Social housing - NAMA plan might help ease crisis

Despite the Government spending over €4.7 billion on social housing during the past five years, the number of families and individuals on the housing lists have increased dramatically.

The lists jumped by more than 28% since 2008, but government funding to local authorities is only a fraction of what it was at the height of the boom.

There was a splurge of spending on new and second-hand houses in 2006 and 2007 when property prices were at their highest and the demand for such houses was at it lowest. Some €930m was spent on local authority housing in 2007, but the expenditure was cut to €670m last year, and is at €390m this year.

More than €1bn was spent on public housing in Dublin during the past five years, but the area still has the greatest need for social housing. Waiting lists for the four local authorities in Dublin more than doubled from under 12,000 to over 25,000 in the period.

When audited, a third of social housing projects were over budget, so in recent years local authorities have divert from their own building programmes to buying property in new developments instead. The amount spent on local authority house-building projects declined by almost a quarter between 2004 and last year.

There are 79,337 families or individuals on the waiting lists for social housing throughout the country. This was up from 43,000 in 2005. The estimated cost of building 80,000 houses is about €12bn.

This amount of money is not available. Environment Minister John Gormley warned that the focus on buying and building units would have to turn to “the more flexible approach” of long-term leasing.

It seems incongruous that there are at least 5,600 empty council houses nationwide. Most of those houses are either unfinished or in need of repair, but almost 95% of the 419 unoccupied houses in Limerick city are boarded up awaiting demolition in areas designated for regeneration.

With so many construction workers unemployed, it would make real sense if the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) would adopt some imaginative thinking to develop a social approach that would allow local authorities to take over unfinished estates and complete them. Such projects could be finishing by employing those drawing unemployment assistance.

This could help rescue the country from at least some aspects of the crazy speculation of recent years.