CIAN Prendiville, Limerick spokesperson for People Before Profit has condemned the government’s Housing for All plan as a continuation of the failed policy of relying on the private market.
The former councillor Cian Prendiville said:
“This plan is all smoke and mirrors, but fails to actually deliver the kind of action Limerick renters and first-time buyers need. This plan will not deliver enough social housing to drastically cut housing waiting lists. It promises only 10,000 new build social homes each year nationally. But even these homes will come mainly from private developers selling 20% of new developments to local authorities. Once again, the number of new homes we get will be left to the market and those seeking profit. It is a scandal that people will continue to languish on these housing lists for years.
“There is no commitment to impose a rent freeze or even set up mechanism by which landlords could be obliged to reduce rents. It only links rents in Rent Pressure Zones to the rate of inflation. This ignores that fact that rents in Limerick and elsewhere are already too high – and most economists predict a rise in inflation.
“Of the €4 billion annual spend on housing, €1 billion will flow directly into the hands of private landlords through schemes such as HAP.
“The affordable housing scheme proposals mainly relies on a shared equity scheme. But the evidence from Britain is that such schemes only lead to price increases in the longer term.
“There was an alternative to reliance on the private market.
“The government could have used the public land to build social and affordable housing. Sites such as the Opera site, Mungret, and Cleeves could be used to provide public housing on public land. We must introduce genuinely affordable housing, linked to peoples incomes not market rates.
“Most importantly, we need to set up a publicly owned, democratically-run construction company to build homes at cheap cost and ensure that they meet proper environmental standards.”
The housing for all plan has expectedly been poked at from all sides of the Irish political salad of party’s. Either saying it’s unrealistic on how those targets will be reached, that the capacity in workforce, to build these planned houses simply isn’t there, while others seemingly ignore that criticism of the plan; that Fianna fail has pitched it’s party’s future political success on, but rather, say it hasn’t gone far enough. While using the tried and failed populist route of saying a possible solution to a housing crisis, is rent control. From Berlin, to San Francisco, to Sweden, it’s failed before, and it will fail again.
The Irish housing crisis, is just that, a crisis, it will take a steep climb of actions and planning to pull the market down from the clouds it’s currently perched in. And to offer a naïve false solution in the midst of it, is, at least, negligent. Similar to how Fine Gael got us here in the first place.
