On Tuesday, the Minister for Housing, James Browne, will present yet another new plan to the Cabinet on how to help solve the housing crisis. Part of that will be to ensure the building of more and smaller apartments.
The current cap on one bed apartments at 50% of new developments will be scrapped. More units will be allowed per lift, as part of getting more into the same space, the minimum size of a one bed ‘studio’ (they used to be called bedsits) will be reduced from 37 square metres to 32 square metres, and for three bed apartments down to 76 square metres.
All of which will cut the cost of building the egg boxes by up to €100,000 per unit. In the hope that our benefactors among the foreign investment funds who have been unhappy with their take from all of this will be tempted back. It is also hoped that new planning legislation and changes will speed up the building of the high rise blocks.
The clear intent is to increase the number of apartments being built in general, and to increase the proportion of one and two-bedroom units as a part of that. Which throws a rather different light on the emphasis that is placed on all sides of the argument about housing on the need to supply “family homes.”
One and two bed apartments are not family homes. Do they even merit the title of being a home in any sense?
Of course, there is a need for smaller units, and there have always been the bedsits that suited younger single people perhaps working or studying after they left their own family home.
They were never regarded as permanent accommodation for families, and their supply was never regarded as a central part of public housing strategy. The reason they are now is that the demand for housing is being driven increasingly by immigration and that a large proportion of immigrants are single young people mostly coming here to work or to study.
It is true, as Social Democrat spokesperson Rory Hearne said on the Week in Politics yesterday, that one of the main reasons that young Irish people are leaving is the difficulty they have in finding a place to live but few of such commentators ever recognise the elephant in the room.
Even last week when Taoiseach Micheál Martin recognised that population growth is “creating pressure” on housing as well as schools, hospitals and other areas, he did not directly connect that to immigration. That is despite the fact that 90% of population growth is, and will continue to be, driven by immigration.
That is something that is central to the most recent CSO population projections and yet Martin like his opponents was quick to fall back on their default that the island of Ireland now has a population of more than 7 million for the first time since the end of An Gorta Mór in the middle of the 19th century.
Martin referred to this as an “extraordinary achievement” and that the growing population is one of the main attractions for foreign investment. It is not an “extraordinary achievement” and it is one not achieved by ourselves but one that has been directly driven by foreign investment.
Overseas corporations are not coming here because of the growth in population. The population is growing mostly because of their demand for labour. The overall demographics of the state are coming more to mirror the demographic makeup of the workforces of the overseas corporations.
The demand for labour is largely being filled by people coming here from overseas, and predominantly now from outside of Europe. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of young Irish people continue to leave.
If there is an “extraordinary achievement,” and it certainly is, then perhaps it consists of the fact that at a time of virtually full employment that more young Irish people are leaving than other Irish people, of an older age cohort, are returning. A net outward migration of Irish people.
Housing does play a part in that but perhaps younger Irish people are not only finding it difficult to afford a place to live even when earning a reasonably good income, but have expectations that run higher than a rented one or two bedroom apartment. Especially if their inflated expectations might run to have a family here. Something which anecdotally many of us will know from within our own families appears to be more easily achieved abroad than it is in Ireland.
It is also the fact that while the opposition and others have berated successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil led governments for their failure to meet housing targets, that has mostly been because demand has vastly exceeded the targets that were set in the original National Development Plan.
The reason for that is immigration. In the ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ housing plan published in 2016 the target set was for an annual new build of 25,000. That was based on ESRI research which itself was based on official population projections which were quickly rendered meaningless by the huge increase in immigration that began in the years prior to the Covid Panic – barely slowed by the restrictions in 2021 and 2022 – and gathered even greater pace since.
The ’Housing for All’ strategy which was to cater for demand between 2021 and 2030 was forced to take the population surge caused by immigration on board – without once mentioning it as a key driver – and a new annual target of 33,000 was set.
Ironically, while the Central Bank has estimated that the number of new builds in 2025 will be around 33,000 that will be regarded as a shortfall because immigration driven demand had meant that targets had again to be revised sharply upward. The target for this year was 41,000 and that is generally agreed will have to be upped to 50,000 and even 60,000 if new and pent-up demand is to be met.
That is where we are at now. It has nothing to do with lads skippering out in doorways and back alleys as was the traditional image of the homeless. It has to do with a demand that is due to the fact that the Irish state has allowed the foreign investors mentioned by Micheál Martin to basically set the agenda for the future development of the Irish state.
That now includes an increasing reliance on build-to-rent high rise apartments and the overseas investment funds who they hope will build them.