Making city housing affordable: Homes crisis shows we’ve got it wrong
A society’s response to a social problem depends on the resources available and its commitment to social obligation.
These ideas are neatly, albeit vaguely, captured in that challenged philosophy, the social contract. The sidelining of that idea, one that strengthened the West for nearly a century, is a reason dangerous extremism is again such a threat.
A society as rich as Oman can confront population growth and a housing shortage by building a city. Five years ago Duqm, about 480km from Muscat, was a dusty village. Today it is a city in the making. It shows how to engineer a positive response to a social problem. Shannon in a desert, if you like.
A symptom of a far less positive response was London’s Grenfell Tower catastrophe last year. This was a building in an affluent area for people whose housing options, because of their income, were limited. Materials used in the building and a very loose local authority commitment to maintenance meant the fire spread very quickly.
To describe Grenfell Tower as Kensington’s servants’ quarters may not be entirely accurate but it is pretty close to today’s harsh truth.
London offers a stark example of how housing costs are changing the character of the city.
More importantly, housing costs are changing the lives of ordinary Londoners in a life-draining way.
Many cannot afford to live in the communities where they were born, raised, and now work, so they are condemned to be commuters, stuck on a mind-numbing hamster wheel because workers on average pay — nurses, teachers, police, retail workers and local authority employees, society’s backbone — cannot even dream of buying a home in greater London.
Dublin is caught in this developers’ and banks’ pincer movement, as was highlighted when musician David Kitt spoke about having to leave the city because he cannot afford a home there. He joins tens of thousands who work in Dublin but live as far away as Carlow or Portlaoise, Drogheda or Belfast.
What a sentence this is for citizens and their families, whose only crime is to earn an average wage.
Last week, Fr Peter McVerry warned that our Government was “ideologically incapable” of resolving the housing crisis. That charge may be made, too, about the hamster-wheel commuting, average-income housing crisis.
This is confirmed by figures that show that a third of more than €100m first-time buyers’ grants covered properties costing up to €300,000. That some 5.61% went on homes costing more than €450,000 raises another set of questions, especially as there are so many empty buildings — and sites — in our cities.
It is not too late to crack this nut in most Irish cities. Decentralisation has a role to play, as have taxes on empty sites and buildings. Maybe the idea of ring-fencing a proportion of land in any given area for affordable housing is worth consideration.
However, unless we adopt a new attitude towards development, finance, wages, and social equity, we will have only ourselves to blame when this polarisation turns our lives into something far, far grimmer. Once again we face a choice between property rights and social justice, a choice we’ve long-fingered for far too long.
