Government plans for investment in social housing have been criticised as insufficient to meet needs.
Speaking to LookLeft, Dr Rory Hearne of NUI Maynooth said that the increase in the social housing budget “is a drop in the ocean in comparison to what’s needed”.
The capital budget for social housing will increase from €250 million to €600 million over three years, but according to Dr. Hearne, this is well below what is needed to meet demand:
“The Government has said that there’s going to be 10,000 additional social housing units delivered over the next 3 years. There’s 90,000 on the housing waiting list. It would take them 27 years, at that rate, to meet the housing need that is there. This is not a big stimulus, this is a drop in the ocean in comparison to what’s needed.”
John Bissett, an activist with Housing Action Now, agrees that the planned investment is too small and points out that actual housing need is far greater than suggested by the waiting list. He raised further questions over the role of housing associations in management of new stock.
“In Holland, the voluntary housing because they’d over-extended themselves. Here, the State used to loan money to the voluntary housing sector, but now they’re effectively being told to borrow and build. So they are almost becoming private landlords, and will consequently be in big trouble if they have a problem with rents.”
Part of the scheme will involve Public-Private Partnerships, where local authorities will tender out to consortia to develop on local authority-owned land, where private developers will build a mixture of public and private rented housing. As the private accommodation will be the developers’ source of profit, this will likely have a very high rent.
According to Dr. Hearne: “The question is why doesn’t the Government use the Housing Finance Agency or the Strategic Investment Fund to build on this land? It could build social and private housing whereby the income from the private rent could provide an income back to the Government which could be used to invest in further social housing.”
More broadly, Government policy on housing must be rethought, with a focus on providing housing for a broader case. Bissett believes that Government policy remains stuck in the market model that drove the housing bubble.
“Nothing seems to have changed since the crash, we’re back to the same process of house prices and rents going up again. Has the State done anything to bridge the supply side? No. Will 2,500 units a year do that? No. So there will continue to be a shortage of accommodation in Dublin.
“We need a substantial investment in housing stock, but the will is not there, because they believe that ‘the market knows best’.”
Dr Hearne says: “We need to make social housing available to 30-40% of the population. A combination of rent controls on private housing and social housing would mean that social housing was not ghettoised and would not have the concentration of poverty and resultant issues for communities, and would not result in massive spatial inequalities. The Government does not see social housing as something that should be widely available and that comes back to the role of the State in redistribution, the question of should housing be a commodity or be a right.”
