Grace Scott (top) in an original ‘crying chair’
Staying in Tonight?
At 9.35pm on RTÉ One.
Our Lives in Property: Oxmantown Road.
A documentary about the property market as experienced by residents of Oxmantown Road in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7.
Gareth Naughton, of RTE, writes:
This is a street where five years ago you could buy a house for €140,000 but where prices now regularly top out at or around €400,000. At the height of the boom in 2006, asking prices rose as high as €423,000
The first house offered for sale on Oxmantown Road sold in 1961 for £800 – about twice the average industrial wage. To buy a home on the street now requires almost ten times the average industrial wage.
For renters, the situation is just as bad with average rents rising from €950 monthly in 2010 to around €1,700 a month this year.
The documentary hears from people from all walks of life including Grace Scott (92) who has been living on Oxmantown Road as a renter for 88 years.
Above she talks about missing out on a bargain as her mother, and subsequently herself, chose not to buy their home even as they saw prices rise.
Related: I called it a ‘fixer-upper’ when I knew it was a ‘falling-downer’ (Conor Pope, The Irish Times)