It may have been the intention, but the reality is the mess we have now.
Small landlords were asked to fill the gap that the state should have been dealing with. That gap has gotten bigger and bigger. Exacerbated by the financial crash.
Maybe understandably, people unaffected donât really see a problem. But this going to become a massive issue and has the potential to bury the current government parties for some time.
Itâs already a massive issue ffs, do you think you have some special insight to the biggest issue in the country for the last 7 or 8 years?! 
The âmarketâ built tens of thousands more units, how was that possible?
Whatever has happened itâs absolutely insane whatâs going on. Normal working families living in and sending kids to school from fucking hotels?? I know of two such people in this situation. One fellas works in Brennanâs which is a well paid factory the other fella drives a truck. Hardly wasters.
The rent in a 3 bed semi being upwards of 2k a month in middle of the road Dublin suburbs and commuter towns. 2k would be the mortgage repayments on a 500k house just a couple of years ago. Whatever the reason is this didnât just happen out of thin air and the government have made an absolute bollox of it.
It always seems to me that there are two valid sides to absolutely every single argument over public policy for eg the eviction ban. But it also seems that in the vast majority of cases the governments we have ahad have always come down in favour of the big guy over the little guy. We might as well try a few years of the opposite especially in the area of housing.
So you are telling us the housing crisis has been caused by poor people buying their council houses from the state 40 years ago leading to âmass enrichmentâ of these poor people and a housing crisis 40 years later.
A novel explanation Iâll give you that.
Itâs not 40 years ago.
During the boom years, between 1997 and 2006, 43,218 new local authority units were added to the stock. During the same period 17,197 units were sold to tenants. In other words, over 43 percent of new output was lost through tenant purchase.
Between 2011 and 2014, local authorities added 2,364 units to their stock. Over the same years, they sold 2,233 units. Tenant purchase sales were equal to 94 percent of new units. And this was in the middle of a chronic housing crisis.
Tenant purchase means that when it comes to investment in social housing, we are always running to stand still.
A particular problem with tenant purchase is that it involves a steep discount for the tenant.
After living in a dwelling for 10 years, tenants can avail of the maximum discount. This is usually supposed to be 30 percent of market value, but a new tenant purchase scheme introduced by Labourâs Alan Kelly last year provides for discounts of up to 60 percent.
Some commentators believe, however, that in practice the discount is much greater, because of conservative estimates of market value. Either way, the unit is sold for far below market value and therefore below the cost of replacing the unit.
While the tenant has indeed paid rent, social rents are quite low in Ireland and often cover only maintenance costs. This means that public investment in social housing is continuously depleted as we sell off stock at a discount.
A large part of investment in social housing in this country is thus actually an investment in subsidised home ownership. Tenant purchase also plays a key role in considerations around how we finance social housing.
In countries where social housing is not sold to tenants, it eventually starts to produce a return and, moreover, can be used as equity to draw down private finance for investment in social housing. It is very hard to design a sustainable model of social-housing finance if the very thing weâre investing in is constantly sold off.
There are positives to tenant purchase.
It may well represent one of the most significant instances of transferring wealth to working-class people in Irish society. There are also arguments that tenant purchase helps to stabilize working-class communities by increasing tenure mix, in other words creating a mix of home owners and social tenants.
However, a large portion of those who acquire their homes through tenant purchase then sell them and move elsewhere. Between 1999 and 2015 (up to November), Dublin City Council had 10,254 applications to resell homes bought under tenant purchase, an average of 603 a year. It allowed the resale of 8,793 of them.
Tenant purchase is thus a great scheme for transferring wealth to working-class people in the form of home ownership. However, it is a terrible scheme from a social housing perspective and for the housing system as a whole.
Many in Irish society think that tenant purchase is fair and commendable. Indeed, many political parties campaigned to extend tenant purchase in future. For example, Fianna FĂĄilâs election manifesto promised a give-away bonanza with a new tenant purchase scheme for 150,000 tenants.
Meanwhile Labourâs Alan Kelly (the acting Minister for the Environment), announced plans last year, referred to above, for an extended tenant purchase scheme. (A plan that was subjected to a blistering critique in the Irish Times by Simon Brooke of ClĂșid Housing Association.)
