“Would it be ambitious to try and deliver 20,000 public homes in a year? Yes, but we need that scale of ambition. We have to deliver affordable and social homes for purchase and rent, because this crisis will continue to get worse.”
Sinn Féin housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, is frank and stark when assessing the scale and level of the housing and accommodation crisis, and yet, he can also see positives and potentialities for the State to truly begin to solve this issue.
Dep Ó Broin was in Galway on Monday, where, accompanied by SF Galway West TD, Mairead Farrell, he held meetings with officials in the Galway city and county council, the Land Development Agency, and charities working with those affected by homelessness and the housing crisis.
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The meetings are part of his keeping informed of the various changes and fluctuations across the private and local authority housing sectors, and to understand the situation in the regions outside of Dublin.
“There is no substitute for coming into an area and meeting people on the ground,” he tells me, as we sit for the interview on Monday evening. “You get a level of depth you wouldn’t have had beforehand.”
Since his election to the Dáil in 2016, the Dublin Mid-West TD has emerged as one of the sharpest and most perceptive critics of Government housing policy, and one of the keenest analysts of the housing crises - a view reinforced when his book, Home - Why Public Housing Is the Answer was published in 2019 by the Irish Academic Press. The Irish Times called it “a fluent, serious book”, while the Sunday Business Post described it as “a major contribution to a critical national debate – and should be read by every policy-maker in the sector”.
The situation in Galway
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Dep Ó Broin meeting members of Galway Simon on his visit to the city on Monday.
Prior to his meetings on Monday, Dep Ó Broin was aware that “Galway city and county was acutely affected by the housing crisis”, through being a place that is desirable to live; being a tourist destination; and having two third level institutions, all of which combine to create issues in both the affordable and rental sectors.
Figures released by the Galway City Council towards the end of last year showed that more than 4,200 people - many of which represent families - were on the waiting list for accommodation, with the majority seeking one to two bed units. Waiting list figures for the county are also very high, at around 3,000.
Also in late 2021, Daft.ie reported that the average price of a house in the city was €322,543, while in the county, the average price was €241,335. Rents also saw alarming increases, rising in the city by 53 per cent over the last five years, and by 69 per cent in the county.
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“After meeting with Threshold this morning, the picture here is probably worse than I thought,” says Dep Ó Broin. “There is a general trend over the last number of years of landlords selling up. That is putting huge pressure on families and singles who are then at risk of becoming homeless. The moratorium on evictions stopped that, but that is gone now, and if you look at the increase in homelessness in the city here over the past year, it is at 40 per cent, you’re almost back to pre-Covid levels of homelessness. So you have less rental stock, more people getting notices to quit, and the social housing output is still insufficient. That would worry me a lot.
“The other big challenge is affordable housing. We still do not have the Government’s full regulations for the Affordable Housing Scheme, and Galway clearly has an affordability challenge, with rents having gone up almost 10 per cent in the last year. House pieces have not gone up so much in the city, but €320,000 to €350,000 is the average price. People are then forced into the county, and what is happening there is house prices went up between 10 and 18 per cent, in part because people cannot afford to live in the city. Ultimately this all comes down to the supply of social and affordable homes.”
Housing for all?
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Housing For All is the current Government's response to the housing crisis, and its defenders would point to its goals of delivering 4,000 affordable purchase homes, on average, each year; 2,000 new ‘cost rental’ homes a year; and more than 10,000 new social homes per year to 2030, including an average of 9,500 new build units, as measures which will seriously begin to address the crisis.
Dep Ó Broin, however, points out that the current policy is “the same, in terms of its underpinning” as the last policy, Rebuilding Ireland.
“The actual number of social homes the Government is targeting is 9,000 this year, 9,000 next year, and by 2025/26 they are hoping to reach 10,000. We were supposed to reach 10,000 last year. Partly because of Covid, partly because of red tape, those targets haven’t been met, so we are going to get less social houses under this plan than under the previous Fine Gael national development plan. At the same time, social housing needs are rising and we haven’t caught up with the lost 3-4,000 units from last year, and the year before, that didn’t get built.
