Rundale

By Aaron Downey

“Housing Crisis Mural – By Barbara Kruger” by Joey Z1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The housing crisis is getting worse. A recent report by Savill’s found the housing delivery in the 26 counties compared to population growth was the worst of nine high income countries it examined. Last month homeless figures reached a record high, including over 4,000 children in over 2,000 families. According to the Residential Tenancies Board, the average rent of new tenancies in Dublin is now €2,098. Rent increases are far outstripping average wage increases.

The existing public housing stock has been left to decay and there is an increasing reliance to build and manage social housing on independent Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) which vary  in terms of their management and rent schemes. 

Add to this an under-resourced construction sector, with apprenticeships starting as low as €7.16 per hour, and dysfunctional for-profit asylum and homeless emergency accommodation systems and you have a recipe for chaos and the perfect space for the growth of the fascist right.

How did we get into this mess?

Housing in the south has been a state-subsidised form of welfare, seen as a way to create a stable middle class invested in the system. Bishop Lucey of Cork argued in the 1930s that public housing was “Bolshevism” and that a “home-owning citizenry will make more compliant citizens”. Large-scale public housing building did happen a number of times in the 20th century when the private market was totally unfit for purpose – in response to tenement collapses in Dublin city centre in the 1960s for example.

Even when the state did build public housing it encouraged its sell-off. For example, in the 1980s ‘surrender grants’ were offered to council tenants to assist them buying property elsewhere, leaving council housing to be reserved as a site of last resort for the most marginalised resulting in lasting stigma. Social housing remains in that role today, being seen as the exception rather than the rule.

Private housing meanwhile has been seen as the best investment opportunity for individuals, particularly during periods of boom like the Celtic Tiger. This has created a proliferation of smaller landlords, often with only one or two properties who rely on the rent extracted from their tenants as a supplement to their wage or pension.

As the cost of building has gotten more expensive the state has increasingly relied on large developers and institutional investors to build at scale. This is incentivised through tax breaks as well as opportunities to skirt building regulations in the form of things like student living. These developers look at housing as an alternate way to guarantee return on investment in the absence of high profit margin industries, and want to maximise their profits for the space they have available. This results in building high density, high rent apartments. Larger funds that own over 100 properties now make up about 20% of the Dublin private rental market, a noticeable shift over the last decade. 

As social housing development has slowed to a crawl, the state is also now leasing on the timescale of decades from such developments to provide ‘social housing’ and subsiding private rentals via Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), in effect transferring public money to private landlords. This has the added effect of allowing landlords to set higher rents knowing they can receive guaranteed rent if they can meet the minimum requirements of complying with tax legislation and rental standards (that local authorities rarely even bother to enforce). This has pushed those who historically could only afford to rent in public housing into the private sector.

The housing system currently exists as an elaborate system for transferring wealth from public to private hands. The origins of this lie in an ideology that promotes state support for individual homeownership, one of the tenets of neoliberal capitalism being that the private sector can always deliver better than the public. It is the perfect concoction of ‘socialism for the rich’ in providing public funds to those with assets and leaving those of no property to struggle. But private interests cannot commodify a human need like housing without the issues we are seeing now, namely rising homelessness, unsustainable rent increases, and the related fragmentation of communities.

Housing needs have gotten so bad, and the state is so ill equipped to sort it out, that the government parties argue we need to just keep throwing money at those causing the problem and refuse to regulate their behaviour, lest the whole house of cards fall down around us. For example, the ‘eviction ban’ was, in fact, a ban solely on no fault evictions comparable to basic tenancy legislation in many European countries. However, fear mongering about private landlords ‘leaving the market’ and causing a glut of evictions if this is implemented permanently has scared the government off putting any more regulations on the sector. Landlords and developers are regarded as ‘too big to fail’ and the ever worsening housing crisis is kicked down the road until the next electoral cycle.

Ultimately any solution that does not challenge the power of private property and the class interests of landlords directly is doomed to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Housing organising

Housing is still the number one issue reflected in opinion polls, even after concerted push by the far right and ruling class media to politicise migration. However as the above makes clear, the capitalist class and its state have no desire to end the housing issue and limited potential to ameliorate it. So what are the opportunities and challenges to organise around this?

