Something peculiar is going on. By this stage we all know the housing crisis is coming down on the country from all sides. The asking price of rooms (yes rooms, not flats) for rent in Dublin has leapt up to €1,000 a month. Families are camping out in cars overnight for a chance to buy houses still priced at more than €400,000. Young people are emigrating not because they can’t find work, but because they can’t afford to stay and rent. Headlines chart the rise of “sex for rent” scandals and bunk beds being jammed into flats as dodgy landlords seek to exploit desperate people.
We know things are bad. But are they trying to convince us that things are so bad that the only solution is to make them worse?
The latest Government proposal to solve the housing crisis is to allow developers to build smaller, darker homes. It has been reported that the shiny new guidelines from the Minister for Housing will reduce minimum floor area for apartments, while “requirements for design features such as dual aspects and balconies would be relaxed”.
The idea is that by dropping certain building standards, new apartments will be cheaper to build and cheaper for people to buy, because developers and builders will definitely pass on those savings. They’re mad for that.
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The last big government scheme to help improve housing affordability and incentivise the private sector to build new homes – the Help to Buy scheme – had absolutely no impact on prices. (Everyone in the real estate industry approached the scheme in the most scrupulous way. Definitely not offering to put down kitchens as “extras” to manoeuvre their way around the eligibility pricing cap.)
Lowering standards is rarely a good move in any situation in your life – romantic relationships, personal hygiene, food safety – doing so will likely impact your quality of life. So why would we allow it for homes? The places where we spend the majority of our time. Our sanctuaries, our safe places.
Dropping the percentage of units that must have two windows facing out of two outside walls might not sound that bad on paper. Until you have to live in one, and it’s summer and you can’t get a cross breeze on a stifling night. Or you have to keep them shut because of the noise of the street but they’re the only windows. Or you can’t tempt the sun in.
Communal and cultural space requirements are also expected to creep back. It’s all in the hope of attracting more investment, but is it at the price of making the lives of Irish citizens that little bit miserable?
Yes, I hear you, reader who is spitting jammy toast crumbs all over this article as you say: “Sure, a smaller home with less windows is better than no home at all!”
But why are we being cornered between the rock and hard place of “homes that are not as good or no homes at all?”. Is it possible the housing crisis is being used to justify the return of things we tried to get rid of in the last century – like co-living (bedsits). Or to sell us solutions like “modular homes”, ie a Portakabin in the back garden. Yes, living in one is better than being homeless but that shouldn’t be the only other option people have. This kind of “well, would you rather” thinking is usually weaponised by Irish mammies: “Yes, I know you hate the dinner I’ve made, but think of the poor starving children with nothing – stop your crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
We shouldn’t be this desperate. The chorus across cities in Ireland is that we need to give up our front yards and embrace high density living. Families can be raised in apartments. We’ll form a village at the communal playgrounds. It’ll be just like the show Friends, popping in and out of each other’s apartments. Except they’ll maybe be smaller, a bit darker and have less air flow. The communal garden didn’t get built. Neither did the promised “cultural space”. There’s a Centra underneath if you want to take the kids for some sensory play at the deli. Reducing apartment standards is going to undermine further trust in high density living in Ireland, a country that has traditionally eyed it with suspicion.
Perhaps we would accept the new standard of apartments if the Minister for Housing or developers or investors traded in their (probably very tastefully decorated) homes to rent one of these. Let us see how they attempt to get their washing dry in winter in a small studio with little airflow before the guidelines are approved for the rest of us.
We would, of course, allow them an Aldi dehumidifier; we’re not monsters.
