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SHARPER WATER’s EDGE

dublin’s formerly derelict docklands district has sprung to life halfway through a 15-year redevelopment project

By Curt Hazlett

When the city of Dublin opened a new footbridge over the River Liffey in 2005, officials named it after Sean O’Casey, whose plays depict life as it was in Dublin’s squalid, working-class tenements. But neither “squalid” nor “working class” are words that the area brings to mind today.

The bridge is in the Docklands, a low-lying area on both sides of the Liffey that once was home to a gasworks, some fertilizer plants and countless warehouses. It was here that generations of poor Dubliners lived until city slum-clearing programs moved thousands of them to the suburbs. By the 1990s the Docklands, its population just half of what it was at the turn of the century, was pocked with empty lots and derelict buildings.

O’Casey wouldn’t recognize the Docklands now. It is halfway through an audacious 15-year redevelopment program that aims to create a “world-class city quarter” with 11,000 new homes, retail and office space and cultural amenities. This is an undertaking that squares well with Dublin’s new image as a young, vital and increasingly affluent European city, and it appears to be succeeding.

Like Ireland itself, Dublin is in the midst of a rebirth. Smart national economic policies have spurred the creation of jobs, especially in technology, and the impact on places like Dublin has been remarkable. “There is a lot of spending going on,” said Cormac Kennedy, director over retail in the Dublin office of CB Richard Ellis. “We have reasonably low interest rates and a reasonably low tax rate, a very large middle class, and people are generally well paid. All of that is feeding into the economy. It’s all good.”

The idea of revitalizing the Docklands was first floated in the 1980s, but it was not until 1997 that the first real step was taken, through the creation of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority. The DDDA created a 1,300-acre development zone that follows the Liffey from the eastern edge of the city center to the Irish Sea, two miles away. The rebuilding began in earnest after the government granted financial institutions the same 10 percent corporate tax rate offered to the manufacturing and service industries. Encouraged, these financial institutions began to locate in the Docklands, and the new jobs helped jump-start residential construction.

These days streets that had been desolate and even dangerous are lined with low-rise office buildings and apartment buildings, many of them facing the river or several canals leading to it. “In broad terms the project has been very successful,” said Lorcan Sirr, who teaches in the Department of Real Estate at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Sirr credits the appropriate use of retail for part of that success. The Docklands project does not include a regional mall or even a big-box component. “Where there is retail it’s mostly on the ground floor,” said Sirr. Store sizes are typically 60 to 120 square meters (650 to 1,300 square feet).

“What they are trying to do is create a community,” Sirr said. The planners “wanted retail that would last for the weekend as well. For that, you need news agents, coffee shops, bagel houses, restaurants. There are a lot of apartments, and the retail is designed for them. The retail has really brought life to the area.”

Kennedy agrees that small, street-level retail is the key to the area’s vitality, though “the retail is a minor component of the overall scheme.”

Still, there are some large retail elements in the new Docklands. One such is Custom House Quay, or CHQ, a warehouse on the north side of the Liffey recently renovated at a cost of €50 million ($66 million). Irish home goods retailer Meadows & Byrne recently agreed to anchor CHQ.

The most ambitious retail element is in the planning for North Wall Quay, just east of CHQ. The Point Village project, planned by developer Harry Crosbie, will feature a 250,000-square-foot shopping center, a hotel and 140,000 square feet of offices on 12 acres.

In the fast-developing Grand Canal Dock area, on the south side of the Liffey, plans call for the construction of U2 Tower, a 30-story building that will house the recording studios of the world-renowned Irish band when it is completed in 2008. It will be Ireland’s tallest building, as befits the world’s highest-earning rock musicians.

In all, about 130,000 square feet of retail opened in the Docklands in 2004 and 2005, and about 19,000 square feet of space was added in 2006, according to the DDDA. Together with previously opened shops, “that is a reasonable amount of retail space,” said Kennedy. Yet even this does not seem to have had much impact on retailing in Dublin’s city center or in the region, he says. “It’s come in a number of steps, so its impact is smaller than if it were all built on day one,” he said.

Even if it had been finished all at once, the Irish retail market has been so strong that it might not have mattered. In contrast with struggling retail sales elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s rose 5.7 percent year on year in 2005. That strength continued into 2006. In October, the latest month for which figures are available, sales rose 9.2 percent year on year.

The strength has been reflected in both High Street shops and Irish shopping centers. Cushman & Wakefield ranked Dublin’s Grafton Street the sixth most expensive shopping street in the world in 2006, for instance, with rents averaging $534 per square foot in June. (The ranking was unchanged from a year earlier.) And CB Richard Ellis noted in its Irish retail market report for the third quarter 2006 that the amount of space in retail parks — groupings of freestanding superstores — rose from 1.9 million square feet in 2001 to 8.6 million square feet in 2006.

Adding to that has been the growth in shopping centers; there now are 147 of them across the country, the report says.

Given Ireland’s economic vigor, it is perhaps unsurprising that a crumbling neighborhood on the edge of the capital city would someday spring back to life. It has been much the same story in Washington, D.C., where decaying areas near the Capitol have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence — aided in part by ongoing financial breaks in the form of tax increment financing.

What is perhaps surprising is that Dublin’s rebirth has been accomplished mostly with private capital. Sirr says the only incentives came at the beginning of the project. Since then, developers like Treasury Holdings Group, one of Ireland’s largest property companies, have undertaken the risk. Treasury Holdings has invested heavily in the Docklands, including a mixed-use project at Spencer Dock.

Sirr says the Docklands project has had a few drawbacks. City planners failed to improve public transit before construction began, for one thing. And too many of the new buildings look alike. That will change with the construction of the U2 Tower and a conference center designed by noted architect Kevin Lynch.

“Most cities, when they reach a plateau of achievement, want trophy buildings,” Sirr said. “We’ve been around a long time, but we haven’t reached that plateau yet. But we will shortly.”