FROM THE ARCHIVES:It was extremely difficult to get a mortgage on a house in 1938, as indicated by this editorial which suggested a way of making home loans more widely available and helping the housing shortage while securing the future of the building industry. –
JOE JOYCE
WE HAVE commented within the very recent past on the depressed condition of the Irish building trade. It is not that there is no need of houses; on the contrary, the need is as great as it has been at any time. The trade is faced with a very serious lack of orders – largely for the good and sound reason that, while hosts of citizens want houses, they cannot afford them.
Young people with moderate incomes and with little or nothing in the bank are unable to lay down anything between £650 and £1,000 for a house. At a pinch, they might contrive to lay down £100 and to pay the rest in instalments, but even such facilities are obtainable only with the greatest difficulty in the twenty-six counties to-day.
The task of house-purchase is simpler across the Channel, where huge and wealthy building societies conduct an enormous business, and have contributed greatly to the rehousing of Great Britain in recent years. We are inclined here to underestimate the part that is played by the private builder. Attention has been focussed of late almost exclusively on slum clearance and the provision of new dwellings for the dispossessed. That task does not come within the private builder’s purview.
He cannot afford to let houses at less than an “economic rent,” and slum-dwellers cannot afford to hire them at an economic rent; the public, by one means or another, must be prepared to foot the difference between the economic rent and the rent the poor tenant can pay.
Nevertheless, the private builder makes a very substantial, if an indirect, contribution to the solving of the housing problem. He not merely keeps the industry alive and more or less efficient, but he provides dwellings which, if they could be bought – it is an important “if” – would help to reduce the demand for publicly-provided dwellings.
Since Mr de Valera’s Government decided to withdraw its house-building subsidies, and the Corporation of Dublin was inspired to abolish the remissions of rates which formerly had eased the burden of buying a new house, the stimulus to purchase has been removed, and the private builder’s outlook is dark. We have called attention to the danger of these economies, and have suggested a means by which their bad effect can be neutralised.
If the Government is willing to guarantee half the capital of new building societies on condition that they offer extremely attractive terms to house-purchasers, and if it entrusts those societies with the administration of the Small Dwellings Acquisition Acts, house-purchase will become easy, and the Government will be free to concentrate its energies on slum-clearance. Without some such aid the industry is in a fair way to perish.
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