By Martin Murphy
The depth of the state’s ongoing failure to fix the housing crisis has reached a new low. On Friday, 29 August, the Department of Housing reported that 16,085 people are condemned to living in emergency accommodation, with 5,014 children spending their childhood in homelessness part of this horrendous figure. These figures do not include the thousands of people experiencing hidden homelessness, or women who are living in domestic violence shelters.
Being evicted into homelessness is a deeply traumatic experience that severs people from their communities and sources of security. Homeless children have their development curtailed by precarity and overcrowded family hubs. For the sake of landlords’ profits, tenants are evicted to raise rent, or so that landlords can sell their properties for enormous profits.
Stress, shame and social isolation
These conditions lead to stress, shame, social isolation, and lives being cast into doubt. It is common for children in emergency accommodation to have to change schools due to large commutes. This heightens children’s sense of loss, for parents this can lead to depression and a sense of deep failure to their children.
Year on year, the Government has failed to deliver social and affordable housing, while developers are paid the inflated market cost of new builds to be used as social and “affordable housing”. Developers such as Glenveigh and Cairn homes can boast of hundreds of millions in profits, while the corporate landlord IRES REIT has recorded €16 million in profits this year alone.
System failure
It is clear that the housing crisis is not a result of failure in supply, it is a result of suppliers drip-feeding the market to cream huge profits at the expense of ordinary people. If we do not take immediate action, the number of homeless people will increase year on year. There are currently over 150,000 vacant properties and 700 public land banks in the state; these must be utilised. Nothing short of a radical mass movement on housing can solve this crisis. Our movement must demand immediate rent cuts and freezes, and a complete halt of no-fault evictions.
To truly tackle the housing crisis, we need a break with the capitalist market and its profit motive. We must take private developers’ resources into democratic public ownership. All of these resources must be merged to build a publicly managed construction company that can be used to construct high-quality social housing on public land. Only socialist planning in this way can truly end the housing crisis.
