DUBLIN — James Joyce famously left his native Dublin at the age of 22 and then spent the rest of his life writing about the city, sending characters to wander its slums, back streets and faded 18th-century grandeur.

A century before search engines and online street views, the exiled Joyce would bombard Dublin-based friends with postcards and letters, checking every detail of the city’s micro-geography, every shop front and street number. Not long before his death in Zurich in 1941, he was asked whether he would ever go back to Dublin. His reply: “Have I ever left it?”

But if Joyce died in love with Dublin, does Dublin still love Joyce? Last month, despite vigorous opposition from prominent writers, artists, academics and heritage groups, Ireland’s planning authority approved a proposal to convert one of Dublin’s most iconic Joycean landmarks into a tourist hostel, dashing hopes that it could be preserved as a museum and cultural space.

18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher’s Island was the setting for “The Dead,” the final story in Joyce’s collection “Dubliners,” often cited as the greatest short story written in English. It is certainly more accessible to general readers than Joyce’s great trio of modernist novels — “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake.”

the detailed decision on its website. An agent for the two developers, Fergus McCabe and Brian Stynes, said they had no comment beyond what was stated in their planning application.

For many Dubliners, the decision to redevelop the literary landmark is symptomatic of a wider erasure of the city’s street life and townscape by commercial development.

report last month showed that Dublin was the fifth most expensive city to rent a home in Europe. Even Paris is cheaper.

Una Mullally, a columnist who champions Dublin’s lively but embattled cultural fringe in the Irish Times newspaper, said the de facto government policy was “to offer cookie-cutter entertainment and hospitality for tourists and people who live in the suburbs, and high rents for landlords that make it impossible for creative people, or even people with ordinary jobs, to live or create in the city.”

Yet in doing so, she said, it was destroying the city the tourists came to see.

Joyce himself has long been used to promote Irish tourism, at the head of a pantheon of great Irish writers. Every year, encouraged by state and city tourism organizations, a swelling army of Joyce fans travel to Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday, the anniversary of June 16, 1904, when the story of “Ulysses” unfolds. Joyce remarked that if his Dublin were destroyed, it would be possible to recreate it from the details in his novel.