It's a dominant issue in the local elections, the Government has placed it near the top of its agenda, new policies on it have been introduced and more are promised, and debates about how it should be tackled rage.
And yet, when you listen to Father Pat Cogan, you wonder if we have even begun to get to grips with the housing problem. The Franciscan priest, who runs the voluntary housing agency Respond from its head office in Waterford, is calling for a radical reappraisal of how to address our housing needs.
He challenges a number of the assumptions which underline current housing policy, such as the belief that it is desirable for everyone to own their home. "Our national obsession with home ownership is heaping a huge burden on low-income families and on the taxpayer generally," he argues.
Father Cogan has an obsession of his own: how to get rich and poor families living beside each other in estates built by local authorities and social housing groups such as Respond. It might sound Utopian, but he has a common-sense argument outlining how it can be done.
The first thing is to get away from policies which result in low-income families living in areas where only poor people reside and which everyone wants to leave. Even well-intentioned programmes such as tenant purchase schemes exacerbate the problem, he says.
Such schemes may provide the opportunity of home ownership to those who otherwise could never have afforded it, but they do nothing to generate the social mix which is essential.
Local authority and voluntary social housing programmes at present act as a net which catches people who have no other form of housing,. "Most people would rather die than go into a local authority or social housing scheme. It's seen as the very bottom of the ladder, even if there is an opportunity of buy-out."
Public housing, he says, needs to be integrated "so that a rich or a poor person could apply for housing to a local authority or a social housing provider".
In the type of estate envisaged by Father Cogan, "there would be good standards of management and maintenance; there would be creche facilities and there would be resident-management meeting and training rooms. All of that would be part and parcel of every public housing estate".
"But the significant thing is there would be no right to buy in that public rental module. Anybody going in would be told `Look, you're in this now, for the long term if you want it', but they would be renting in an environment where their rents are capped."
The social benefits would be far-reaching: low-income families would no longer be living in ghettos; young couples who must today take out mortgages of £100,000 or more would have new life-style choices, such as whether or not both needed to work.
All this could be funded without recourse to vast amounts of taxpayers' money. Instead, housing providers could take out 50-year mortgages, enabling them to charge low rents which would cover the cost of the mortgage and the management of the estate.
In any event, he says, the taxpayer is not well served by the current system which forces local authorities to build or buy, at market value, houses to replace those which have been sold to tenants for a fraction of their value. One local authority, for example, made £2.4 million from the sale of 331 houses to tenants in 1997, while simultaneously buying 299 dwellings valued at over £28 million.
Father Cogan's ideas may sound unrealistic to some, but he points out that in other EU states there is not only a much higher proportion of rented housing, but also of people living in social housing. In the Netherlands 36 per cent of the population live in such housing, compared to 6 per cent here.
Respond, which has built 1,500 houses for low-income families as well as elderly, disabled, homeless and socially-disadvantaged people since it was established in 1982, is already beginning to put some of these ideas into practice. One new development in Drogheda, for example, will include a mixture of houses sold on the open market and a rented social housing element.
In April Father Cogan outlined his ideas to the Progressive Democrats' annual conference, at which he was invited to speak by the Minister of State for Housing.
A spokesman for Mr Robert Molloy said many of the proposals coming from Respond and other voluntary housing agencies were being taken on board, and the Government was committed to facilitating a 10-fold increase in the number of houses provided by that sector through increased funding and other measures over the next five years.
The Planning Bill, due to be published this summer, was likely to include a "planning gain" element requiring developers to include a proportion of social housing in new estates.
But he disputed Father Cogan's assertion that tenant purchase schemes did nothing to address the need for social integration. Many tenants used the opportunity to become first-time buyers, but later sold their houses on the open market. This had the effect of bringing new homeowners into the areas concerned. Facilitating home buy-outs would continue to be a key element of Government policy, he said.