Housing provision is a conversation that has transcended time, generations, and governments. A series of 3 panel discussions will debate and examine housing through the lens of architectural history and social evolution from the 20th to the 21st century. What have we learned from the successes and failures of the past and how do we comprehend the challenge today?
Speakers:
Prof. Nasrin Seraji (UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy), Dr Ronan Lyons (TCD Economics and LSE), and Bulelani Mfaco (Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland). Chaired by Emma Geoghegan (Head of Architecture, TU Dublin).
Good evening, everyone. You’re all very welcome here to the Living Room space at Housing Unlocked. This space is an active site of discussion and debate throughout our entire public engagement programme, and I’m really happy to see it so used and alive. So this evening you’re very welcome to this talk.
It’s part of a trilogy of talks, Housing: A Timeless Challenge. We started last week with Talking Housing Histories, and this week’s talk is Talking Housing Now with speakers Ronan Lyons, Nasrin Seraji and Bulelani Mfaco, who has just arrived in the door. You’re very welcome.
So if you want to find out more about the extensive public engagement programme related to the exhibition, please visit housingunlocked.ie, and you’ll see the details of all of the events and bookings. So unfortunately our chair Emma Geoghegan can’t join us this evening, but myself and Nathalie Weadick will co-chair this evening’s event.
So our first speaker is Ronan Lyons. Ronan is an Associate Professor of Economics and Director of Trinity Research in Social Sciences here in Trinity College, Dublin. His academic research has been widely published in leading peer-reviewed journals, and he’s a frequent contributor to national and international media.
Ronan is also a consultant to the IMF and is the author of the quarterly Daft.ie reports, which you are probably all familiar with. The title of his talk is “Housing in Ireland: Trends, Needs and Policy”, and he’ll discuss the relationship between housing supply and affordability. Over to you, Ronan, you’re very welcome.
Thanks very much. And thanks for the invitation to speak. And thank you all for coming this evening. I’m going to rely quite a bit on the screen, so hopefully you can all see the screen. What I’m going to do – there will be a lot of charts,
But hopefully each chart will just make one point. So collectively, they’ll be a story. They’re not just random charts that I put together. In terms of the messages, though, for me, I think there are four key messages. The first is that supply
Is the most important determinant of whether housing is affordable or not. We can see that time and again across international studies – and even if you just look at Ireland in the last few years – if there’s more housing available, it’s more affordable. And I think we shouldn’t
Forget that when we’re trying to solve the current challenges. And the second point I wanted to make, that’s about: whatever your demand is, you need the supply. And if you don’t like supply and demand as words, that’s fine. We can think about housing requirements instead of demand and housing capacity instead of supply.
Supply and demand tend to be kind of loaded words, and I’m not really fussed about market or non-market. I’m interested in meeting our housing requirements with the adequate housing capacity. In terms of what those requirements are, we have a tendency in this country to underestimate our need, right –
I’ll come back to that – and this is kind of key because there are numbers around how much housing we need over the next 10, 15, 20 years, and those numbers are incredibly conservative. And if you think it from the point of view of a civil servant, it might make sense.
Well, if we assume really strong growth and there isn’t, then we’ll have been accused of being over optimistic. But if you flip it around and say: well, if you have strong growth and you didn’t plan for it, you’re actually constraining the country and the potential of the people
In terms of meeting their needs. So rather than seeing growth as some sort of tempting the gods, right: Oh, we could assume the strong growth, but why should we? Let’s kind of dumb down our growth projections. Turning it on its head, what if there’s really strong need
For additional housing and we haven’t built it? In the same way, what if there’s a really strong need for schools or university places and we haven’t provided for it? Where are we then? So growth as a challenge, not just an opportunity. And the numbers – I’ll go through them – are basically
50 to 100% higher than the policy targets; and the policy targets are about 50% higher than where we are now in terms of new homes getting built every year. So we’re a good bit away from where we need to be. So how do we get there?
But I’m not going to claim I have all the answers, but what I will claim is if I were a policymaker, I’d be focused on one thing in particular, which is the viability. Profit or not, you can have non-profit housing, but let’s look at how much
It costs to build a home and how that compares to people’s incomes. And if you’re a policymaker involved in housing in Ireland you can’t say to me: “okay, you need to be this far up the income distribution to afford a minimum spec home” To me, you’re not doing your job well. And
That’s sort of where I think we are now. But let’s let’s look first at what this graphic says: how many homes are available for sale. I just picked Dublin as an example. On the first dv ay of each quarter, going back over the last 15 years and that’s on this bit.
