Home. Eoin Ó Broin
numbers of people are affected by and concerned with the failures of our housing system. In newspapers, television shows, casual conversations or arguments in pubs and parliaments, housing is the topic of the moment. But how adequate is the language we are using to describe what is happening around us?
We talk of ‘market failure’ as if the provision of housing operated inside some kind of private sector bubble free from State intervention. The word ‘failure’ suggests either a lack of success or a problem caused by the omission of some required action that never took place.
We use the word ‘broken’ suggesting that our housing system once worked but has at some point in its development fragmented into pieces. The word describes something that was badly designed or poorly implemented. But also something that with the right intervention could be put back together again.
More and more we talk of ‘crisis’ as instability, trauma and hardship increasingly come to describe people’s experiences of trying to access secure and affordable accommodation. For some, ‘crisis’ also speaks of a crucial or decisive turning point, a sudden change of course or, in drama, a high point immediately preceding the resolution of a conflict. For others, ‘crisis’ is the inevitable outworking of the cycles of the market economy as boom turns to bust, only to repeat itself endlessly.
In response, reformers ponder how best to ameliorate, but not eradicate, the worst impacts of this unavoidable sequence of events while revolutionaries agitate for some imagined rupture and new beginning.
Some prefer the word ‘emergency’ both because it speaks to the immediate risks facing so many people while at the same time demanding urgent attention and greater intervention to get the ‘crisis’ under control. But ‘emergency’ also sounds like an accident that requires you to be rushed to your local hospital. These ‘emergency’ departments never go away, they just see different people on different days with different ‘emergencies’ without end.
Others talk of ‘scandal’, ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’. The first suggests something that offends or causes reputational damage, presumably of those responsible. The second and third imply an unforeseen event, something natural possibly, maybe even on a greater scale than originally imagined.
For me none of these words work. They fail to fully grasp what is going on around us. Housing is not a purely ‘market’ activity and the State, past and present, is intimately involved in every aspect of its financing, building, pricing and allocation.
And surely ‘market failure’ is a tautology. Allowing the market too much of a role in the provision of housing is always destined to fail. History, if nothing else, teaches us that.
Indeed, talking about ‘market failure’ suggests that it has an opposite called ‘market success’. Such a thing may exist for the few, but it definitely does not exist for the many.
Housing is a system involving both State and market. There are also non-governmental, academic and media agents whose role is important. And crucially there are real people not just living in, or seeking to live in, but financing, planning, building, pricing, allocating and paying for the places they come to call home.
Our housing system never worked properly. It was never in a fixed or whole state only to be broken and fragmented somewhere along the way.
It certainly is in crisis but whether this is a key moment in the creation of something better is not yet clear. And are we really consigned to the Hobson’s choice of an inadequate amelioration or an impossible revolution?
For tens of thousands of families and individuals the inability to access secure and affordable accommodation certainly is an emergency demanding urgent action but was this really an accident, the result of a bad fall or clumsily decision?
And of course what is going on in housing today is a scandal but I wonder if those responsible are really suffering any repetitional damage. Unfortunately, too many people think of the hardship they see around them as the result of some natural disaster or human catastrophe, a localised problem rather than a system failure.
Each of these words describe a piece of our housing problem but none of them quite get to the root of the meaning of what we are living through. This is not just about semantics. Words matter. How we describe what we see in our society is in effect how we diagnose the problem we want to solve. Bad diagnosis can lead to bad treatment with the patient never recovering.
The word I would choose to describe our housing system is dysfunctional. The Greek origin of the word connotes something ‘bad’, ‘abnormal’ or ‘difficult’. The Latin root speaks to a ‘lack’ of something. In more recent times the word means an abnormality or impairment in an organ or system. But it has also come to describe the disruption of normal social relations.
This gets to the very heart of the matter. Housing is not just a physical thing, the bricks and mortar, timber and steel within which we live. It is a relationship between the providers and the occupiers, between the State and the market, between people who create homes for families who in turn create communities.
A functioning housing system is one in which all people have access to safe, secure and affordable accommodation to meet their needs. It is a system in which everyone has a place they can call home.
Of course, our current housing system functions for some, those who have access to a home. Nor is there any doubt that there are those who benefit from the dysfunction, whose profit is dependent on the system being perpetually bad, abnormal and difficult. But for many, indeed globally for the majority, accessing safe, secure and affordable accommodation is uncertain and is certainly a struggle.
Today in Ireland, and across much of the world, our housing system is completely dysfunctional. It is bad, abnormal and difficult. More importantly these negative experiences for millions of people are the result of abnormal and impaired relationships between the key players in the system. And these are damaging wider social relationships, creating hardship, insecurity, fear and anger.
If you believe, as I do, that good-quality, safe, secure, appropriate and affordable accommodation should be for the many not just the few then understanding the way in which these relationships have become abnormal and impaired during the course of the modern history of housing provision is crucial if solutions are to be found.
Real People
Of course words, no matter how descriptive or evocative, cannot fully capture the lived reality of housing stress facing tens of thousands of families and individuals. Every single day, ever growing numbers of people find accessing secure and affordable accommodation difficult if not impossible.
This book is motivated by their stories and is written in an attempt to help solve the problems they face.
Una and Sean
Una is a full-time mother. Her partner Sean has a badly paid job. They used to live in private rented accommodation with their five children until the landlord raised the rent to an impossible level. In the two years before receiving their Notice to Quit rents had increased 20 percent.
They presented to the Council’s homeless desk. With only nine years on the housing list they still had two years to go before an allocation. All the desk clerk could offer them was hotel accommodation on the other side of the city.
Every morning they would leave the hotel at 6.30am and take the two-hour bus journey to drop the kids to school. Each starting at a different time. Sean would head off to work while Una would wander the streets waiting for collection time, staggered from 2.30 to 4.30pm.
Then they would make the long bus journey back to the hotel, tired and cranky, stuck in rush hour traffic.
The hotel room was clean but there was no place to cook or to store their stuff. Homework was a nightmare with all five children trying to read and write sprawled out on the large double bed. Health and safety meant the children couldn’t leave the room unattended. It was suffocating.
And then there were the arguments. The children’s behaviour started to change. Una’s relationship with Sean was under real strain. There was