It is almost impossible to have a discussion on the provision of social housing without someone harking back to the halcyon years when council workers built Dublin’s homes.
This period, typically pitched somewhere between the 1920s and the 1970s, is seen as a golden era in housing provision, when – despite limited resources – the corporation, as it then was, had men on staff building homes for those that needed them, instead of relying on property developers to do the job for it.
It is a beguiling image, and an abundantly staffed council house building division appears a neat fix for the current housing crisis. In truth however, most of Dublin’s council estates, from Cabra to Crumlin, were built not by council staff but by private builders contracted by the local authority. Why, then, do local authorities draw such criticism for relying on the private sector to build homes instead of doing it in-house, so to speak?
A lot of the confusion comes down to terminology. The terms developer and builder have become interchangeable, but in relation to the construction of housing on behalf of the State, there are important distinctions.
When a local authority engages a developer to provide a social housing scheme, they are generally relying on the firm to design the scheme, secure planning permission, finance the build, and then once completed the local authority buys the homes. The developer is taking on the financial risk, and will be required by their financial backers to achieve a certain profit level.
One voluntary housing association, Circle, has decided to cut the developer out of the deal, and is instead directly contracting a builder, having already sourced the design team and secured planning and finance, for a social housing scheme on Railway Street in Dublin’s north inner city.
Circle is effectively the developer in this case, which allows it to reduce costs through having more control over the project and eliminating the developer’s profit margin. While small scale at 47 apartments, it is a method that has the potential to be scaled up for larger local authority projects.