Affordable homes? Not in my yard

Public discussion of housing in Ireland is dominated by a single assumption: high prices are good, lower prices are bad. Yet from the point of view of the 100,000 households, containing 250,000 people, who are in need of housing, this is not at all obvious.

It is an assumption that reflects, rather, the corrupting effects of a long period of ever-rising property prices. Discussion is dominated by those of us who own houses and have a vested interest in seeing their value rise. If that rise is at the expense of those who are currently excluded, so be it.

Consider one modest but important tool of public policy, the Affordable Homes Partnership (AHP), whose work is aimed at those people who are well-off enough to pay smallish mortgages, but too well off to qualify for what minimal social housing is available.

We're talking about are the young middle class: single people earning up to €55,000 a year or couples earning a combined €75,000. They're significant in terms of the overall planning of the country because they are, typically, the kind of people who currently move out of the old cities and into the commuter belt. They can afford a house, but not a house in the city.

They become, therefore, the denizens of Los Dublines, that sprawling Greater Dublin that occupies the same land area as Los Angeles while containing just a quarter of its population. Allowing them to buy houses in or around the urban areas where they live and work is the one short-term way of controlling the mad spread of the capital city.

Early this year, the AHP went to two Dublin local authorities with proposals for affordable schemes. One of those schemes is in the DúLaoghaire council area, on a 1.5 hectare site on Military Road in Killiney, very close to the village of Ballybrack and its amenities, and just 500 metres from Killiney Dart station. It already has a residential zoning. And the immediate area is definitely not over-populated: it has been losing 175 people a year since 2002.

So here's a good example of what planning should be like: decent, affordable homes in areas that already have amenities and public transport. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a start, there's the fact that, when it comes down to it, a lot of people actually don't want houses in their areas to be affordable.

The demand for affordable housing in Dún Laoghaire is huge. The plan was for three four-storey blocks, containing 140 apartments.

The AHP agreement with the developer was that 70 per cent of these would be affordable two-bedroom homes, to be sold at €299,000 each. The other 30 per cent would be sold at the market price. This meant that there would be 98 affordable homes. For these, there were 3,463 applications - a mark of the scale of demand that exists outside the private market.

There have been some concerns that affordable housing is being used by developers merely as a way to secure the rezoning of valuable land, but those concerns were not relevant here. The land did not need to be rezoned, but the scheme did require a variation in the county development plan to allow a higher density of homes on this site. The county council proposed to do this and sought observations from the public. It got 270 observations. One was in favour, but that came from the Department of the Environment.

The other 269 were against. Or rather, in the words of the report by the county's director of planning, "very much against".

Most of these objections complained, inaccurately, about the rezoning of the land, which is already zoned for housing. But this didn't stop the local councillors from getting into a panic.

When the council met in mid-June to consider the plan, sentiment was overwhelmingly negative. There was talk of the county having done its bit for affordable housing already, and even of the 3,463 people who had applied for the houses being guilty of emotionally blackmailing the poor councillors. The vote on the proposal was 17 against, two for and six abstentions.

The AHP is essentially an arm of government, but not one of the councillors from the current Government parties voted to allow the affordable homes to be built. Four Fianna Fáil councillors voted against and two abstained.

Three Green Party councillors and one from the PDs voted against. The only votes in favour came from two of the five Labour members present. All the Fine Gael councillors, except one who abstained, opposed the proposal.

This is fine for the developer, who will probably be able to build a smaller number of expensive houses on the land anyway. But it's not fine for the 98 families whose names had already been drawn out of the hat as the winners of an affordable home, or for the other 3,000 households in the county for whom the message is "to Hell or to Gorey".

The episode does at least illustrate the truth behind much of the rhetoric of concern for first-time buyers: that for most residents, and for parties on the ground, the best place to build affordable homes is elsewhere.