Sir, – Cliff Taylor warns of the challenges of the costs of the bigger State and highlights housing as one area where more State involvement is heading (“Paying for bigger role for the State is not repeat of austerity”, Opinion & Analysis, January 30th).
This should be seen as a positive.
There are multiple reasons why the State should be more active in the provision of housing, not least economic ones. Currently the Government uses taxpayer money in a variety of schemes to pay private landlords to provide housing to those in need. These include the housing assistance payment, the rental accommodation scheme, rent supplement, and the social housing current expenditure programme. The estimated cost of these schemes in Budget 2020 was a substantial €793 million. The estimated cost for the Government to build a three-bedroom house in south Dublin is €277,500, according to figures from the Department of Housing (“Cost of building homes can be ‘much cheaper’”, News, September 9th, 2019). Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance built A-rated three-bed houses for €178,000 each at Poppintree, Ballymun, Dublin. Based on these figures, the Government’s 2020 budget for the schemes noted above could build 2,858 three-bed dwellings on the Department of Housing’s figure, or 4,455 using the Ó Cualann model. That is just based on one year’s budget!
The State simply cannot afford to continue to pay private landlords to provide accommodation, often insecure and unsuitable, that ruptures individuals and families from their communities and contributes to spiralling rental increases that impacts more homeless people than those being accommodated.
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These schemes, while undoubtedly offering some form of shelter in the short term, merely prolong the sticking-plaster, dysfunctional system of Irish housing. They represent a classic case of ideology trumping economic reality. The sooner the State gets “bigger” in providing long-term sustainable public housing the better, not least because it makes economic sense. – Yours, etc,
JIM ROCHE,
Senior Lecturer,
Dublin School
of Architecture,
Technological
University Dublin, Dublin 1.