Housing crisis and reluctant renters

Sir, – Mark Mohan’s letter (June 26th) comes a day after the release of the annual Threshold tenant survey. Their results found that just 6 per cent of renters are doing so by choice, and that over half of renters are doing so because they cannot afford to buy their own home.

A result of poor housing and financial policy, and especially its use as de facto social housing, the private rental sector is now bloated with hundreds of thousands of people who should not and do not want to be there.

The best policy move here is not to increase the supply of private rental accommodation but to reduce the demand for rental accommodation. This can be best done by concentrating the next waves of housing output on the construction of housing to purchase, through “affordable” schemes and private purchase, to remove potential homeowners from the rental sector.

Considerably more effort also needs to be made on the construction of accommodation for social housing: direct build by Dublin’s four local authorities was less in 2023 than in 2018.

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The support of home ownership over renting is most certainly not a left-wing ideology, as any fan of Margaret Thatcher will know, but basic economic common sense in an Irish context. The average wealth of a homeowner in Ireland is about €330,000; the average wealth of a renter is €5,000, so for good or ill, ownership matters.

Finally, in relation to regulation of the private rental sector – the go-to ideological bugbear of the real estate industry – it should be noted that the European countries with the highest proportion of households renting, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland, are also those with the highest levels of rent regulation and security of tenure. – Yours, etc,

Dr LORCAN SIRR,

Senior Lecturer in Housing,

Technological University Dublin,

Dublin 1.