The Workersâ Party was the only party I could find that takes a strong stance against tenant purchase. Sinn FĂ©inâs housing policy notes that the scheme has âpositive and negative aspectsâ, and commits to a stay on the scheme while the housing crisis continues, and to future reforms.
However, most left-wing political parties stay away from the issue, as tenant purchase is extremely popular among the schemeâs potential beneficiaries, who are also a key constituency for the left.
Abolishing tenant purchase is a bit like increasing taxation. Itâs fairly obvious we need to do it to have decent public services, but there is no short-term political gain in advocating for it.
This why we need a strong civil society and social movements that can shape housing policy beyond the narrow confines of electoral politics.
My loose impression is the state did basically nothing after the crash to prepare for the future. If private developers were not building, surely it made sense that the state should have filled the gap and built. It would have kept a lot of tradespeople at home too. Instead they emigrated.
Irelandâs historic underdevelopment and underpopulation is paradoxically its biggest driver of economic growth now.
When the economy began to rebound, it seems to me that the question of housing was one which was again left to the market. But leaving things to the market depends on profit. When housing is an entirely profit driven business, houses only get built when there is profit to be had. That seems axiomatic.
It seems to me also that planning and land laws favour property holders far too much, and that powers like compulsory purchase orders and extra taxes for unused property are not used.
It also seems axiomatic that if you leave housing to the market in an environment where property laws favour the property holder and encourage hoarding and speculation, youâll get sky high prices.
And it also seems to me that we donât have enough people to build what we need to build as a society.
Again, thatâs only my loose impression because itâs hard to form firm opinions from Irish public debate. I could be completely wrong.
An apt comparisonâŠlaissez-faire the order of the day.
I think itâs also worth noting the impact of the civil service on housing, as with health. Iâd be fascinated to see what sort of reforms Sinn FĂ©in could get past the relevant departments.
They will presumably have an advantage that other left leaning parties havenât had before in that they wonât be the junior party. Too often the larger parties have resisted anything radical and relied on compliant AGs to back them up. But SF could challenge that status quo and overturn it but still find the civil service resistance to change upsets any hopes they have.
That maybe would be the sort of more boring and more practical implication of what People Before Profit were talking about last week when they were saying the apparatus of the state would try to defy a âleft-ledâ government?
Bit of a side issue but I wouldnât mind seeing a SF-led government with a strong mandate having the health portfolio.
The likes of Robert Watt do what they want and make absolute mugs of various FF & FG Health Ministers. (Admittedly said Ministers have no difficulty in showing themselves up on their own).
If the state decided to do something very radical like, say, build 70k dwellings a year itself (if it could find the capacity), what would be the impact on the private development of dwellings?
Like what? Rent Pressure Zones? Judicial reviews taken by resident associations against the âbig guyâ?
1 x DCC development (new build or renovation) costs over âŹ400k.
70k homes a yearâŠ.
The state has âdecidedâ to build lots of houses already. Iâm not sure that is that radical.
Itâs the actual execution of their decisions that proves quite elusive (and Iâd say that goes across parties)
We donât have enough construction workers to build half of that. The average age on a building site is now in the 60s.
I donât know about the average age being in the 60s but Iâd guess we have a serious labour shortage in the construction industry alright.
Apart from dramatically ramping up apprenticeship schemes and the like, it seems we have a problem there because if we import the workers they find it hard to find accommodation.
And if Irish construction workers return from abroad, they find it hard to find accommodation and probably donât want to live with parents.
At the same time, maybe we should be mindful of what life was like in tenements back in the day.
And perhaps Irish people should be mindful of the sort of sub-standard accommodation immigrants who come here are prepared to live in. The Irish expect a better standard, which is perfectly understandable, but at the same time, overall, most of us are reasonably lucky.
I donât know but something different to whatâs happening now where some people are becoming fabulously wealthy through property and children are heading off to school from a shit hole hotel. Whatever led us to that point head the opposite way.
Encouraging huge vulture funds to come and snap up houses by the the thousands⊠A handful of these funds probably dictate most of the rental sector⊠VLP own about a thousand houses nationwide if not more ⊠Or at least they did. Outbidding young couples or taking over scores of dispossessed homes⊠And renting these houses back to decent working people at ridiculous money.
Thatâs FFGâs legacy.
Theyâve failed on what they promised the electorate.
They were voted in repeatedly to close the gap. They promised the electorate that they would.
They havenât kept their promise.
They have failed at their job.