State must start building to relieve housing crisis

A key issue for our economy for the next decade is that of housing. There are reportedly 7,000 homeless people on our streets and there are tens of thousands of others living in highly expensive glorified squats.

Back in the 1990s, when apartment block after apartment block was being built on Dublin’s quays and elsewhere around the country, many of us felt that government policy towards housing had changed. It was allegedly to address a housing demand but our prior experience with living in multi-story apartment buildings had been abysmal failures. The flats in Ballymun, north Dublin, were a case in point.

From being a nation of wannabe house owners, with 20- and — more recently — 30-year mortgages around our necks, someone had decided that we were now going to move into multi-storey apartments, many without any proper kitchen, with no gardens or even without any recreational areas nearby.

Perhaps they thought that just because they were being built close to city centre locations they would solve the problem. It was clear that something had changed. That was particularly so when it was said of many of these apartments that one could not swing a proverbial cat. They were not designed for families, in a very family-oriented country. It was as if our politicians and decision makers had ceased to care.

Gradually government had stopped building social housing. It instead was focusing more and more on having the private sector make up the shortfall.

Government introduced a requirement that a certain percentage would have to be social housing. It was a silly effort at social engineering and doomed to failure.

Once government accepted money instead of ensuring that social housing was part of the development, the writing for what is happening today was writ large. The private sector has no interest in solving the social housing crisis now or ever. There is nothing in it for them. If government goes back to making it attractive for the private sector, we will very quickly change the economic cycle for the worst.

Instead, government will just have to roll up its proverbial sleeves and started building itself again.