Rory Hearne: Generation Rent has been failed once again
Only Have Of Evicted Generation Of Private Homes, Locked Prospect Picture: Many Landlords By Not Are Members Them Countenance Pexels Being To Own Out File Of The Of Rent Owning Their The
I really wish I was able to write a different article today.
I wish, after a decade of wrong policies that created a crisis causing massive misery and generational exclusion in this country, that we had reached the endpoint and those suffering from this unprecedented crisis could see a real light of hope.
I hoped that Housing for All would be a new policy that would chart a genuinely new direction and give hope to the locked-out generation. But unfortunately, this plan falls far short of what is needed.
It is not a radical plan. In too many ways it continues the same flawed approach as the previous plan, Rebuilding Ireland.
The starting claim that the Government will deliver 33000 homes a year is ambitious, but it is misleading because over half of these are due to come from the private market. The Government has no control over this delivery. Furthermore, not once does the plan mention the aim of reducing housing prices. That clearly isn’t their intention.
Housing For all is about maintaining the market status quo.
This is a plan that is overly oriented towards the interests of developers and investors rather than those in need of affordable homes. The plan does not properly define an affordable home.
Absent is a clear delivery of a very large supply of actually affordable homes, such as 200,000 homes, on public land that might have some chance of bringing the price of houses down.
The plan is insufficient on scale and lacks clear delivery mechanisms. There are approximately 356,500 households in the private rental sector. These are the generation rent, paying unaffordable rents. There are also 450,000 young adults living at home with their parents. This is the existing need right now. The plan does not acknowledge the scale of their housing need.
By 2040, an additional one million people will be living in Ireland. Their need is not accounted for either.
The rollout of the cost-rental model, as new housing tenure, with affordable rents and lifetime security for average earners is very significant and is potentially a game-changer. The problem is there is only a plan to deliver 18,000 cost-rental homes. That offers a mere 5% of current private renters the possibility of an affordable home at some point in the next decade.
Add in the 450,000 young adults and the Government is offering just 2% of those in need of secure affordable rental homes over the next decade.
If cost-rental is to provide a genuine alternative to the private rental market and pull down rents, then it needs to be provided on a scale of 10,000 units per annum.
The plan is simply insufficient and will not reduce rents at this scale. This, I think, is the intention. The market is not to be disrupted, because they are still looking to incentivise the private market to provide the supply of rental homes, including investors.
And they want to keep rents high so it remains an attractive investment for institutional investment funds.
There is no change to the build-to-rent planning guidelines, so we will continue to see these tenements of the 21st century dominate large new build developments. Apartments are again excluded from the owner-occupier guarantee measures. The investor feeding frenzy on the carcass of 'generation locked-out' is set to continue.
Renters are still being treated as second class citizens. There is no rent freeze, no tax break for renters, no increase in security of tenure for tenants, no change to the ability of landlords to evict tenants.
There are no measures that will restrict the purchase of homes by investment funds. This leaves the private market wide open to be further devoured by real estate equity funds. It is a flaw at the heart of the plan.
On social housing, the plan retains the discredited Housing Assistance Payment and sets out that it will continue to have 60,000 recipients of HAP in the private rental sector.
So €1bn per year, a quarter of the total €4bn a year allocated to the housing plan, will continue to be paid to private landlords.
The trumpeted increase in Part V planning, from 10% of private developments for social housing up to 20%, will also not apply to current planning permissions, nor to land purchased between 2015 and 2021 and will not apply until 2026. This beggars belief. We have no breakdown — which at least was given in Rebuilding Ireland — of how many social and affordable units will be delivered by part V.
Nama is sitting there and could provide 70,000 affordable homes in five years but there is no mention of it, aside from a paltry 1,400 social homes for the Land Development Agency.
There is no detail of how the social houses will be built. Will the social housing be bought from the private market as is currently the case?
The plan for local authorities to use compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) to target up to 2,500 vacant properties is a drop in the ocean of dealing with vacant properties. There is also no timeframe for introducing the vacant property tax.
I searched the document for a reference to making housing a human right, a key requirement to fundamentally address this crisis. But, nothing. Not one mention of the human right to housing. A referendum is mentioned, but no clear intention of a referendum to insert the right to housing in the Constitution, which is urgently needed.
Despite all the rhetoric and promises it is very clear that this is not a plan driven by a vision of a right to housing for all.
This is important because the right to housing is the value and vision framework for affordable, secure, quality homes for all. It makes the state accountable and responsible for this. By excluding the right to housing the Government has shown that it still views housing predominantly as an investment asset.
In regard to building the capacity of workers to deliver this, it is again completely dependent on the market.
All of the initiatives to address the supply of skills are predicated on employers and the construction industry making the careers ‘attractive’.
A sector that is renowned for pushing lower employment standards and subcontracting and bogus self-employment? This is why a public home building agency is needed to drive up standards and offer apprentices a real prospect of secure, well-paid employment.
It is very welcome that they are going to “work towards eradicating homelessness by 2030” but if you are not stemming the flow into homelessness, how will you stop it? The expansion of the Housing First initiative is vital but evictions in the private rental sector are the principal cause of homelessness and there is nothing to address this.
Overall, it appears the vested interests of the private market held sway over the needs of Generation Rent.
The investor funds, developers, financiers, ‘ the market cabal’ have kept their capture of policy.
Housing For All contains some of the policies that could bring us towards solving the crisis, but ultimately it will not achieve this as it is inadequate in scale and funding, and continues to pursue a failed policy of relying for the delivery of affordable homes on the private market and investors, whose modus operandi is to do the very opposite.