And if you go up, it’s what happens prices. So you can see it is like a downward sloping pattern. The more homes there are on the market at any particular point in time, the less upward pressure or the more downward pressure there is on prices. And that is a funny one, right?
Because if I said this about widgets or Mars bars or even cars, most people would go :”Yeah, of course, that makes sense”. But when you switch to houses, people are like: “Oh, I’m not so sure anymore”. And there’s a thing called supply scepticism which seems to be unique
To housing. People don’t believe that supply is the answer when there’s a shortage relative to underlying need, and I think some of that due to various explanations for that. But the overwhelming evidence is that this is true. It’s true long run, short run, Ireland, other countries every single time.
This is the rental market, right? The same same period, same city. The fewer homes there are available to rent at any particular point in time, the more upward pressure there is on rents. And the red dots are where the two segments are now.
And apologies for the guys over here. In the sales market the red dot is not far off four and a half thousand, which is what you’d expect if you want kind of roughly stable prices. On the rental side, we’re kind of plumbing new depths in terms of availability,
And therefore we’re seeing record increases in open market rents. And that tells me this one you can kind of solve reasonably easily by building more, in particular, estates of housing. But this one is a much trickier one to solve. Right. Because in part,
We seem to have an issue in this country around building rental accommodation. There’s been a drive over the last few years and now sort of the policymakers have tired of that and they’re going to probably get rid of it.
But if you get rid of it, what are you going to replace it with? Because not adding to the rental stock doesn’t seem like a particularly good option given we’re so far below where we need to be. But just Dublin alone instead of 400, we want 4000
Rental properties on the market just to keep rents from rising. So we’re way below where we need to be in terms of supply. That’s the short run version. This is the long run version. How many homes have we built per household since World War Two? I know the history one was last week,
But I can’t stop throwing in a bit of history. Right. And these red lines are where I think we should be. Adding – let’s say – to two and a half homes per household per year. And you can see we’re kind of coming off a very low supply, but it is increasing.
But in the last few years, we have built fewer homes and at any point on record; back to World War Two. And we can see that. And again, I’m going to pick Dublin out because I think Ireland is urbanising. It’s urbanising its jobs, certainly, but it hasn’t been urbanising its housing.
And as a result, we’ve ended up with really long commutes. But if you run the numbers right, – this is an ugly looking thing. But let me walk you through it – Right. So we start here in 1970. In 1970, Dublin was building more homes than the rest of the country (per need),
And housing in Dublin was no more expensive. But if you’re under a certain age, this will blow your mind. There was a time in Ireland – not that long ago – when Dublin housing was no more expensive than anywhere else in the country. And the reason was Dublin was adding enough homes, right?
You go all the way through to the mid 1980s. That’s still roughly true, right? You can see what’s happened. Dublin is adding fewer and fewer homes relative to what’s being added elsewhere. But there’s a premium emerging for living in Dublin, but it’s kind of 15, 20%.
And then Ireland Inc finds a business model. It’s in the single European market. – all of a sudden there’s growth – Right. And then by the mid 2000, Dublin has still providing less and less housing relative to the rest of the country. And housing is getting more and more expensive.
And that continues into the crash – and by 2015 – Dublin is adding half as many homes as it needs to compared to the rest of the country. And housing is twice as expensive. And that is a 50 year process or a 40 year process in terms of under building decade on decade.
And Dublin here is like a placeholder for all the cities in Ireland. Since then, it’s got a little bit better and Dublin has provided more housing, but it takes time to work through that. If you’ve built four decades of a backlog, you’re not going to solve it in four years.
So we’re going to take persistent demand and not just Dublin, in Cork, and Galway ,and in Waterford, and in Athlone ,and in other towns around the country. We’re going to need to build a lot more housing than we have been over the last five decades.
And as a quid pro quo, at least in proportionate terms, we need to be building less one-off rural housing than we have been over the last five decades. So supply really matters. But what’s the need or capacity really matters? What’s the requirement?
So over the last five years, – this is kind of the now into the future – But Ireland has been on what the officials call a high migration, low fertility scenario. Right. So if you take the number of women between 15
And 45 or 50 and how many children do they have per year? Right. That’s falling. That’s a low fertility, but high migration. How many people are coming to this country versus leaving? Right. Our housing targets are based on a low migration scenario: low migration, low fertility.
What that means is if you run through the numbers, – and these are the different population projections over time – these are the high migration ones. And they say: “okay, different starting points”, but where are we going to be by 2051 or whatever? And then these are the official housing targets here.
