At the beginning of this year, Dublin housing minister Bobby Molloy declared that he did not believe there was a housing crisis. This was in the face of charges that less than 10% of housing applicants had been accommodated, that there had been a 50% increase in private rents and a 500% increase in tenant evictions in the private rented sector since the present government came to office, and that over one third of today's wage earners fall below the house-purchase threshold.
There are 39,176 households in the 26 Counties ``in need of local authority housing'', according to Bobby Molloy. These figures include 622 Traveller households in need of permanent homes, and 1,406 Traveller households who are seeking local authority housing. There are an estimated 10,000 people in the Dublin region alone who are homeless and sleeping rough. Nobody knows the figures for Cork and Galway or around the rest of the country, but they are at least as much again.
``The problem of housing for asylum seekers is not a problem about refugees. It is a problem of a scandalous shortage of accommodation which the state has allowed to develop,'' says Dublin City Councillor Christy Burke.
The current housing crisis arose because local authorities sold off their housing in the mid-1990s and because, under the planning regulations in the 26 Counties, areas without any services could be designated as development land, with huge windfall gains to landowners, in return for little except a brown envelope. The promise of enormous price increases for land encouraged its retention in the hope of further increases. The government and local authorities did not use their powers to compulsarily purchase farming land at corresponding prices. Instead, county managers happily designated agricultural land as development land.
£400 million to landlords
The government responded with a reduction in capital gains tax from 40% to 20%, in the hope of `encouraging' landowners to release development land, and by introducing tax relief schemes for investment in housing, whereby even tax on income from other sources could be written off against investment in, for example, building holiday homes, which play absolutely no part in reducing the housing crisis.
The subsidising of landlords and developers has gone crazy. In a market that is claimed to be free and unregulated, government intervention in fact works to the advantage of property owners. Last year, £115 million was spent in supplementary rent allowances, private housing grants cost the Exchequer a further £43 million, tax relief on mortgage interest cost £160 million, and tax relief for private landlords and urban renewal developers amounted to £89 million. A round total of over £400 million paid into a sector which was also accruing huge returns from the market.
£18 per person per night for emergency accommodation
The conditions in which many asylum seekers are being forced to live are only a reflection of this overall crisis. Many refugees, because it is an emergency, are housed in monstrously overcrowded rooms, with strangers sharing bunk-bed accommodation, sometimes six to a room. They may live in hostels where there is a curfew, where they have nowhere to keep their food or cook it, and where health and safety conditions are appalling.
In the Eastern Health Board region, the board pays £18 per person per night, and sometimes more, to hostel owners and owners of B&Bs to secure emergency accommodation, according to Focus Ireland. ``It is a scandal, which typifies the way the housing crisis has been exploited to the benefit of landlords, and the exploitation of the homeless,'' says a spokesperson for the Anti Racist Campaign in Dublin.
Lordlords make killing
Recently, the Department of Justice placed advertisements in the press for accommodation outside of Dublin. According to the Department, they have received offers of 3,000 beds, which are now being circulated to the respective local authorities. The Anti-Racist Campaign is concerned about the state of this accommodation and asks whether local authorities outside of Dublin will pay the rates that the Eastern Health Board has been allowedto pay out. The Department of Finance is to reimburse local authorities for the costs of housing the refugees. There are no provisions in place, however, to ensure that landlords don't make a killing out of them.
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What land shortage?
The Dublin Government has repeatedly said that it is the shortage of available land which has held up house building. It is hard to credit this (see picture above of empty/vacant property on a half mile trip through the southside of Dublin).
There are 222 acres of serviced land, some with buildings, which could be refurbished, in empty barracks in Naas, Fermoy, Castleblaney, Ballincollig and Kildare, where at present the Department of Defence is paying security firms £500,000 per annum to security firms to guard.
This summer, Clancy Barracks, with a serviced site of 13 acres in Dublin's heartland, is to be evacuated. The cost of these sites would only amount to an inter-departmental transfer, were the imagination there to use it for social housing.
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