The Gist: The Landlord's Game
The Government has a new policy to increase housing, which is to keep doing their failed policy, but even harder. This is the Gist.
After months of flopping about, the Irish Government decided it was time to stop messing about on the edges, rowing about Schrodinger's Independents and saying the opposition were telling lies, but as Gaeilge.
The moment had arrived for this government-in-no-great-hurry to finally get down to the heart of the main problem of the nation- Housing.
Starting from the top, the Taoiseach took the lead. Firstly, there was the little problem that all the housing numbers the Government had chanted before the election had turned out to be baloney. Just absolute duff figures, used to rebut arguments that we had a housing crisis and that the Government had failed to address it.
The Taoiseach explained that everyone had relied on Darragh O'Brien, the Housing Minister, telling them how many houses he'd get built (40,000). Then, after the election, it turned out those numbers were absurdly inflated when the CSO came out with some actual figures on completions (30,330).
This explanation does require us to imagine that the Taoiseach and other coalition party leaders haplessly considered Darragh O'Brien a more oracular source of statistics and prediction than, say, the Central Bank who were projecting final housing completion numbers of around 32k as early as September 2024.
One Fianna Fáil TD told the Daily Mail: ‘We’re left wondering what was actually achieved by his housing plan that wouldn’t have happened without him being there.’
Darragh O'Brien is no longer housing minister, so he didn't address any questions about why he had given his Taoiseach and all the other members of the Government their regrettably false sense of personal success.
Instead he has moved on to tackle public transport, making (and I swear I did not invent this) his first signature policy the delivery of infrastructure that just doesn't turn up when the numbers say it ought to be there.
Yes, the Minister for Ghost Houses is now the Minister for Ghost Buses. Has any single politician ever had such a record of haunting failure?
Rent Lobbyist Pressure Zones
Then, almost in the same breath, the Taoiseach laid out his plan to turn things around. We had to be realistic, he told us. The Government wouldn't build houses for everyone, so we needed to make building more profitable for private developers. As these developers are now (unlike the last FF housing boom) largely build-to-let investment firms, the key profit lever is to do away with rent pressure zones.
We should be clear what this kite actually means. It is the direct continuation, now the election is over, of the previous government's housing policy. From March 2023:
"The result, just to look at it again, was that the Government decided that they would see thousands of people made homeless, as a deliberate result of their public policy, so that landlords (institutional or individual) could see higher returns from their property investments."
The alternative to mass homelessness is that someone has to pay for housing all the people who need houses, but who cannot afford to buy one.
As the government has promised its property-owning voters that it will never reduce the price of housing (see April 2023, The Gist: Where did the houses go?), the possibility of making housing more affordable to buy is off the table.
This leaves two sources to provide new housing. Either the state builds it, spreading the cost of providing this housing across all of the tax base (humans and unfathomably wealthy companies alike) or investment firms pay for it and then recoup the costs with extra profits directly from renters through rent, forever.
Obviously, the result of the former would be cheaper accommodation for the people who live in the housing than the latter. You can spread the costs to the state through the whole economy, likely recouping more in additional economic productivity and social mobility than it would cost in actual euros spent.
If nothing else, consider the boost to population alone arising from all those 20somethings suddenly released from their parents' back bedrooms. Talk about a Big Bang.
But doing so is now ideologically rejected. Meaningful quantities of State-provided housing has become the river Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refuse to cross. On the far shore is the possibility of housing in general becoming more affordable. And this is the one thing they will never do.
So the governement has again made the conscious decision to see masses of people made homeless- families, single people, old people- in order to allow institutional investment firms to make higher profits through raising the rent on people who are not voters they care about.
Forget Ghost Houses. This is a Zombie Policy, which still shambles on long after it has been shown to have no life or hope left.
If you'd like to listen to me talk about some of the above, as well as the other things which came up during the Campaign Gists, I was on the EchoChamber Podcast doing exactly that.
Health issues, including a broken arm from an unnecessarily dramatic ice/road/bike interface, appear to be clearing up and I hope to be able to type more readily this week.
