There was something a little tired about the responses that Glenveagh chief executive Stephen Garvey gave to reporters this week about the new Government’s housing targets.
Off the back of the Dublin-listed developer’s full-year results, Garvey said on Thursday that the Coalition’s plan to deliver 300,000 homes by 2030 was “very ambitious” and “what the country needs”.
He would not be drawn, however, on his view of how feasible the targets were. “You need ways of controlling costs,” he said. “You need capacity, which is land, services and infrastructure. And you need capital.” Deliver those three things first and you will be on a “trajectory” to hit the 300,000 mark.
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In fairness to Garvey, it’s not Glenveagh’s or any other developer’s job to solve the housing crisis.
Certainly, they have a role to play in its solution, if only for the fact that there isn’t much competition from the public sector to deliver at the scale and price required to ameliorate the situation sometime before the heat-death of the universe.
Speaking last September, Garvey even praised the “ambition” behind the more radical idea of a State-owned residential developer, a notion mooted by some Opposition parties. However, he queried whether something like that could be resourced and stood up quickly enough to make a difference.
Who knows? But at least he’s open to suggestion, which is more than can be said for the Government parties.
A “special” Cabinet session on housing in February appears to have been a big nothingburger, with such innovative solutions as activating brownfield sites and bringing short-term lettings back into the market discussed at the nothing-is-off-the-table meeting.
Despite days of speculation to the contrary, the Coalition was seemingly dissuaded from leaning on the favourite crutch of governments past: more tax breaks for developers.
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It’s certainly not that the State is inactive in the property market. Government policies amount to a complex tangle of tentacles, as Eoin Burke-Kennedy wrote recently, reaching into every corner of the market and every side of the equation, from buyers to renters to developers.
It’s just that for all that complexity, all that additional money that has seemingly been lobbed at the problem, the situation appears to be worsening by almost any metric. House prices and rents are rising, and so too are homelessness and eviction notices.
You would be forgiven for being cynical about the Coalition’s chances of finally winning this long-running war using the same weapons as its predecessors.
