Google to donate 46 apartments to house local public service workers

Google will donate 46 apartments in its huge Bolands Mill redevelopment to local public service workers, such as nurses and teachers, who will avail of rental rates below their market value for fixed terms. Google says it's doing this as a gesture to the local community in recognition of its 17 years there.

Sundar Pichai told The Independent newspaper a while back that the technology giant was willing to subsidize the local housing sector.

"It's something we would think about doing over time," Pichai said. "It makes sense for us as a company to do it and it's also the right thing to do."

Pichai added that housing is one of the issues “we care about.” "I think we are in the early stages here. I think being part of Dublin, for us, means it's important that we get our development right in a way that works for the community."

Like other hubs elsewhere in the world, Dublin’s tech boom is having an impact on the local real estate market.

Tech workers who gain on average around €100,000 a year are putting property prices out of budget for the rest of the population.

In the U.S., Google is already spending some $1 billion for community housing in San Francisco to help reduce the city’s spiralling housing costs.

Pichai said that his company wants to “engage with the community” and “do what is right.”

"If you look at Silicon Valley in the past, specifically companies like Hewlett Packard and it's founders, they invested a lot in the communities around them. And so I think that's what led to much of the sustainable development back then. We've gone through a few years of hyper growth. Maybe that sees things fall behind. So I think it has to go hand in hand."

In news this week, Google said that it will donate 46 apartments in its huge Bolands Mill redevelopment to local public service workers, such as nurses and teachers, who will avail of rental rates below their market value for fixed terms.

Google says it's doing this as a gesture to the local community in recognition of its 17 years there. In that time, an apartment in the Barrow Street area has tripled in rental value, pricing most local non-tech workers out of the district they may have grown up in.

So Google hopes that its move will be a small step in helping some of those people to live and work in the area.

It's not a new idea to Google, or to trillion-dollar tech firms in general. In the San Francisco area, Google, Facebook and Apple have pledged $4.5bn towards general housing stock because of the acute problems there, some of which is caused by their success. Monthly rents for one-bedroom apartments regularly exceed $4,000, thanks to hundreds of thousands of richly-paid staff.

Despite some easing off during the pandemic, rents in Dublin have proven to be surprisingly resilient. An average-sized two-bedroom (one bathroom) apartment on Pearse Street goes for €3,000 per month, or €36,000 per year, according to listings on Daft.ie. This is despite all of the talk about permanent work-from-home initiatives from Google, Facebook and others in the area. Living in the south inner city is, and will probably always be, in premium demand.

A large part of that is Google and Facebook, the anchor corporate tenants in the docklands area. They employ over 10,000 (very) well paid people there. As a direct result, half the incoming tech multinationals to Dublin want to be within a few kilometres of this square mile; to poach staff from those two giants and to give those poached staff continuity in the part of the city they have grown used to.

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