Housing crisis - Radical ideas needed to break cycle

YESTERDAY, as a disheartening number of newly elected and re-elected Dáil deputies indulged in parlour games, something like a cross between blind man’s bluff and a high-jinks round of charades, the real world trundled along showing that we still struggle to learn from history or find the courage to confront the fundamental issues shaping this society in the most destructive way.

Just a day before Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil politicians tried, again, to patronise and, yes, cheat us by insisting that the integrity of their generations-old quarrel outweighed their duty to build a future for this country, the ESRI signalled that it’s business as usual for young families with ordinary or even decent incomes.

The ESRI predicted that many young, and maybe not so young, people working in cities, already struggling with inter-generational inequities, are condemned to try to find homes in remote commuter belts.

Soaring house prices, rents, and a market-shaping shortage of new houses are driving this spirit-draining, energy-sapping, family-separating, community-killing curse.

This is social and political failure on a grand scale. Living in a commuter belt or a dormitory town imposes huge costs — financial, physical, emotional — and is one of the consequences of living in an urbanised world.

Like private health insurance, being exiled to a commuter belt is, in reality, a supertax imposed on those so condemned because of continual public policy failures.

It is recklessly bizarre that at the very point we should change destructive habits to try to cut carbon emissions, this daily migration adds greatly to the demand for transport contributing dangerously to climate change. But what to do?

Some options seem obvious even if they challenge long and dearly held beliefs.

It seems reasonable to suggest that, unless we want Dublin to be like London where the exodus of anyone who can’t afford a multimillion but pretty basic home has been described as “ethnic cleansing”, something has to give.

Rather than faff around cutting USC, the next government should review, with the objective of cutting them substantially, all State-imposed costs on new housing development.

On the other side of the coin, anyone hoarding building land, including the State, must face a meaningful use-it-or-lose-it timetable.

Ways must be found to end the cherry picking by developers that seems to dissuade them from building houses they imagine less than profitable.

The banks’ role in all of this, as both lender to the developer and their eventual customer, might also be reviewed.

Decentralisation, public and private, has a role to play. The ECB cut its main interest rate to zero yesterday and the CSO recorded that the economy grew by 7.8% last year, outstripping all other eurozone countries so market conditions seem set fair.

Of course this is not a new crisis. More than 40 years ago — in 1973 — the Kenny Report addressed these very issues. Those admirable recommendations were ignored and the issues eat at every generation.

How can this be, one might ask. Unfortunately the answer is all too obvious if you look at the vainglorious and sterile posturing that passed for parliamentary democracy in Leinster House yesterday.