I’d be pretty sure that was all council houses back in day …so what you have is people who were once beneficiaries now refusing others getting same start …or better again they all sold up and made a fortune off their council House in boom and now the buyers don’t want it going back to that …
Yet many would have you believe that the vulture-like private sector would inevitably result in higher costs due to their vulgar profit seeking I just don’t understand.
Why do something yourself when you can sell state resources and services to your friends and connected parties for a song or award them state contracts worth millions.
It’s a complete abdication by successive governments of their responsibilities relating to housing that has created a market for those funds.
You had the property bubble with a large cohort trying to be a developer/landlord, leading to a massive oversupply of poorly built units in areas that didn’t need them.
Didn’t notice much hand wringing when the funds came in a bought those units and spent money rectifying issues with fire safety and planning conditions.
When there are massive overruns on state built housing schemes there will be more hand wringing.
The current total capital spend of gov in Ireland is about €10 billion per year. This has doubled since 2017.
A fairly simple calculation would suggest that if we need 25,000 new housing units per year, then it’s roughly going to cost about €6 billion plus per year to fund this. Say we need to do that for 5 years at least so a total capital spend of €30 billion +
Of the €10 billion, about a quarter is for housing or about 13 billion over 5 years. So if we’re going to exclude private capital in funding developments then either we find an additional €17 billion ourselves (presumably from additional borrowing rather than tax increases). This borrowing is on top of the funding of current services and funding of the other 75% of the Capital investment program.
Our current national debt is about €240 million, the highest per capita across the EU/UK. While interest rates are low now, largely driven by the ECB, I’m not sure we can always assume that will be the case and if the tide turns being out on our own could be a lonely place to be.
By all means look to funnel the wall of PE money towards increasing supply through funding new projects, addressing specific needs or types of housing etc but any talk of looking to exclude it completely is to my mind against our own self-interest.
The problem is when you hand these things over to the free market they have little control over the market prices and people get prices out of basic services and home ownership prospects.
The level of public housing need isn’t a hard calculation tbf. Take the current public housing lists in any LEA add the typical % of the population who requiring public housing that are currently between 14-35 plus maybe 5 extra % and build within 5 years in those LEA. Solves people living where they want, builds the capacity and award some of these contracts to local medium sized builders.
Money into the local economy’s, accommodation provided and a reduction on the demand on private housing. In the meantime allow private developers build for the private market (along with restrictions on buy to rent).
A further commitment to building a certain amount of public housing in line with CSO and census figures into the future after the capacity is reached. We cannot allow this to happen again