Rory Hearne: Latest updates show Government still falling short on housing targets
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The Government's most recent progress update on its housing plan Housing for All shows little to give hope to those already locked out of the market.
Homelessness remains at record highs and the changing economic situation of inflation and rising interest rates are putting people under even greater pressure.
The Government continues to claim that it will solve the housing crisis by using the same failed policies of an overreliance on the private market to deliver housing. Housing For All promised an increased delivery of social and affordable housing, but in reality, when you plough through the detail, it had that fundamental flaw at its core. Each year, of the €12bn to go into finance new housing, €10bn, is expected to come from private sector and just €2bn, or 16%, from the state.
The market is the dominant financier, and therefore, delivery mechanism for new housing in Government policy.
Housing For all is a market driven plan and that approach is leading us to an even deeper housing disaster as the private housing market jitters, as private developers are deciding to delay or mothball new house building. A statistic that wasn’t given any coverage in the update report is that new home commencements have actually dropped: they were 10% lower in the last 12 months. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) highlighted this recently and has forecast housing delivery to fall in 2023.
This is red flashing sirens time. The reason we are in this housing emergency is that successive Governments have handed housing delivery over to the market — to the private developers, and investor funds to provide housing.
But the market does not deliver housing to meet actual housing need. It builds when it can make a sufficient profit — it responds to a demand that gives it a big return. When those profit calculations change, they stop building.
So now, as building costs rise due to inflation, and potential buyers are struggling to access finance and save deposits, developers are likely to slow down construction.
The dysfunction and illogical decision to rely on the private market is going to be illustrated further. Our need for homes has never been higher. Yet the market is reducing its building. And this is what Government policy remains wedded to promoting.
And in the area of vacancy and dereliction, the private property market is shown also to be negligent. There are 166,000 vacant homes, and tens of thousands of derelict properties. This hoarding of property in a housing shortage is akin to hoarding food in a famine. Yet Government policy is woefully inadequate in tackling it.
These progress updates are frustrating. They repeatedly present targets and claim they were met, moving the goalposts as suits. Just 5,000 new social homes were delivered last year, some 4,000 below the initial 9,000 target. That missed target should be added to this year's goal, but that hasn't been the case.
Even worse, they don’t acknowledge that just 1,500 social homes were delivered in the first half of this year. In terms of affordable housing the delivery is even more disappointing. Just 234 affordable cost rental homes have been delivered, and less than a hundred affordable purchase homes.
COP 27 is highlighting the other emergency — climate. And I have shown that through housing we can really address these twin emergencies. Yet there is no acknowledgment that the cost of living crisis will make it more difficult for people to afford to retrofit, and the Governments targets for social housing and private rental retrofitting are simply tiny in scale in contrast with the social and environmental catastrophe facing us.
I was Blindboy’s guest at Vicar Street recently, and the audience was mainly young people in their 20s and 30s. They asked where is the hope. Should they just emigrate? I said, there is hope, and they have a right to a future in their country.
The hope is in the attitude change to housing that is underway across Irish society. People want property to be treated as a home not an investment asset.
They want renters to have a secure affordable home, for rent reduction measures, for removing the ability of landlords to evict tenants on sale, for vacancy and dereliction to be properly tackled with radical measures like Barcelona’s use it or lose it policies.
Housing For All was flawed from the outset, it is now being exposed badly, and the housing crisis will worsen without a new housing plan based on putting the state central to ensuring affordable green homes for all.
The money allocated to a rainy day fund should be directed into fast-tracking rapid-build and affordable housing. We are losing our youth, our future, because of the failure to provide the basic human need of a home.
As a society, we cannot just accept or tolerate this crisis any longer. We must raise our voices together.