Under the terms of Minister John Gormley's new housing bill, measures will be introduced to enable people who qualify for social housing and cannot afford to buy under the affordable housing scheme get on the "property ladder". Local authority houses will be offered to their tenants at a knock down price, most likely 40%. The remaining equity will then be ceded to them gradually over a number of years until they own the property outright.
In the current economic climate this seems to be an extraordinarily generous offer to make on behalf of the Irish taxpayer. There are many serious housing issues that we face in Irish society - homelessness, extended housing lists, atrocious planning, lack of essential services, dodgy management companies etc, but a low rate of home ownership isn't one of them. Ireland has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world, far higher than most of our European partners. So why are we making it a priority to get social welfare recipients on to the property ladder? For whose benefit?
Every citizen has a right to a roof over his or her head, but they don't have an automatic right to own it. That is something that most people have to work and save for, and it is up to each household individually to decide if the sacrifices are worth making, and if they don't want to and decide to rent instead, then, so what? What's wrong with renting? The average rent is a great deal less than the average mortgage which makes renting sensible in some cases, but the government is now creating a form of social injustice by giving wealth in the form of houses to a small section of society for no reason other than to reinforce the myth that owning property is a public right. Why? If the price of houses is too high then leave the market alone and let it come down to a reasonable level. Why is the government proposing to spend hundreds of millions of our euros trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
Monday, August 4, 2008
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