These are the population estimates on which the official housing targets are built. And then you put in the low migration scenarios here. And then what’s actually happening is we seem to be tracking this one here, this red line. Now, at the moment, it doesn’t make a huge difference.
But the longer we go on with a high migration, low fertility scenario, the more likely we are to end up at a population of something like between six and a half and 7 million people by mid-century. And again, think of it as not like me trying to be optimistic about the country.
But this is a problem that we are challenging and that we have to address. If we have six and a half or 7 million people, what kind of infrastructure will we need? What kind of housing, schools and public transport and universities, all that kind of stuff.
And housing is a good one here as we’re just getting into this. If we assume that migration collapses ,and it doesn’t, what kind of problems are we building for ourselves? And if you look at this, this is trying to get at that point, what is net migration?
So what’s the cumulative net migration between 2019 and 2029? The official targets say we’ll have maybe about 200,000 people moving to the country over the course of the decade. We are on course to beat us within four years. And even if it slows down, we probably have twice as much migration.
And this is not to say migration is bad, far from us. We are completely dependent. Like all high income countries, we are completely dependent on net migration to the country to provide the basic services we need. But what it means is that we need both initially when when people move to this country
Or move back to this country, they need somewhere to live. And the more people move to this country, there will be a fraction that stay. And there is a delayed response in the natural increase. Even though it doesn’t increase the fertility rate, it increases the number of women aged between 15 and 49.
And the bigger that pool is, even for a given fertility rate, you have a boost in a couple of decades down the line in terms of of housing need. And this is just to show like the housing targets are based on net migration collapsing between 2019 and 2024.
What’s happening with a COVID pause is the opposite. This is the number of PPS numbers that are issued every month, excluding Irish people and excluding this year Ukranians, because that’s a slightly different category. You can see that actually over the course of the last decade,
The number of moving into the country has been going up, not down. And that doesn’t include Irish people who left and then came back. And that is now a positive number as well. There are more Irish people moving to Ireland every year than leaving
And they won’t need a PPS, but they are adding to housing need. And as you can see, the under 20 population increases with your net migration. So if your net migration is down here as the policy targets assume, you have a much smaller population under 20
Than if you’ve got higher migration and we’re on the higher migration path. I’m not saying we absolutely, definitely will stay in the high migration path, but I think it would be silly for policymakers to not even consider
That we stay on the high migration path, given it’s the one we’re on at the moment. We need a range, not a single number. We need a range of possibilities. And it has to be in there as one of the possibilities. So on the third point, it’s easy to get distracted by population
Growth and say; “okay, so it’s really about population growth”. But if you think of all high income countries, say pick a random high income country in your head, go to 1950, more than likely average household size of four where they now average household size of two or heading towards two.
So even if your population stays the same, you need twice as many homes as you go from households of four to households of two. Not only that, if you’re urbanising in the same century, you go from houses of four people, predominantly in the countryside
To apartments of one or two persons in urban areas. So it’s not just that your housing need doubles. It’s a different kind of housing. It’s housing for different kinds of households in different locations. And one of the challenges is that this is something that I feel
If I had a time machine, I could go back and give out to the officials in the 1990s. You can spot this. You don’t need a PhD. You can look at other countries and go, it’s clear what’s happening. And yet we didn’t turn our housing system in the 1990s in that direction.
Instead, seven out of every eight homes that we’ve built over the last 25 years have been larger, outside urban areas rather than for one or two person households. Regardless of the size, they’re not built for one or two person households. They built for bigger households.
And they’re typically not in the in the urban areas. So what this looks like: this is the average number of persons per household. And there it is going from four down to two, but then all of a sudden it stops in 2011. Why does it stop in 2011?
We stop building homes. It’s basically that simple. You’ll get people who interpret that a different way and go: “Oh no, Irish people are just different, we decided we changed our minds in 2011”. And this is preferences, not the lack of housing. I just don’t buy that.
I don’t buy it for the reason that people are angry about housing. This is just saying for the same population, the smaller your household size, you need hundreds of thousands more homes. We are building 20,000 homes a year.
So this is a big, big deal when thinking about housing need over the long term. But the key point is over here, again, a bit of a messy graph – but bear with me – when do you leave the parental household?
If you are in one of the Nordic countries, you leave the parental household 19, 20, maybe 21 on average. And it hasn’t changed that much over the last ten years. In Ireland, ten years ago, you left the parental home on average around 25. Now you leave around 29.