I believe that organising around housing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a revolutionary upheaval of Irish society, and that a full upheaval is ultimately what is required to solve the housing issue and decommodify this public good. Having been involved in housing and homelessness organising since 2018 I can see several issues posed by the current context.

A significant number of people who are not landlords but do own their own homes are happy with the current system (even as it begins to affect children, grandchildren etc.) as rising house prices guarantee inter-generational wealth transfer and offer the ability to access credit even if they do not have a liquid asset. Tenants still only make up around 30% of the population overall, and they are concentrated in cities, and building solidarity across tenancy lines is challenging. 

Public housing offers one avenue for organising, CATU have made inroads in a number of blocks as local governments are obliged to engage with the residents and ownership is centralised. However, austerity era funding issues remain, local vacant site levies remain uncollected, and the government is not meeting its targets in retrofitting social housing, nor its new build targets. We must also be careful about stealth privatisation via regeneration or reinforcing the narrative that public housing should just be for the furthest behind or that it is inevitably substandard.

The list to access social housing is long and opaque and organising to gain access to housing is seen as a fight over scarce resources i.e., ‘skipping the list’. Given the wait times and limited supply of new or refurbished social housing, this is not entirely untrue.

One of the greatest issues faced in housing organising is that it exists much like a high turnover workplace with many small petty landlords who are often the most directly exploitative.  This raises challenges in scaling up and collectivising struggles into wider campaigns or political movements. This is changing as big landlords enter the market and newer generations and arrivals to Ireland are locked out of home ownership. The arrival of such landlords presents its own organising challenges; issues ranging from physically accessing these apartment blocks as they are often heavily securitised or surveilled, the wealth profile and class interests of people renting high end apartments, and also the total social atomisation of many private rental blocks. But it also affords opportunities for collectivising a struggle not found elsewhere.

Ultimately the private rented sector lacks regulation and what regulation there is lacks enforcement, and tenants have limited legal power to organise. We have taken steps in CATU to win – through public pressure, direct action, blocking evictions, occupations, pickets (both in real life and virtual) – and we have won back deposits, kept people in homes, gotten repairs done and reopened community spaces. Each of these has built working class militancy and made housing a site of struggle. However, the greatest tool of economic power in the hands of tenants, withholding rent, has not been wielded due to the problems of scale and lack of legal protection. Fighting housing issues is time consuming, personally risky, and often hard to link up beyond individual problems due to our labyrinthine housing system. A ‘water charges’ style movement on housing never developed in the way people hoped, and there is not even a partial constitutional solution like Repeal despite best efforts – and we must ask, would a right to housing referendum even pass in the current moment of conspiracism and reaction? This is not to discard any of these tactics but to highlight that they must play a part in a greater whole.

More questions

It is worth asking ourselves whether we can look at alternative, traditional levers of power that exist in workplaces? How do local authority workers feel about the consistent underfunding of their roles and underdelivery of housing making their jobs more difficult and unfulfilling? How do construction workers feel about substandard pay and bogus self contracting in the development of private housing? How do maintenance workers feel about the outsourcing of council housing repairs and the undermining of unionised public jobs? Would a state construction company meet the challenge of scale while supplying decent jobs; and who is prepared to politically deliver that greater rupture with business as usual?

Further what is the likely outcome of the next great political moment, the general elections? Perhaps not on the radical left, but after the 2019 general election many people’s hopes for fixing the housing crisis lay with Sinn Féin who recorded their largest ever vote share focusing the election on that issue. Recently their support has plummeted and the party fought the local and EU elections on the terrain of migration and crime in an attempted to answer the nascent far right movement and the best efforts of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to distract from their own failures. However, Sinn Féin’s recently released new housing policy document – which deserves an article of its own – offers a clear signal that the party trying to shift the conversation and fight the next general election on its own terms. Its impact on public support is yet to be seen.

I hope the above has shown that the housing system cannot be fixed for working class people by the self-correction of the market. However, a question that lies open to us as housing activists is what is the concrete balance of political and economic forces open to us – who has the political will to grasp the nettle of the housing crisis, challenge private property, and ameliorate it (even slightly), and open the door to more transformative demands? And how do we best use our time to build power that can be wielded strategically to force the government into action?