Una Mullally: Government has lost control of the housing market

In a broken system, interventions without systemic change don’t work. One of the issues with housing in Ireland is that we have a housing policy crisis alongside a housing crisis. Policies, including documents such as Housing For All, which followed the failed Rebuilding Ireland, often appear more concerned with targets that can be used for political capital , rather than actions that are actually going to improve the crisis.

The market does not provide what is necessarily needed. If it did, we wouldn’t be in the midst of a disaster. But government has continued to double down for more than a decade on market-led solutions, further embedding the concept and reality of housing “stock” as an asset. This ideological entrenchment – spearheaded not just by Fine Gael, but also by Fianna Fáil – of treating housing as a commodity, and not a social need, has been catastrophic.

Over and over again, experts and analysts point the finger at the divestment of responsibility by the State regarding home-building. Building homes through the local authority system was effectively ended in the 1970s and private entities could take over. Why? Because Fianna Fáil wanted to serve private Irish developers. Fast-forward to Fine Gael’s decade in power, and the entities it decided to serve were institutional and international investment funds. These funds were never going to build public and affordable housing, which is what we needed. This is the crux of the issue. An ideological shift, rooted in common sense, has been needed for a long time, to create policy that foregrounds the construction of public and affordable housing.

Because Fine Gael is ideologically opposed to even facing that fact, never mind acting on it, the State never reasserted its role in home-building, and so we are left with a completely dysfunctional mess. Affordable rent no longer exists for people entering the rental market. Homelessness has rocketed. Rent-driven emigration is widespread. It is remarkable that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are perfectly fine with taking radical steps to transfer near total power to institutional funds and corporate developers – and indeed away from the smaller landlords we need – but apparently utterly incapacitated when it comes to taking the normal, obvious, functional steps to provide housing in the way that a state must.

It’s funny how ‘unintended consequences’ always benefit landlords

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Fine Gael is ideologically blind and bound. Anyone who opposes its housing policy is seen as tainted by ideology, while it positions itself as magically free from ideology. And yet its own approach to housing has been doggedly ideological. Why has there been no “balance” between funds and developers building, small landlords sustaining their livings, and a large State programme of affordable and social housing construction? Why is there no diversity of construction? Why is there an abundance of luxury build-to-rent developments under construction, and plenty of unaffordable luxury student accommodation, when that’s not what we need? This isn’t functioning policy. It’s magic beans policy.

Simultaneously, urban planning appears non-existent. Apartment blocks are being built in inappropriate places. Streetscapes are being destroyed. Under-resourced communities are being lumbered with inappropriate developments their young people can’t afford. Hotels were built where there should be housing.

The spin from Government around ‘balancing rights’ regarding lifting the eviction ban is a nonsense when tenants’ rights are imbalanced from the get-go

The very obvious sustainable and place-making planning approaches – tackling dereliction, moving more people into the city centre above commercial buildings, bringing thousands of short-term lets back into the rental market, facilitating mews building, ending land hoarding, renovating industrial buildings for housing, increasing tenants rights through long-term leases – is not happening. We hear politicians and local authorities mention these things as bright ideas over and over again, but nothing meaningful is done.

There are two things that are also very worrying for the future. First of all, contemporary government housing policy is built on flawed data. The Taoiseach himself admitted as much last week when he said there is a deficit of 250,000 homes in the State. What’s missing from his remarks is: what kind of homes? Building any kind of homes won’t do when the market is already specifically geared towards extracting among the highest rents in the world from tenants in Ireland. We need affordable rent. We need to be normal.

[ Ireland’s housing crisis: why doesn’t the State step in and build? ]

The second thing, is the Minister responsible for all of this, Darragh O’Brien, is now making the exact same mistakes Eoghan Murphy did as a minister: short-term interventions that have negative consequences. For the duration of his tenure, rents have continued to spiral upwards. The level of dysfunction is so acute, that government housing policy is now damaging things Government says it’s all about. The housing crisis isn’t just anti-worker, it’s anti-business, it’s anti-FDI. It isn’t just damaging people’s lives, it’s damaging the real – not GDP-framed – economy.

At this point, there are simply too many things wrong at once. It’s not the Opposition or mere discourse that is “demonising” landlords, running them out of the market, causing rents to rise, or limiting appropriate construction, it’s Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’s own policies. The spin from Government around “balancing rights” regarding lifting the eviction ban is a nonsense when tenants’ rights are imbalanced from the get-go. In an emergency, emergency measures have to exist. Now Government has removed one in the form of the eviction ban. It has lost control of the market, the policy and the emergency.