Michael Clifford: Co-living is bedsits for the 21st century
Once embedded in the national consciousness co-living will take flight because it will best suit investors and would contribute to tackling the political problem of homeless statistics. Picture: PA
The nuns’ summer house at the end of Ballinskelligs beach was off-limits when I was a kid. It sat on high ground above the beach, two storeys tall, rows of windows with a stone crucifix on the roof.
There was a retaining wall separating the front lawn of the abode from the high tide mark on the shore.
Sneaking up there from the south Kerry beach to get up to some devilment would be to mess around with your chances of making it to the one true kingdom in the afterlife. So I stayed away.
A few years ago, well beyond childhood and the afterlife, I ventured up for a gander. The place was no longer in use and reeked of the past.
The front rooms and kitchen were large communal affairs. Around the side lay a row of windows that looked into little cell-like rooms. In one there was what appeared to be the kind of jug and bowl that was in use in the days before handwash basins.
The nuns had lived like this, their private space confined to the small rooms, and most of their time spent communally with their family of fellow religious.
That was their chosen way of life, sacrificing some creature comforts and human needs or desires.
In today’s parlance those nuns spent their lives co-living.
They did so in worship of a God. In today’s world co-living is threatening to become a way of life for a new cohort.
These new tenants will be living like that because others are in worship of Mammon.
There are currently at least 10 applications for planning permission for developments in Dublin designed for co-living and rumoured plans of at least one for Cork.
Also in Dublin, a student accommodation provider plans to lease 600 bed-spaces in The Point Village, near the 3Arena, to non-students in a move that has been described as “co-living by the back door”.
Many others among the student accommodation developments that have sprung up in Dublin and Cork in recent years will definitely follow.
With the prospect of the lucrative foreign student market now kaput, the obvious move is into co-living.
The concept is opposed by many in politics, the housing sector and among charities and with good reason.
Co-living represents bedsits for the 21st century. Do we as a society really want to turn in that direction in order to sort out a chronic housing crisis?
The co-living dream is promoted as “choice”.
It is cast as a kind of extended college existence for people in their 20s, maybe working in the digital economy.
Everybody under the one roof, socialising, venturing out on the world, having a few beers together, not yet ready to settle down behind the boring closed door of their own home.
You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind will blow on this one.
Once embedded in the national consciousness the concept will take flight and multiply because it will best suit investors and would contribute to tackling the political problem of homeless statistics.
Co-living will be presented as a first option to those entitled to access public housing.
Equally, some senior citizens who are currently accommodated in independent housing units will be told to get real and try out this trendy co-living thing.
Co-living must be seen in the wider context of what this country is facing into.
The smart money says we’re heading for a K-shaped recovery. This effectively means that for some things will get better and probably in a short time.
For others they may well get worse. There will be greater inequality, possibly to the point where the divisions will be unsustainable.
Developers have a key role to play in housing people which in turn is central to the shaping of society. But the idea that they should have the lead role in determining how people live in this respect is long past its sell-by date.
Once upon a time, the current Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien saw all of this.
In July last year, after An Bord Pleanála gave a green light to a co-living development in Dun Laoighaire, then opposition spokesman on housing Mr O’Brien was perturbed by the decision.
“The big concern now is that these type of facilities will now become the norm,” he said.
“Co-living units will have no effect on housing, and they will push up the price of ‘normal’ apartments in addition to co-living box apartments.
“They are not trendy boutique hotels, they are boxes and we need to consider amendments to the 2000 Planning Act to change regulations and stop more from being built.”
Last month, current opposition housing spokesperson, Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin, published a private member’s bill to ban co-living.
“The idea that anybody thinks it’s a good idea to rent out living spaces that would have a bed, a kitchenette and toilet in an equivalent space of a car park for €1,300 a month is not living in the real world,” he said.
The minister has ordered, yes, you guessed it, a “review” of policy of co-living.
Private members' bills from the opposition are unlikely to enjoy the kind of welcome from this Government as was possible in the last, minority government, Dáil.
But the minister could innovate a little.
A bright thing to do might be to fillet the Sinn Féin man’s bill, garnish it in Fianna Fáil dressing and, wearing a straight face, serve it to the Dáil in righteous tones as his big idea.
It would send a signal about how the Government intends to face into a post-Covid world in which closing divisions of inequality is going to have to receive a high priority.
Mr O’Brien has a chance to do the right thing.
The alternative is to repeat the faults of the past and hand over to developers once more a key function in the shaping of society.
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