“The aim is to get to 4,000 affordables, but they are not going to get there until 2026, so this year it looks like it might be 1,250 delivered by the local authorities, approved bodies, and the Land Development Agency. It might go to 2,000 next year, it might hit 3,000 the year after, and maybe in 2025/26 hit 4,000, but that’s far too little.
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“Sinn Féin believes that instead of 9,000 social houses, we need about 20,000 public homes a year. Each year we have to be increasing social housing - 12,000 is what we proposed for this year, and increasing that each year thereafter - and you need at least 8,000 affordable for purchase and rental.
“The problem is that neither Galway city nor county council have targets for affordable yet. They have some planning applications in the pipeline, so if they only get the targets from the Government now, and the planning applications have to be approved, it will be a couple of years before they are on site to start building.
“The Government is saying it might deliver 400 affordable homes across the State this year - 400! - that’s just a drop in the ocean.
“Then there is the price. What are we talking about when we say affordable? Affordability has to be linked to people’s income, and the general principle is, other than people on social housing and very low income, for everyone else it should be about 25 to 30 per cent of your net income. That means homes have to be for sale at €230,000 or less for a standard two/three bed house or apartment. If you are going outside the main urban centres, you need to be pushing the units down to below €200,000.
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“Likewise for rents. The LDA is going to be doing affordable rental and it is looking at €1,200 to €1,300 a month. They need to be €700 to €900 a month. The meeting with the LDA today, we were discussing how you can achieve this? If the cost of delivering a home is X, how can you bring the rents down? You refinance the development where you pay down the loans over a longer period of time. There are ways to deliver accommodation at those kinds of prices.”
‘Things can be done differently’
If current poll ratings continue to hold, Sinn Féin can expect to be serious contenders to form part of the next Government. In such a scenario, Dep Ó Broin would be widely expected to be appointed Minister for Housing and Local Government. How then, would he approach the task of beginning to tackle one of the most serious issues - for many, the issue - afflicting the State?
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“The first thing to say to people is, ‘There is hope. Things can be done differently.’ The first thing that has to happen is direct capital investment by central government, in the delivery of social and affordable homes, has to double, it is going to be just under €1.5 billion this year. It needs to be €3 billion.
“We also need to empower local authorities to deliver more good quality homes at a faster rate. For those local authority projects already in the pipeline, beauraracty needs to be lifted. There are opportunities in what are called ‘turn-keys’ - private developments that can be bought by the State - to be used for affordable as well as social housing, so that people can buy or rent them.
“In the private rental sector, we have to stop rents from increasing. We need an emergency three year ban on rent increases on people in the private rental sector who are not on HAP, and reduce rents through refundable tax credits.”
The cost of housing
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Dep Ó Broin, with trade unionist and former SF city councillor Mark Lohan, and SF Galway West TD, Mairead Farrell.
However, the question plaguing all aspirations to reform and improve Irish society, be it in housing, health, or education is, ‘Where will the money to do this come from?’
“We are still in a moment where Government borrowing is at very low interest rates, and that opportunity won’t last forever,” says Dep Ó Broin. “Particularly for affordable housing, which doesn't require subsidies, if you were to borrow the money to invest in the 4,000 affordable homes each year, you only have to borrow that money once. Those homes are sold, and you recycle the money to build the next 4,000, and the next 4,000.
“With affordable rentals, you do borrow money, but that is against the strength of the rental income that comes in, and over 40/50/60 years that’s paid down, so both are self financing, it doesn’t have a recurring charge on the Exchequer.
“For social housing, the real cost is in not building it, because people then end up in emergency accommodation, homeless accommodation, and that is a cost that keeps going up.
“At the very least the crisis will continue to be as bad as it is, and because there is such a low level of investment, things will continue to get worse. That is why we need more ambition. The funds are there, and here’s the crazy thing - it’s more expensive to build a house today than it was five years ago, yet we didn’t build enough homes five years ago because of bureaucracy, unwillingness to borrow, and that policy since the 1990s of chronic overreliance on private developers, private landlords, and private investors, to meet all housing needs. So it’s more expensive to do it now and that is the way it is going to be, so ‘seize the moment’ is what I would say if I was the minister.”
