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Niall Keenan founder and chairperson of the Shared Ireland.
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Sinn Féin are calling for a complete ban on co-living. Their housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, a very talented politician who’s been on this podcast before, not sure if those two are connected, said announcing this that the new housing minister Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil, when he was in opposition was vehemently opposed to co-living, and he, O’Brien, had challenged his predecessor Eoghan Murphy, and then Taoiseach, now Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, that if they thought it was acceptable, they should try living in it.
In case you’re not sure, co-living is basically a student dormitory type arrangement. People get bedroom of about 12m2, about the size of a smallish single bedroom, and share kitchen, living room and bathroom facilities in a block with maybe dozens of other residents.
I’m pretty sure that Eoghan Murphy and Leo Varadkar, and Darragh O’Brien for that matter, would not be interested in that type of accommodation, but to be fair, I don’t think that there would be nobody who it would suit. If I was a student, or maybe coming to a city to start my first job, it could be quite a sociable way to live, get the right crowd and you could party every night, that might be quite attractive to some people if it was a cheaper way to get accommodation.
But that’s the thing. It’s not cheap. I’m not clear of his source but Eoin Ó Broin quoted a price of €1,300 per month for the privilege. Never mind students, if we had a normal functioning housing market, that would be hugely expensive for people in good jobs.
There’s an international rule-of-thumb that it’s reasonable to spend about a third of your take-home pay on rent. A single person in Ireland would need to be grossing €70,000 per year to justify that. The average full-time salary in Ireland is less than €49,000. Queuing for a shared bathroom and trying to squeeze your shift into a single bed might be a viable lifestyle in your early 20s, it’s not something that someone aspires to do when they are well into their career.
And that’s the problem with this. Co-living isn’t being offered to people who are up for the lifestyle. It’s being offered to people who simply can’t find, and can’t afford anything else. And Eoin Ó Broin makes another excellent point about this. Giving permissions for these co-living projects pushes up the price of land – if you can wring €1,300 a month out of someone for every tiny bedroom that you stack high, why would you go to the bother of building decent housing?
Ó Broin is absolutely right that these have the potential to just lower the bar for everyone’s accommodation. And yet Ó Broin’s solution for is absolutely wrong. He’s demanding a change to the planning act that basically bans co-living.
Why would we ban it? There are some people who would genuinely like that type of accommodation, although I don’t think that there’s so many of them, but even if they didn’t matter, this is not going to solve the housing crisis, it’s not going to improve things even a little bit.
Sure developers may, instead of building co-living, build some houses and apartments more suitable for the bulk of the population. But the core housing problem in Ireland is not type of dwellings we’re building, it’s that we’re building far too few of them, particularly in the centres of our towns and cities, most particularly on brown-field sites in the centre of Dublin.
The solution to this that dare not speak its name… is simple. It’s simple, it works internationally, but Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the parties of the builders and the landlords won’t do it. The solution is to tax property.
If you tax industry A and you don’t tax industry B, simple logic tells you that you will attract more investment and economic into industry B, and the expense of industry A. Hoarding land in Ireland is vastly profitable, and it attracts basically zero tax.
A small number of hugely wealthy individuals are much richer by sitting on vast land banks and keeping them almost entirely off the market, just dripping enough onto the market to keep them in yachts or racehorses or whatever it is they are into.
If that hoarded land was properly taxed, it would cost its owners, not pay them, to keep it vacant; that would push them to sell, and accordingly push down the price of land and therefore housing. Ireland is almost unique in the developed world not to have any significant land tax, instead we heap all our taxation onto PAYE workers.
If there was a plentiful supply of affordable housing, there would be no need to ban co-living, the only market for it would be people who genuinely wanted to live like that.
But Sinn Féin won’t say that, People Before Profit won’t say that, nobody in the opposition will call out the government because for all their demands to tax the rich, they want to stay pretty vague about how they might tax the rich, and in particular they don’t want to tell their voters that they have to push down the value of the voters’ house, if voters’ kids are to be able to afford a place.
There’s not much incentive on the government to stand up to vested interests, when the opposition is so careful not to offend them too. And that’s why, in Ireland, you have to be earning €70k in order to be properly able to afford to live like a teenager.
