Ireland for sale, homes never built

It's been a very messy month in the history of our housing crisis

February isn’t over yet, but so far we have seen the month mark an abysmal chapter in the lengthy saga of Ireland’s housing crisis.

We began the month with Micheál Martin’s suggestion to scrap rent pressure zones, which represent the final lifeline that many people in the country have left at this point. It’s a move that will likely have devastating economic consequences for everyone in the country. Not just renters.

At the midpoint of the month, the Government spitballed another halfhearted idea to solve the housing crisis: removing limitations on planning permission for cabins. The idea is that young people can move out of the box room and into the back garden. What could possibly go wrong?

I’m sure these are the first of many more bandaids that will be affixed on Ireland’s gaping wound, which consistently remind us that the Government would really rather do anything than just build some affordable or social housing.

Let’s start with RPZs

I don’t know if anyone has ever championed the existing RPZ framework or claimed it to be perfect. With that said, every renter in the country is acutely aware of how precarious their living situation is. Capped rent increases offer crucial reassurance in this environment, offering some semblance of stability to tenants in Ireland.

In the days after Martin suggested axing RPZs, there was justified backlash and concern from both the opposition and the public. This criticism resulted in some slight backpedalling, but ultimately, a review of rent pressure zones is still set to go ahead. As a renter who has firsthand experience of the insecurity that comes with renting in Dublin, I am honestly afraid of what lies ahead.

It’s a shortsighted and senseless move from a human perspective, but undoubtedly, there are people and organizations who’ll stand to financially benefit from the erosion of tenant’s rights in Ireland.

For those who think “I don’t rent, it won’t affect me,” I’d encourage you to consider the wider implications of removing or restructuring rent pressure zones with the motivation of increasing investment in Ireland.

With unbridled rents, there will be a knock-on effect on house prices as their value to prospective landlords increases. This will make it even more difficult than it already is for any regular person to enter the property market. Those who do will end up paying outsized mortgages for inflated house prices.

Homelessness will spiral even further out of control. Emigration will intensify even more.

When the basic necessities of life (such as shelter) become unaffordable and out-of-reach, logically, increased crime rates will follow. Desperate people lose their hard-won bargaining power in the workplace, exploitation increases, and vulnerable people can be taken advantage of more easily. This is concerning from whatever angle you look at it – but particularly so in a country where landlords have gotten away with exploiting the desperation of tenants by offering reduced rent in exchange for sex.

So when a review of RPZs is undertaken, I hope the wider societal impact is taken into account. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the negative consequences far outweigh whatever benefits there will be for investment. The proposed review is rooted in an obsession with making Ireland “attractive” to investors and large companies looking to set up shop – which Martin said himself.

In the long run, how attractive will Ireland be to the financial institutions and big tech players we have spent so long appeasing, once we’ve run the entire country into the ground? Actually, on second thoughts, don’t answer that.

Violence

I am aware that much of the above has been framed around the anxieties of the middle class. Despite this, I am acutely aware of the fact that it will always be working class people who bear the brunt of these policy decisions.

While the housing crisis might seem like a recent enough phenomenon, dating back to the mid-2010s, the reality is that it’s not. I’m about to say something that might irk a certain cohort of people, so please brace yourself. If you feel defensive in relation to what I’m about to say, it might be worth interrogating why that is.

The reality is that we have always had a housing crisis. People just didn’t care until it began to impact the middle class.

Growing up in a working class area, this has always been apparent to me. As a teenager, I knew of people who had been on the housing list for as long as I’d been alive. Throughout my life, I’ve seen working class people (particularly single mothers) suffer disproportionately from a crisis that existed long before it was reflected in our disgraceful homelessness figures.

I have seen the cost of rented accommodation keep people on low incomes in abusive relationships and violent family dynamics that have caused them significant long-term harm. Precarious housing has always been at the centre of coercion and abuse for working class people – whether that’s in relationships or in the workplace.

Even in the most peaceful households, there is a latent stress that comes with renting. People living in rented accommodation deal with the ongoing fear that their lives will be turned upside down by a landlord selling up on a whim, evicting their families and young children without a second thought. This fear that the property could be sold is near-universal for people with smaller landlords.

In these scenarios, people find themselves afraid to complain about substandard living conditions, enduring life with mould and rodents, in case making a complaint means that you’ll have to pack everything up and start again. Renters rarely know if the next landlord will let them stay for two years or ten.

For these people, who already suffer so much as a result of long-term housing insecurity, I am most afraid. Rent caps are truly one of the only sources of reassurance they have in the current rental market.

So, without a shred of exaggeration, I think the removal of rent pressure zones could represent the single greatest act of violence we’ll see inflicted on this generation of Irish people.

Subdividing the suburbs

Carrying on from this, we’ve got the so-called ‘bed in a shed’ plan that sees planning permission exemptions potentially being introduced for detached cabins in back gardens.

Prior to the structures being at the centre of Dáil discussions, I had been thinking a lot about cabins and how I expected them to become a last hope for a lot of people if RPZs were to be abolished. If people can’t afford to rent or buy a home, backyard cabins may be the only affordable, secure housing option many people will have.

It’s still too early for me to know exactly what my feelings about this news are – so maybe I shouldn’t be writing this at all. But something doesn’t sit right with me.

The idea of Irish people dividing up their property so that their children can live on a fraction of their land brings Penal Law to mind. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Irish history will be aware of the oppressive inheritance laws introduced in the 1700s which required Catholic landowners to divide their land equally between all of their sons. It was those circumstances that left Irish people unable to grow any food, other than potatoes, in sufficient quantities to feed their family. We know what happened next.

I am obviously not suggesting that cabins in family gardens are going to lay the foundations for something as catastrophic as the famine. But I do think that between subdivision and Dublin’s tenements, we have enough of a historical precedent to give us pause when it comes to this sort of thing. I can’t put my finger on what exactly concerns me about this, but the reality is that the majority of people in Ireland don’t own much land. I’m uneasy with the idea of people dividing up what little property they’ve been able to accumulate throughout their lives, in a way that’s reminiscent of some of Ireland’s darkest periods of history.

At the same time, I don’t think people should be dragged through the courts and threatened with jail time for accommodating their children or elderly parents on their own property. Yet, I do worry about what this exemption could mean for the private rental market too. Are there ways in which this move could incentivise the greedy purveyors of mice and mould into illegally turning a profit? Probably, but I guess that is conjecture.

I suppose one of my concerns is that this is a solution that risks placating the middle class, while lone parent families and people on lower incomes will continue to suffer. You can’t build a garden cabin if you live in the flats. They simply aren’t an option for multi-generational families living in overcrowded rental accommodation.

I fear that if we only introduce these kinds of solutions, all we’ll be doing is numbing the middle class from the sting of the housing crisis and relieving public representatives of the pressure that is currently on them to deliver some affordable houses.

And without that crucial discontent from that segment of society, our Government will find their time in Leinster House much more comfortable.