the Private Purchase Sector
Building Communities, Not Just Homes
Improving Building Control and Consumer Protection
Planning for the Future
Managing Land for the Common Good
Meeting the Challenge of Climate Change
Ending Housing Inequality
Conclusion
Coda
It’s Time to Raise the Roof
Nye Bevan’s Vision
Hatert Tower
The Promise of the Democratic Programme
Acknowledgements
To Lynn … for everything but mainly for putting up with me.
To Ailbhe, for advice, assistance and patience.
To Iñaki, Maite, Mikel & Irati for poking fun at my procrastination (oh yeah and the great company).
To Izei for the voice message … maitia idatzi dut.
To Cooper, because if I don’t Lynn won’t speak to me.
To Bóthar Buí (Sarah & Kieran) for space to think and inspiration to write (oh yeah and the amazing shrimp).
To Peter O’Connell for good advice and even better contacts.
To Conor, Fiona and all the team at Merrion Press for making the impossible happen.
And to Adrienne in MacCarthy’s bar Castletownbere for the Hewitts Whisky.
To the significant number of housing policy analysts, practitioners, public servants, activists and constituents whose experiences, writings and conversations have given me a wealth of knowledge on which the words that follow are based.
To Michelle, Simon, Nicola, Frank and Paul for comments on the draft.
Deficiencies and Terminology
The original intention of this book was to address the Irish housing system in its entirety, i.e. in both the South and North of Ireland. Unfortunately, due to limitations in my own knowledge, time and space I have had to reduce the focus to just the housing system in Southern Ireland. Throughout the book the term South of Ireland refers to the entity officially known as the Republic of Ireland. Given that I am a Sinn Féin TD and committed Irish republican I doubt you need me to explain the rationale for this.
Preface
Paul Mason
Over the past thirty years, Governments all across the world began to insert market mechanisms and market norms of behaviour into many parts of society where they do not exist.
Where there was resistance, they did it by force. Bus and train services that were once run in the public interest were forced to ‘compete’ with each other; so were schools, universities, even the people who serve school dinners and clean the offices.
At the same time, more and more of us were forced to behave as if we were a tiny, individual bank. We were taught to evaluate our success not just through our wages and what they can buy but through the ‘assets’ we own, and the numerous lines of credit we could command.
These two relentless forces – marketisation and financialisation – formed the core dynamics of a strategy known as neoliberalism. A third dynamic – globalisation – made us prey to the avarice of rich elites across the world, not just our homegrown ones; and forced us to compete in a labour market that begins at the local bus stop and ends at a bus stop in Shanghai.
As a result, in the space of two generations housing got transformed into a weapon in the hands of globalised finance.
This is how it works. If you can constrain the supply of something, the price of it should go up. With housing that means constraining the supply of land and buildings.
But if, at the same time, you put unlimited supplies of cheap money into the hands of people who already have money, something unusual happens. Land is acquired, apartment blocks are built – but the prices seldom fall. Because property has become a one-way bet.
The price of a home no longer responds to the supply and demand of buildings but the supply and demand for money.
As long as Central Banks operate a cheap money policy – whether to encourage speculation as before 2008 or to keep the economy on life support as after 2008 – the chances are that property prices rise faster than incomes and rents.
Since 2015, Ireland is second only to Canada in the developed world when it comes to house prices rising faster than incomes, and high up the global league table when it comes to rents:
https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/.
If you add in the boom for speculative commercial property building, the picture in many cities and large towns across the developing world is of a frantic building boom and a shortage of affordable places to live. The housing market no longer responds to human need, but to the rhythms of finance.
Supporters of free-market economics insist this outcome is natural and spontaneous. In fact it is the result of relentless coercion and intervention by the State. The rundown terraced house, with every room turned into a bedroom; the ex-council flat turned into an Airbnb while people huddle under sleeping bags in doorways; the lights-off apartment blocks, bought off-plan and left empty by some footballer or crook. We walk past the evidence every day.
Periodically it all goes bust, and some bankers flee the country, and some politicians are disgraced and people on radio phone-ins get shouty.
But then the State steps in, in the form of the Central Bank, saves the speculators and floods the market with more cheap money, pricing ordinary people out of affordable homes some more.
The only thing that’s going to break this cycle is political action by the State. In the first place, it’s a question of separating the market for housing from the market for financial assets.
You can place limits on foreign buyers. That means limiting the forces of globalisation that are worshipped with a religious zeal in politics; they will call it protectionism. But it is just protecting families, communities and social cohesion.
You can cap rents. That means limiting the power of finance – because rents are always set exactly at what the lenders to landlords need, not what renters
