Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Jamie Bryson is the editor of Unionist Voice and a prominent Loyalist activist.
*****
Homelessness has been in the news a lot recently, as it deserves to be. In most normal societies, even though it’s not really polite to say so, homelessness, in the sense of people living on the streets, or very marginal accommodation, is a very different issue to the high prices in the rental and property market, and difficulty for people in finding a place to live.
The bottom line is that, in most normal societies – to the extent that people living on the streets can be regarded as a normal thing –that type of homelessness is isn’t an accommodation issue, it’s not really a housing issue, it’s a mental health issue, often closely associated with alcoholism and drugs of abuse.
People, when threatened with losing their accommodation can usually access social services, or at worst find a friend or relative who can put them up on a couch until they get sorted. People who have addiction and other mental health issues find it much harder to do that – often because their problems have alienated them from those support networks. They have problems,we need to address those problems, but actual housing isn’t the issue.
It is a sign of how serious our situation is that people who are clearly together in other areas of their lives – they have relationships, children that they care for, we have homeless children, think about that, children who are homeless – and that’s a sign of how serious the situation is. For thousands of people, the reason that they are homeless is that there just isn’t a home for them.
That’s not normal by any standard.
And we have so many suggestions for a solution to the housing crisis. Podcast listeners might know about Dr Karl, if you don’t, then look him up, he’s worth it. Anyway, he’s a medical doctor, and one observation that he likes to make is that if a disease has one cure, then it probably works. If a disease has many cures, probably none of them work.
The reason is simple, if you have a cure that works, why bother researching to find a second one? And if you have more than one cure, surely one works better than the others, so why not ditch the worse ones?
This is true for our housing crisis too. There are lots of nonsense solutions proposed, I’m just going to look at one. Airbnb is being held up as a villain. Thousands of homes are being rented out at huge profit,when they could be used to house needy people, or so the narrative goes. And it’s true, there are about 23,000 listings for Ireland on Airbnb.
But the story just doesn’t add up. First off, many Airbnb listings are for people’s spare rooms – they make some money on the side renting out the room to tourists. They probably don’t pay tax on it, that’s a whole other issue, but it’s an issue for another day.
There are about 8,500 entire homes advertised on Airbnb at any given time, but a significant portion of them are not the same 8,500 all the time. They are people who go on holidays or are away for a short time themselves, and while they are away they make some money by letting out their house while they are away. Again, yes, tax issues, also planning issues; but again, no, different issue.
There are actually only 7,000 dwellings on Airbnb that seem to be for short-term rent throughout the year. Well seven thousand – wouldn’t that house 7,000 families, that’s about the size of the housing problem? Well, yes and no. first of all, even if we have a shocking homeless figure, like many of the Airbnb lettings, it’s not the same people all the time – some people are getting housed, others are falling into homelessness. In a country of nearly five million people, 7,000 dwellings is trivial.
To put it in context, in 2006, we built about 90,000 dwellings, so that 7,000 was about one month’s of building. If you buy that analysis, then the homelessness problem would disappear in a month. We’re not building at that rate now, there will be about 15,000 completions this year, but even at that rate, the housing problem should solve itself within four months – and that’s clearly not happening.
The flaw in this thinking is that it doesn’t recognise that we have a systemic problem. It’s the same problem as with proposals to build pre-fabs, the proposal to build on city parks, the proposal to cajole elderly people to move to smaller houses, the proposal to do away with building standards, as if the cause of homelessness was the outlandish desire not to have to sleep in the same room that you cook, and all the other half-baked ideas scrawled out on the back of a beermat in the Dáil bar.
We have all these solutions because none of them work. And we don’t have the one solution that actually works, because it offends too many people. In Ireland, we don’t tax property. This is simply crazy.
It doesn’t mean that we pay less tax, for sure. But we pay tax on income and on sales. We tax economic activity, but economic inactivity gets off scot-free. Every other country balances their tax around a whole range of items, including property taxes. And it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you tax brown bread, and don’t tax white bread, people will buy more white bread.
So in Ireland, all our taxes are piled onto economic activity, onto job creation, onto adding value. So all the talent, the innovation, the investment and the energy that should be going into that is instead going into property speculation.
It means that Ireland, by far the most thinly-populated country in Western Europe, has by far the highest land prices. And we can’t change it, because people want their children to be able to get on the housing ladder, but not as much as they want their own house price to keep going up.The cure to homelessness is one pill that people just won’t swallow.
