HOUSE Programme (Homes On Upper Spaces for Everyone)

The Belfast Agenda - Belfast’s community plan - is a shared strategic document that sets out an agreed vision and big ambitions for the city by 2035. Developed in collaboration with residents, businesses and community planning partners, it recognises the importance of creating a more vibrant, more inclusive, and more liveable city. These are essential for enhancing quality of life and economic prosperity. Therefore addressing housing need and driving forward housing led regeneration is a key priority.

Our Place

Under the theme of 'our place', community planning partners have agreed several ambitious targets for the city centre and housing:

• Increase the city centre housing supply to 8,000 by 2035 in order to meet population growth projections
• Increase housing supply across all tenures
• Deliver 745 retrofit homes.

Unlike many other cities of a similar size, the residential population of Belfast city centre is low. The relocation of the Ulster University to the north of the city centre and growth in purpose-built managed student accommodation is helping to address this, however, to achieve real vibrancy, it will be important to diversify the mix of people living in the city centre including families, elderly and professionals etc…

Whilst our housing targets primarily focus on new builds, it is critical that we strike a balance between investment in new stock with maintenance of existing homes whilst identifying the potential to create new homes from redundant spaces.

In addition, as part of a wider programme to address vacancy within the city centre, we are exploring a potential delivery approach for reactivating unused spaces on upper floors for residential use. These vacant spaces could have been used as commercial, retail or residential in their former use.

H.O.U.S.E. Programme - Homes On Upper Spaces for Everyone

We are appealing for information from property owners, owner occupiers, investors and developers who have unused spaces on upper floors within the city centre.

We would like to determine the level of interest to bring forward current vacant upper floor spaces for residential use and understand the enablers required to do this. It is also important to identify the main challenges that need to be considered and potential delivery methods required to overcome these challenges.

Please fill in and submit the Expression of Interest form by Friday 25 October 2024.

If you have interest in more than one property, please complete a separate form for each.

*Please note that this is a request for information and there is no capital allocation to this programme at this time.