Renua: Pre-fabs will lead to slums
Party leader Lucinda Creighton said “ghettoes and slums” would be the result of the policy as she called for a range of Government deals with developers to push house building.
Modular homes have been touted by the Government as a way to ease the housing shortage, but Renua believes some political parties want to keep people who have experiences housing difficulties in specific localities to gain electoral advantage.
Ms Creighton said the country needed to see 27,000 new homes a year to try and head-off a crisis, rather than the 10,000 being built this year. The former minister said private-public partnerships should be harnessed to provide the €2bn a year it would take to reverse the housing shortage.
Ms Creighton said pension funds and private investors would be keen to get involved if they were offered a long- term gain.
“What we are proposing is radical and entirely different to any other party, it is a model that works all over the world,” Ms Creighton said.
Ms Creighton also called for Nama to be forced to release more of its assets for housing as she said the agency controlled up to 10,000 dwelling units. She said 16,000 apartments and 8,000 houses remained vacant in Dublin.
Ms Creighton said private-public partnerships in housing would lead to more balanced developments and the provision of such homes would help keep rents down which in turn would ease the cost of welfare payments.
The Coalition has been accused of not addressing the problems with enough urgency, but ministers have hit back saying plans to end the housing crisis by 2020 with a major house building scheme will transform the situation.
