Stewart Dickson MLA said: “While I welcome the work by the Department for Social Development to regenerate these areas, I am however disappointed that none of these pilots will include any shared housing areas.
“OFMDFM set a target to establish ten shared neighbourhood projects in their shared future strategy ‘Together: Building a United Community’, so it is regrettable that they have not sought to use this housing regeneration programme to meet their own target. This strategy committed the Minister to identify the locations of these ten shared neighbourhoods within three months, yet five months on, not one location has been identified.
“Questions must be asked of the Minister for Social Development’s commitment to shared housing, especially after the plans for the regeneration of the Girdwood Barracks site in North Belfast were described by him as shared but were in actual fact just a further segregation of housing in Northern Ireland.”
ENDS