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A vacant site in the Shankill area of Belfast. Photo from Flávia Gouveia
NORTHERN Ireland is in the grip of a housing crisis caused by years of constrained supply, yet Stormont departments are sitting on hundreds of acres of unused land and vacant buildings.
While the housing waiting list grows year on year, with more and more families facing the prospect of homelessness, Stormont spends millions on land it can’t seem to find a use for.
Almost 1,000 acres - costing the public purse £6.4m since 2019 - sit waiting to be put to use.
It would be unrealistic to suggest that every single acre could be converted into new homes - the nuclear bunker in Ballymena, Co Antrim, that the Executive maintains certainly wouldn’t make an inviting home for a family.
But a significant proportion could be used for housing developments, and it simply isn’t.
Community groups in Belfast have for years campaigned for publicly owned land to be released for redevelopment.
The Participation and the Practice of Human Rights NGO (PPR) has been battling for the former site of the James Mackie and Sons foundry and factory in west Belfast to be used for social housing development for a number of years.
The land is owned by the Department for Communities (DfC), and while parts of the site have been sold, 25 acres are vacant.
Last year, PPR revealed plans for 900 homes to be built on the plot which is located in an area of acute housing need.
But despite DfC saying that it had agreed to transfer the site to Belfast City Council there have been no assurances that it will be used for social housing.
Down the road, the BUILD Shankill community group has been campaigning for government bodies to release tens of publicly-owned parcels of land for development.
BUILD have identified more than 80 derelict sites in the greater Shankill area, around half owned by government bodies - including DfC and Northern Ireland Housing Executive.
Flávia Gouveia on the north's housing crisis
But despite campaigns calling for the land to be redeveloped or released to private developers, several sites continue to sit empty.
Instead of putting derelict and vacant land to use, the government departments in question seem ambivalent, while communities are left with a lack of transparency and surrounded by dereliction.
The solution to the housing crisis is not a straightforward one, but it will inevitably involve improving supply - which means building more homes, and that requires land.
It is therefore incomprehensible that the department responsible for housing policy chooses instead to spend millions essentially keeping land and buildings unused.
In many ways this is yet another issue characteristic of the dysfunction of our politics where the most vulnerable suffer at the hands of inaction.
The existing framework urging departments to deal with surplus assets has had limited success to date, and while efforts to centralise this data is underway it will mean little without a policy commitment to use these assets for housing where appropriate.
Flávia Gouveia is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Belfast Telegraph, BBC News NI, The Detail and ViewDigital @flaviasgouveia