Earlier this week, the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government released a report from the Housing Agency detailing the social housing list – households in need of a permanent home, which the State is obliged to provide. The report itself is here and it sets out in some detail the composition of the very large group of people judged to be in need of a State-provided home.
In total there are 98,318 households in need of a permanent home. I can’t find anywhere in the report how many people this represents – remember a household can be a single person or a couple with 15 children – but from Table 2 on page 4, I calculate the minimum number of people represented by the 98,318 households to be 176,147. It might also be worth saying that there is suspicion in some quarters that these figures collated by the Housing Agency contain some element of double-counting and further, there is concern that the bookkeeping which monitors those coming onto, and off of the housing list isn’t as robust as it needs to be. An audit of the figures by the Department of the Environment might be warranted.
Ireland famously has an overhang of vacant property after the construction boom during the 2000s. Over 300,000 dwellings are in fact vacant but vacancy arises for a large number of reasons including homes being used as holiday homes. It is estimated that the overhang of vacant properties – the number of vacant properties over the long term average – is over 100,000 of which 23-33,000 are on so-called Ghost Estates. So on the face of it, the country has a surplus of housing and a sizeable housing list. It would be simplistic to suggest there is an opportunity to completely eliminate the housing list with existing resources as there can be issues with the location, size and type of housing (the latter is particularly important for those with disabilities); there are also issues with the lack of State finance and arguably there are too many State distortions preventing property reaching its true clearance price.
The Housing Agency’s report provides various analyses of those seeking permanent homes, and makes for interesting reading. In light of the news reported here this week of Westmeath County Council bulldozing and levelling an estate in the village of Ballynagore (also called Ballinagore), let’s take a look at the households in need of a permanent home in Westmeath (Westmeath excludes Athlone which is 32 kilometres from the village of Ballynagore where the houses were demolished, and Athlone has an additional 1,417 households in need of a home on top of the 1,285 households on the list in Westmeath county)
(click to enlarge)
NAMA Wine Lake 
I flagged the opportunity to everyone I could think of in 2009. No one was interested. As a country, we could do something completely amazing in terms of social housing right now. People could look back in 20 years and say ” wow – how fantastic what they did”. It would tske imagination and vision.
@NWL
The decision by West meath Co Council to demolish three almost fiully complete bungalows beggars belief. I have commented on another thread on this kind of economic and social stupidity.
If I were in Government, I would not give Westmeath Co Council one red cent fo capital spending for at least twelve months. If the best they can do with money is to burn it by demolishing buildings, then there is a strong argument that the council should be abolished by the Dept of the environment.
If the council cannot improve the situation in the county then at a minimum they should be prevented from making it worse.
https://namawinelake.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/the-first-housing-estate-bulldozed-by-a-council-in-ireland-%E2%80%93-before-and-after-pictures/
@Krystyna
I must presume from your name that you are not Irish and therefore may not understand fully how utterly prejudiced, selfish and greedy Irish decision makers are. Their logic, which goes back to the famine, is simple and was encapsulated by the late Brian Lenihan Snr by the phrase’ shure this little island is big enough for everbody’ to a complaint that emigration was being forced on people back in the 1980s.
The idea is to force the surplus people and their children from employment to emigration. During the famine it was usual for the landlords to demolish the houses from where people had been evicted.
As a society we are more clever now. We demolish the houses before they are completed, so that people cannot even dream of living in them.
Thats the Irish for you!. Shit-arse cute.
@Krystyna
I mistyped the Brian Lenihan Snr quote above
It should of course have read, or be understood to mean,
‘Shure we can’t all live on a small island’ .
What is a housing list? It’s a list of people who would like to rent a house below cost. This is not a measure of demand. Everyone would like to rent a cheap house. you can earn 35K and still get on the housing list.
To obtain state housing you accrue points according to a scale devised by a state official. Rational people will judge whether it is better value to pay market rent or else meet the criteria for cheap rent by adopting their behaviour to qualify.
Council housing is a method used by the state to control the lives of the poor by directing them to live in state designed and operated ghettoes. The unspoken assumption is that the poor people cannot be trusted with money so it is better for the state to pay them housing benefits in kind rather than give them the money directly to choose their own accommodation on the open market.
The vacancy rate for the state may be high overall but on closer inspection vacancy rates are three times higher in rural than urban areas, due to holiday homes and a structural lack of rural jobs. Vacancy rate in Dublin is 8.6%, probably not that far from a typical natural urban residential vacancy rate of 6%.
This is immoral. Westmeath Co Council could surely have found some unemployed tradesmen within the county and employed them to finish the houses and take some families off the housing list. Some people get some employment and the Council get some income (rent). Instead the taxpayer and ratepayer picks up the tab for restoring the site to a green field.
@ Kirsten
A housling list is a list of people/families who would like to obtain affordable accommodation and probably escape the clutches of unscrupolous landlords charging exhorbitant rents – subsidised by the taxpayer.
[…] pay their mortgages via movements to local authority lists. That is not a simple process either, as NamaWineLake has recently […]
[…] their mortgages via movements to local authority lists. That is not a simple process either, as NamaWineLake has recently […]
Taking underhoused families and plonking them in the middle of nowhere isn’t the answer. Priority for any scheme to bring unfinished/vacant housing into public ownership should be given to houses in towns where there is access to schools (particularly ones not mostly consisting of prefabs), jobs, public transport etc. At least then such a family might have the option to go without a car and save serious money towards rebuilding some financial stability.