AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Throughout the election campaign we have had the political parties vying with each other to solve the No.1 issue on the doorsteps. Each party is promising to build more houses whether the number is 30,000 or 50,000 a year. Their mechanisms for bringing houses within reach of buyers vary: ranging from shared equity to ‘help-to-buy’ schemes but they are all aimed to solve the housing crisis.
The point is though, that we don’t have a housing crisis. We have a home crisis, people need homes, they want the hope of owning a home, of having their own front door, a place which is affordable, appropriate to their needs or a home they can rent.
The private sector keeps coming up with the same old building models, regardless of what people need or want. We get high rise soulless apartment blocks built for returns on investment funds, while developers build three-bed houses in dreary rows at the end of long commutes further and further away from the centres of towns and cities.
The cost of putting services to greenfield site escalates the price, while infrastructure, school places and necessities like surgeries and transport lag behind developments. Commuters pay dearly for their commute and push up carbon emissions. Meantime, cities and towns are full of derelict, unused buildings and empty sites.
People don’t want homes at nearly half a million that they can’t afford. Young people need starter homes where they have their own front doors and don’t have to pay eye-watering rents, so why not build small starter homes? There are log cabin homes available starting at just over €60,000, great so long as there is somewhere to put them and you have planning permission to live in them (currently denied).
People like the idea of the 15 minutes city where everything is near to hand rather than facing an hour and a half commute to nowhere land, so why not build infill homes on vacant sites or recondition abandoned buildings and over shop premises, with a service to identify and advise on premises in addition to grants.
Older people may want to downsize but still have something left to put in their back pocket without having to pay eye watering prices for smaller properties, so something similar to starter homes might suit them and at the same time free up their previous homes.
The home crisis’ upsets the apple tart’ as Bertie Ahern puts it, causing job shortages because nurses, teachers or Gardai can’t afford to live where they are needed. Companies can’t get homes for their employees, our brightest and best are emigrating and if we talk about bringing in extra builders where are they going to live?
Instead of the same old solutions what is needed is a can-do attitude, the kind Irish businessman Niall Mellon applied when he discovered the plight of people living in shacks in Imizamu Yethu township, along the coast from his holiday home in Llandudno, on the outskirts of Cape Town. Niall’s solution to the crisis there was to set up the Niall Mellon Township Trust, inviting Irish builders and volunteers to put together funds for travel and accommodation and come out to Cape Town and build homes – 22,000 of them over the years in different locations. These weren’t grand affairs, just breeze block single story homes where people had their own front doors. Now that the Government there have their own housing programme The Mellon Educate Charity are building and renovating schools in townships.
Sister Stan (Stanislaus Kennedy), founder of Focus Point, is another can-do person reducing homelessness, having worked to redevelop the former Sisters of Mercy Convent in Stanhope Street, Dublin into 80 apartments and 10 terraced homes. Focus is now converting the former Dominican Convent in Cabra, Dublin into 60 housing units.
How many sizeable convents and monasteries are there dotted around the country, lying virtually unused? What about the unused office blocks, emptied out by working from home? Where are the examples of faster, less-costly building methods, the inspirational home designs elsewhere which really work for people and communities or innovative ideas like Belfast’s Take Back The City community initiative designed to meet community needs?
We need to plan differently for homes – if you fail to plan you plan to fail.
