Could house price rises lead to the end of social apartheid?

Societies, like the truth, are rarely plain and never simple. Which is why clouds can sometimes have silver linings and bad things can occasionally have good effects. Or, in the case of the current housing crisis, why there is what might be called an upside to the downside of the good times.

For most people, the insane rise in house prices is the bad part of the economic boom. And for some it is very bad indeed, with the cheapest rented accommodation being taken by people who used to be able to afford the better flat that has been taken by people who used to be able to afford the small house that has been taken by people who used to be able to afford the bigger house.

Even what was often regarded as the classic lower middle-class couple - the nurse married to the garda - is now being saddled with a large long-term mortgage and an equally long, increasingly tiresome journey to work.

For such people the notion that this might have some potentially good side-effects may seem insulting. At the intimate, personal level, the housing crisis is at best a source of great stress and, at worst, a disaster. But at a larger social level, it just might begin to have an effect on one of the worst aspects of modern Ireland - the social apartheid that has been enforced through housing policy and that has been, in its own quiet way, a highly effective system of class segregation.

When Irish cities - especially Dublin - were small and intimate, it was hard for the rich and the poor to avoid each other. James Joyce, after all, could credibly construct his masterpiece Ulysses around the notion that any two people moving around Dublin on a given day in the early years of the 20th century would inevitably cross paths and come into contact with at least some of the same people.

The poor occupied the centre of the city. The places where they lived were familiar to the other classes. This physical intimacy had no romance and did not lead to much in the way of spontaneous benevolence, but it meant at least that lives led in deprivation were not invisible lives.

This began to change with the post-war slum clearances and the creation of new working class reservations on the edges of most towns and cities. The process of segregation was actually inflated by well-meaning planners who insisted on low housing densities, increasing the distances between the new reservations and the rest of the urban population.

And these separate places were served by their own schools, shopping centres, churches and sports clubs, so that what began as the construction of separate houses ended with the construction of separate lives.

For anyone naive enough to imagine that Ireland was a classless society, the current property boom has provided a stark lesson in how strong these divisions have become. As house prices rose and rose to a point where a relatively ordinary family house in Sandymount or Rathgar cost half a million pounds, many middle-class couples in the major cities faced the reality that they could no longer afford to live in the areas where they grew up or to which they had aspired.

They had a choice. They could move long distances to middle-class estates in unfamiliar areas, with all that this entailed in terms of commuting time. Or they could buy houses in what used to be corporation estates.

Considered rationally, the latter choice ought to be the obvious one. The corporation houses in, say, Ballyfermot or Whitehall, are solid, well-built and generally well-maintained structures. For the huge families that were normal in the 1940s and 1950s, they were insanely small. The one I grew up in, for example, had two bedrooms for eight people.

But for a young couple with one or two children, these houses are perfectly fine. Many have larger gardens than most expensive new houses have now. Crucially, in these days of gridlock, they are often within a few miles of the city. And many of these estates are quite settled, without the kind of high crime rates that form a perfectly rational disincentive to anyone thinking of moving in.

And yet the tacit strength of class partition is such that most people faced with this choice prefer to pay a lot more for slightly larger houses much further from where they work. The estate agents' cry of "location, location, location" has continued to carry a silent counterpoint of "class, class, class".

BUT THE housing crisis has now become so bad that this is beginning to change. Young professionals have started to move into areas where, even two years ago, they would hardly have set foot. The wild uncharted territories beyond the familiar social boundaries are being tentatively colonised. Gentrification is starting to hit the corporation estates. Segregation is melting at the edges.

It would be foolish to make too much of this or to imagine that it will mark the end of social division in Ireland. People can live next door to each other and still be on different planets. Many of those who are moving in to workingclass areas hope to gain a foothold on the property market from which they intend to ascend to greater heights. Any good effects will be slow, incremental and, perhaps, almost imperceptible.

But it would be equally foolish to make too little of the potential of this development. It is, after all, the first minor reversal of what has been since the 1940s a one-way trend towards ever greater distance between those who are in the system and those who are not.

And the importance of having a real social mix in the places where children grow up and form their expectations of life is not lightly to be dismissed.

The long, brutal neglect of the children of the poor over the past 20 years has tended to concentrate deprivation in areas where choice seems illusory. The walls around the ghettoes and reservations may be physically invisible but they have proved to be almost impassable. If the housing crisis forces some small breaches in those walls, it could prove to be a heavily disguised blessing on the common house that we call Irish society.

e-mail: fotoole@irish-times.ie