Sir, – Fintan O'Toole's article on snobbery and the housing crisis was depressingly accurate ("Snobbery is at the root of the housing crisis", Opinion & Analysis, October 13th).
The number of people who will be competing to pay over half a million euro for a bog-standard former council house, described as “lovely” solely due to the fact that it is in Dublin 4 rather than Dublin 10, is beyond pathetic. This house is probably destined to be rented out, at an equally excessive level, based solely on its location.
The tragi-comic irony of such snobbishness and its accompanying false sense of superiority, which too many people possess, is that many of them could not possibly afford the rents that the poorest (presumably “less worthy”) among us are being asked to pay.
If they already have a mortgage, they usually cannot afford a second and rely on tenants to pay that mortgage for them. This means, of course, that the tenant is the person actually paying the mortgage (or most of it), without ever being able to own the house that they are paying for!
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Here’s a thought. Instead of the banks financing these “beggars on horseback”, obsessed with their postcodes and social class, let them finance ordinary working people, who can prove excellent credit history and at least a decade of paying high rents, by reducing the deposit required and setting them on a mortgage path. This will allow many more people to put their money into a home they will one day own, instead of the seventh circle of hell, which is the rental market today.
What are the chances of the Government compelling the banks to do this, by passing the necessary legislation? Given the fact that over half the Oireachtas are landlords – not much. – Yours, etc,
JESSICA FREED,
Crumlin,
Dublin 12.
Sir, – I have to take issue with Fintan O’Toole’s proposition. He states that social housing was previously built specifically for working people and that we need to return to this basic idea. He suggests the way to avoid turning public housing estates into ghettoes is not to stop building them but to make social housing available to a wider range of people.
In comparing present circumstances with those of the 1930s, your columnist misses one fundamental difference. In the 1930s, and indeed for many years later, there was no drug-fuelled antisocial behaviour that has destroyed the living conditions of so many ordinary working people. Government policy and tenancy rules make it almost impossible for landlords and home-owners to rid estates of this scourge. – Yours, etc,
JIM MANNIX,
Monkstown,
Co Dublin.