Property addiction is blinding us to reality

YOUR editorial (April 15) on ghost estates continues the “build it and they will come” mentality of the housing boom.

Despite the property bust, the Irish addiction to houses is still clouding our judgment and preventing us from seeing reality.

In the same edition, you report there are more than 300,000 empty houses in the country.

Presumably these are completed houses, so how many more unfinished ones are there?

Using completed houses to fill the waiting lists still leaves more than 200,000 of them, and that is before we count the unfinished ones.

Your report says we don’t know where these houses are or whether they are houses, holiday homes or apartments. For example, would anyone on a waiting list in Dublin accept an apartment in Leitrim?

How does it make sense to pay builders to finish houses that won’t be lived in? Who is going to pay their wages and buy the building materials? And when all the houses are finished, what will these builders do then?

Like an alcoholic admitting he has a drink problem, we have to stop the denials, accept reality and admit we built too many houses resulting in some housing estates which will never be occupied.

They are either in the wrong place, have no shops or schools, are in a flood plain, too far from employment, or poorly constructed.

More houses won’t help our national recovery, but continues the addiction of building them here, there and everywhere without any logical pattern or planning, or the infrastructure for viable communities.

We should bulldoze those estates that have no realistic future and instead focus what meagre money we have left on infrastructure that can improve our quality of life and support the creation and maintenance of sustainable jobs that provide exportable products and services.

Another empty house adds no quality of life, no job after it is built, and you can’t even export it to get rid of it.

Jason FitzHarris

Rivervalley

Swords

Co Dublin