I see a direct link between this thing flattening out and Ireland adding more and more years until you earn the right to leave the parental home. And I think the disenfranchisement of younger adults out of the housing system is at the heart of our challenges. You know, I could make up
A reasonable case that the owner occupied sector is doing okay or at least heading in the right direction in terms of people buying their home to live in – of a certain age. I could make a more optimistic, immediate future look in case that the investment is there around social housing:
The government has doubled the amount of money it’s going to put into social housing. So again, it’s heading in the right direction. But for the critical age where you are, you should not be expected to take on a mortgage aged 21 or 22. There is going to be a need for rental housing.
We have been lacking that housing and adding that housing and targeting those groups and including them in the housing system. And understandably, people under the age of 35 are pretty angry about this, and I don’t blame them at all. Together with Portugal, Ireland and Portugal have seen
The biggest deterioration in housing for younger adult cohorts. And the problem is the official housing targets assume that household size won’t change over the next two and a half decades. They assume that whatever fraction of 25 year olds heads of household now will stay the same into the into the future.
Whereas, in fact, we should be allowing the household size to come back down. And even my estimate is that if you look at underneath the hood, if you go into the census details that actually true household size in Ireland is about 2.4. 356 And as we go over
The next couple of decades, we want to be going somewhere around here 2 or 2.2 persons per household on average. And again, that sounds like a little difference. Okay. 2.2 or 2.4, does it really matter? But it’s 6 million divided by two and a half or two is actually a big difference.
There’s hundreds of thousands of extra homes that you need. So I really wish policymakers cared more about this number, even though it’s a bit arcane. Maybe this is the way: when do you get to leave the parental home? Maybe that’s the measure that they can internalise as a key performance indicator
When they’re thinking about the housing system. So you put all these numbers together, right? One more, which I haven’t talked about, which is obsolescence. Don’t laugh or do. But the official housing targets, assume that the dwellings that are built already in Ireland, will last 500 years on average. That’s the right response
From especially the architects. That is not going to happen. So what is it? Is it 100 years, 200 years? 300 years? 378 So I put in 125 as low, 200 as medium and 300 as high, but only because if I put in like 50 years,
The policymakers wouldn’t listen to me because they’re up at 500. And then how many persons per household? And then what do you think the population is going to be? Oops. Sorry, I meant to put in a little red box there. I think the most reasonable ranges is around here:
42 to 62000 homes per year between 2023 and 2050. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. The official target is 33,000 a year and the current output is about 23,000 a year. So I’ve mentioned this to policymakers and they’re like:
It doesn’t really matter if it’s 42 or 32 or 62 if we’re stuck at 23. So let’s just try and get to 32. Well, no, because if we get to 30, you’ll think it’s job done, and I’m saying we’re only halfway there. But anyway, I can’t get that message through, unfortunately.
This is just a graphical version of what I was saying. It’s not just about the numbers, it’s about where people live and the age cohort as well. We’ve failed our younger adults and we’re in danger of failing our older adults as well. That we currently have the family home,
The nursing home and the funeral home and you’re gone. We need a lot more housing than that. Right. It’s not that everyone has to move out of their family home when they hit 60, far from it. But the people should be able to, if they want, to downsize in the same area.
Because, if I think of it as my mother, she downsized. But for her it was a progression to a nicer home that suited her needs better. Well, I’ve peaked in terms of meeting my housing needs and now it’s like some sort of downward spiral.
We want to be building homes that people want to live at. So the last point, and I’m conscious of time here, but the last point is just about the viability. And this is a graph in which we have data for 2016.
So I will be updating this when we get the new census figures. Under 35,000. there is as a cut-off for social housing. Now, realistically, if you’re under 35,000 and you don’t have a family, if you’re a single person, you’re not going to get considered for social housing in the Dublin area.
But at least on paper, that’s the cut off, right? So those people are covered, at least in theory, by social housing. Above 100,000, in terms of your income per year, the market will cover you, but it’s very expensive to build new apartments. The average rent is something like 1600 a month breakeven,
Even not allowing for recent increases in costs. But we’ve got a whole bulk in here of people who aren’t covered by either social housing or the market. And if I could pass on one message to policymakers, it would be if you think in these terms, the blue and the pink,
Need to join up. There should be nobody left out of either the market or the social housing system. That’s how you do housing for all. With this massive group in here, only the top 16% can afford to break even. And that’s where policymakers need to focus. So thanks for the additional minute.
