THE NUMBER of people in need of social housing has climbed by more than 30 per cent since 2005, with 1,000 new applications for rent subsidies from the State every month, according to Minister of State for Housing Michael Finneran.
Addressing the National Housing Conference in Sligo, he also revealed that the number of households in receipt of mortgage interest subsidies had increased by more than 100 per cent over the past 12 months due to the economic downturn.
Donal McManus, executive director of the Irish Council for Social Housing, said he anticipated that the 56,000 households recorded as being in need of social housing in March 2008 had increased significantly since then because of rising unemployment. He complained that a number of social housing projects in the pipeline had been stalled due to budgetary cutbacks – even though they could now be built cheaper.
Mr McManus called on the Government to ensure that the proposed National Asset Management Agency (Nama) should ring-fence land for future social housing schemes, so that there would be a “social dividend” from resolving the financial and banking crisis.
Mr Finneran made it clear that he would not be following the advice of those who said there was never a better time to build social housing because construction costs had fallen significantly, or to buy up large numbers of unsold homes at discounted prices.
Although he saw merit in both arguments, the Minister of State said “the reality is that we simply do not have the resources to pursue the traditional approaches of buying or building the numbers of units of social housing required” to cater for those most in need. “Taking an average unit cost of €200,000, it would cost €4 billion to meet the needs of 20,000 households. That is nearly three times the overall level of resources available for all housing programmes this year.”
Instead, vacant houses would be leased on a long-term basis.
“While some reservations have been expressed about this approach in certain quarters, I want to be clear today that I firmly believe that from a policy perspective, it is the right way to go.”
Mr Finneran denied that the leasing approach, which he first announced last October, was “some sort of sinister plot to prop up developers”.
The theme of this year’s conference – organised by the Department of the Environment and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland – is Readjustment, Resilience, Resurgence and it aims to address key issues facing the recession-hit housing sector.
The conference also heard that vulnerable children in Limerick “are on a conveyor belt to criminality” unless there was intervention to deal with the root causes of the city’s social problems.
Former Dublin city manager John Fitzgerald, who chairs the two State regeneration agencies which had been given the mandate to transform Limerick’s most deprived areas, said this would also avoid “stupid, unnecessary expenditure into the future”.
He said the “constant negative publicity” about Limerick was hindering regeneration efforts. “Limerick’s resilience isn’t open to question – even Cromwell couldn’t break it – but the credibility of the region needs to be restored.”