Providing housing for those who cannot afford to buy or rent their own homes is threatening to become a major issue for this State. Already Focus Ireland says it sees people who have had to wait months to find an affordable flat before moving out of B&B or hostel accommodation. The gap between demand and supply is enormous. In 1996, some 30,500 households were on the housing waiting list. Last year local authorities built 3,200 houses but sold off 2,100 existing houses. Voluntary housing associations provided a further 756 flats and houses. At this rate it will take 16 years to house all those on the waiting lists - so long as nobody else joins the queue in the meantime.
Perhaps Senator Brendan Ryan accurately diagnosed the problem when he wrote, in a recent Simon Community newsletter, that "housing need cannot be met by the market alone. Leaving housing to the market means leaving people without homes or in second-rate, insecure, rented accommodation. No country has solved its housing problems by exclusive reliance on the market. Every country which has tried has ended up with a crisis of homelessness and its associated cardboard cities."
Already the sight of people sleeping in blankets in doorways is commonplace in Dublin. Clearly, what we are doing is not working and, unfortunately, matters are likely to get worse before they get better. It is unlikely that we, as a society, are yet ready to pay the high price required to resolve the accommodation crisis for people on low incomes. Community welfare officers will pay rent supplements amounting to an estimated £96 million this year to people on low incomes. The Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Dr Moffatt, recently told the Dail that if this money was switched to building local authority houses the effect on waiting lists would be negligible. The sum would provide about 1,300 houses and he contrasted this with the figure of 35,000 households receiving rent supplements.
What may have to happen is a return to large-scale building of dwellings by local authorities - even if not at the level sought by Focus Ireland. Net increases of 1,000 local authority houses per annum simply fail to meet the need. This raises questions concerning the sale of local authority houses. On the one hand it is a good thing that people in local authority dwellings can improve their financial status and the security of their families by buying these dwellings. Yet the building of these dwellings was paid for, in the first place, by taxpayers, some of whom themselves are finding it extremely difficult to meet mortgage repayments. So does it make sense, at a time of housing shortage, to allow local authority dwellings to be sold off?
In a recent adjournment debate in the Dail, the Dublin West TD, Mr Joe Higgins, spoke of investors buying houses in local authority estates and then renting them at high rates to people who cannot afford to buy their own homes and who are sometimes also on the local authority housing waiting list. This is a situation that needs to be remedied. It is vital that we recognise now that we may be beginning to move into a crisis and that the time has come to work out how to respond.