building reasonably safe by using modern technology could be a solution to the regulatory stumbling block.

“A lot of modern advances can be put to good use to improve the standard of accommodation in these over-the-shop situations. No building is 100% safe, but one can make those building safe, or as safe as practically possible,” he said.

MAKING IT WORK: FENN'S QUAY

HERITAGE conservation specialist Chris Southgate was amongst the team involved in restoring a row of 18th century buildings on Fenn’s Quay in the 1990s, along with Jack Coughlan Associates and Horgan Lynch Consulting Engineers, funded by the city council (at the time Cork Corporation).

Restoration of the derelict properties was to act as a demonstration project for how “live above the shop” refurbishments could be successful, and provide best practice guidance.

Mr Southgate said that in many ways the project was a success, and provides an example of ways to make a refurbishment workable in the face of building and fire regulations.

“Our modern building regulations are fantastic for providing good quality buildings, but the problem is that they become quite complicated. It can be quite overwhelming for a trading business who are not property specialists, so the Fenn’s Quay project tried to simplify and guide on these matters,” he said. Units on Fenn’s Quay, rather than being split up into multiple apartments stacked on top of each other, comprise larger units with multiple floors. This removed complication of fire safety requirements for multiple units, and creates homes with enough space for families.

“For older buildings, a single unit over a shop is possibly the way to think. Plus it’s more likely to suit a larger family group, in the future once the city becomes more sustainable as a place to live in,” he said.

He also suggested incentives could be used to encourage development, such as rate reductions for downstairs retailers who co-operate to provide a separate entrance to upstairs units, or even the removal of VAT for building projects that would renovate vacant upper floors.

However, Mr Southgate said that there is no one simple solution to making “above the shop” living work, as evidenced by the fact upper vacancy is a “major problem” faced nationally, and not just in Cork.

He said, rather, there is a whole recipe of ingredients that need to come together, emphasising that the recipe includes a focus on improving the public realm outside the door of “above the shop” homes in urban centres, to make them great places to live.

“It’s a mixture of various aspects, like ingredients of a cake, which are to do with the help to overcome difficult [building] obstacles, but also improvement works in the entire public realm, that made the city feel like feel like a space that’s pleasant for people to live in,” he said.