Home ownership figures released by the CSO today have been met with calls for the state to scale up investment in public, mixed-income housing.
Reacting to the figures, Cllr. Éilis Ryan (Workers’ Party) said:
The CSO figures prove that, for most middle income households, getting a mortgage to buy a home is an impossibity. Landlords and investors now dominate house sales. It is time that we face up to this fact.
Cllr. Ryan was responding to CSO statistics indicating that home ownership in Dublin has dropped by a fifth since 2000, to a historic low of 60% last year.
Cllr. Ryan said:
The gap left as home ownership falls will be filled either by the private landlords or by expanding our public housing system to accommodate all those who wish to take up the option. And in contrast to the rent gouging and evictions we see in Dublin’s private rental market, public housing provides a lifetime’s stability and rent which is tied to income – not a landlord’s whim.
Home ownership has been historically high in Ireland, something the Workers’ Party councillor said has not worked out well for the Irish economy, commenting:
We have seen in Ireland that home ownership has boomed only when the government offers massive subsidies to developers, or when banks lend irresponsibly. Neither of these is good for the economy – or for middle-income households who end up with unaffordable mortgages.
She concluded:
We need to give all households the option of taking up a lifetime lease within an expanded public housing system. For all the commitment to ‘mixed tenure’ development, private housing in Ireland has become a landlord’s game, and does no good for our communities at all.