Tenants in older properties in Pulrose will not be forced to move out while upgrades are carried out to their houses.
Some 22 of the older local authority houses in Pulrose’s Outer Ring will not now be upgraded as planned.
Councillor David Ashford ,who is chairman of housing and property committee, said the work involved upgrading the kitchen, replacing doors and moving downstairs bathrooms from the ground floor to occupy the third bedroom on the first floor, effectively turning the houses from three bedroom to two bedroom properties.
‘When the work was first proposed all the tenants were written to and a number came back to us and said they did not want the work doing,’ he said.
He said the houses would need to have been vacated while the work was done and a few of those tenants who needed three bedrooms would have needed to move permanently. In some other cases tenants had carried out their own upgrades, which it would be pointless to destroy, and in a few instances tenants needed to retain a ground floor bathroom and toilet. Some of the longest-standing residents had lived there since the early 1970s, he said.