The idea recently floated by the Government to allow glorified garden sheds be used as housing under the umbrella of exempted development was emblematic of its unimaginative approach to solving the housing crisis. The solution has to be about much more than simply increasing supply.
From an engineering standpoint alone, you can be sure no council wants to see thousands of back gardens concreted over to create foundations for “accessory dwellings”. The runoff rainwater would flood already-crumbling drainage systems. With no extra resources to police the situation, the Residential Tenancies Board won’t want to see the creation of a new shadow sector of illegal rental properties. Cue a rental Wild West.
Decent housing requires input from many experts in architecture, taxation, society, planning, finance, health, demographics, transport, human rights and regulation. But it’s mostly about people and dignity. Embracing lower standards, including – for example – removing outdoor amenity space like balconies, in new apartments, is a mistake. Across the world, research has shown how balconies are hugely popular and beneficial as extra living spaces. They were even de facto mental-health supports during Covid when people were confined to their apartments.
State agencies, including the Land Development Agency, which calculated the penny-pinching savings from these proposals, should consider the long-term social and economic costs of building inadequate housing. We’re at risk of returning to mono-tenure, low-quality housing for poorer people. We can’t allow the built environment to be designed by quantity surveyors, accountants and lobbyists.
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Minister for Housing James Browne has said he must be “radical” to solve the housing crisis, yet smaller housing and reduced standards have been around for centuries. To save costs during the construction of workhouses in the mid-1800s, some had earthen floors instead of timber ones.
Here are five far more radical steps the Government could take now to start tackling the housing crisis.
Ban lobbyists
A genuinely radical plan to fix housing would involve banning face-to-face meetings between officials in the Department of Housing and property lobbyists. Submissions could still be made, but only in writing. Policymakers need to think for themselves and implement their own research rather than earnestly implementing suggestions of lobbyists.
The Department of Housing has frequently been accused of suffering from “regulatory capture”. This is when a Government body whose role is to serve the public interest ends up prioritising the interests of the specific industry or group it should be regulating. This was one of the accusations levelled at it after the creation of the now-defunct Strategic Housing Development system, for example, when property lobbyists boasted that the officials had taken their recommendations “lock, stock and barrel and stuck it in the new housing bill”.
A minister for housing who really wanted to be radical could go even further by seeking to change the rules and banning former politicians on the Lobbying Register (introduced due to widespread corruption in the planning system) from having unrestricted access to Leinster House and influential TDs and ministers. This is quite the privilege and should not be monetised. No record is even kept of these visits.
Bring in a residency requirement
As their next step, a minister looking to take urgent action on the housing crisis could introduce a residency requirement – say five years – for those purchasing any investment property, as is the case in Denmark and Malta. The sensible Swiss strictly limit overseas purchasers.
Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal are the only three EU countries with no restrictions on real estate acquisitions by overseas purchasers. A residency requirement would give households a better chance of finding somewhere to buy. There is no legal impediment to such a proportionate requirement in the public interest.
Introduce a new legal definition of “rent”
In some cases, landlords may circumvent Rent Pressure Zone limits on annual rent increases by increasing annual service charges significantly. Minister for Higher Education James Lawless called on Dublin City University to reconsider its service charge hikes (it hasn’t yet done so at the time of writing).
In the private sector, Ires Reit (and others) introduced extra charges on top of rent for the upkeep of the common areas, according to a report in The Journal. A new legislative definition of rent, to include all payments made by a tenant for use of their property, would help address this. Service and any other charges would then be covered by Rent Pressure Zone caps and limits not dodged.
Count new bed spaces, not just new homes
Counting output by the number of new houses completed each year is a crude metric, where a one-bed studio counts the same as a four-bedroomed house. If we were really serious about housing people, instead of counting an increasing number of smaller units – an average new dwelling is 36 per cent smaller in the last decade – we would also measure housing output by bed spaces (alongside houses) created as a proxy for the number of people housed. A lot of smaller houses accommodate fewer people but flatter the overall completion numbers.
Hold a housing referendum
Finally, according to the Mercy Law Centre, the right to housing is recognised in the constitutions of Belgium, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden and in the legislation of Austria, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. Globally, the right to housing is included in 84 constitutions.
The Housing Commission recommended that a referendum on a right to housing be held. (It would not mean everybody would have a right to be given a house by the State.) The Commission felt that although “the current constitutional position does not in and of itself pose an undue barrier to measures designed to tackle the housing crisis . . . the Constitution does present such a barrier”, particularly among Government actors and legislators. The Commission even helpfully suggested appropriate wording.
Dr Lorcan Sirr is a senior lecturer in housing at Technological University Dublin
