Nama’s 20,000 opportunities - An answer to housing crisis?

Nama announced yesterday that it has identified sites linked to its debtors where 25,000 housing units might be built.

The agency also said funding is in place to deliver 4,500 houses and apartments in Dublin over the next 18 months. That, however, does not mean they will be delivered. Even if they are, and let us hope they will be, that leaves over 20,000 opportunities unresolved at a time when a housing crisis is driving a new property bubble in our capital.

As a society we seem to lack ambition and urgency around the delivery of essential infrastructure — a national children’s hospital, broadband services to every community, the Corrib gasline or, say, a new deep-water facility in Cork Port. Is it inefficiency, laziness or smugness that encourages this it’ll-do-next-year negativity? Whatever it is, we can no longer afford it. Report after report, some several years old, warned of the housing crisis now facing thousands of citizens yet our response has been far too slow.