And I pause there and I’m looking forward to the discussion later on. Thank you very much, Ronan. And we’ve invited Ronan back in January to to chair an event about renting in Ireland, specifically focused on that topic. So we look forward to welcome you back again
Ronan and also I’m hearing from you in the discussion later. So our second speaker this evening, is Bulelani Mfaco. You’re very welcome. Bulelani is a human rights activist and spokesperson for the movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland. He’s currently campaigning for the reform of the asylum process in Ireland
And advocating for better legal and social protection for asylum seekers, including access to state services. Bulelani holds a master’s in Politics from UCD and he’s currently a PhD student at TU Dublin. So the title of his talk this evening and his current research topic is Institutional Inhumanity, Direct Provision
And the Threshold for Inhuman Treatment. He will illustrate how very little has changed over the past 20 years in Ireland. You’re very welcome. Very good evening, everybody. My apologies for being late. I was doing another talk in UCD and got stuck in traffic on the bus,
But I made it. Thank you for the introduction. I’m doing a study in TU Dublin on whether or not the conditions in the provision system meet the threshold for inhumane and degrading treatment. Within Article three of the ECHR of the European Convention
On Human Rights. There have been quite a lot of cases in the European Court of Human Rights that are taken by asylum seekers in other parts of the world, and very few coming from Ireland because Ireland doesn’t provide legal aid for asylum seekers so they actually don’t make it to court.
But we found there are situations that mirror the experiences of people in the countries that do actually allow asylum seekers to take the government to court. In Belgium, for instance, an asylum seeker who was evicted from an accommodation centre for asylum seekers took the state to court, challenging a breach of Article
Three, arguing that the destitution that they experienced while they were left on the streets for four weeks as a family unit amounted to inhumane and degrading treatment. And the court did find, even though that the Belgian authorities argued that, you know, you don’t have a right to housing,
Nobody has a right to housing in Belgian law, nobody has a right to housing in European law. But the state did have an obligation to have regard to the vulnerability status of an asylum seeker in society. And that’s how they managed to rule on that.
But they were reluctant, and Belgian authorities were arguing and the Irish authorities have similarly argued that you don’t have a constitutional right to housing in Ireland and therefore we are doing you a favour by providing you with accommodation. So you should take it or leave it. When an asylum seeking family
Challenged the Irish government in court, CA vs Minister for Justice arguing that direct provision breached their fundamental human rights. They lost under Article three and the legal challenge there, because the state was there arguing: “actually you don’t have a right to housing. If you find the conditions in direct provision so intolerable,
You’re welcome to leave. Go back to your country if you wish”. They actually had no shame in putting that in writing. You can google the court case, it’s mentioned in the 505 And so it’s in that context that I’ll be talking to you about the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland
When it comes to accommodation. Some of you might know about direct provision, some of you might not know about direct provision. Some of you might live next to a direct provision centre that you don’t know it’s a direct provision centre. A lot of hotels now are housing asylum seekers because it’s Ireland.
If you are homeless, if you are an asylum seeker, if you are a refugee, if you can’t put you in a house or an apartment because we haven’t built enough them, we just put you in hotels and call it emergency accommodation. And they’ve been calling it emergency accommodation for how many years?
Seven years ago I arrived in Dublin and they still had an emergency accommodation There was no emergency. Now we have a real emergency with Putin bombing the Ukraine and there are people coming. More than 60,000 already came to Ireland They need somewhere to live. I need somewhere to stay. And you can’t
Shut the borders and say, you know, they’re not coming anymore. We are full. We don’t have enough housing for you. International law prevents from doing that. It’s something we call the Principle of Non-Refoulement. But the principle is that you don’t return a refugee to a country where their life might be in danger.
So you can’t turn a person away at the port of entry. You have to subject them to due process. You have to listen to their case, assess their case properly, and then make a decision on their case, allow them to appeal if the decision is negative, go through all the appeals.
It’s a very long process. I’ve been in that process for five years now in direct provision and in general in Ireland for a very long time you had a lot of people stuck in that process. While they’re stuck in that process, they are living in direct
Provision centres. Until 2nd July 2018 weren’t allowed to work. You’re getting €19.10 per week that you had to eke out a living. So if you have children, start thinking about back to school that time of the year when you have to think about the expenses.
That’s the stresses that a lot of asylum seekers have had to deal with for the past 20 years and. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Ireland didn’t have that much experience of receiving people who arrived spontaneously at ports of entry for a very long time because it’s an island.
It was difficult for people to travel from the Global South to Ireland. They could get to France because, you know, France had a lot of connection to West Africa and all the countries they had colonised. They had links with those countries. They had direct flights. I think I was in Ireland
When they had the first direct flight from Africa, from Ethiopia. We can fly now from Addis Ababa to Dublin. It’s new. It wasn’t always that. You had to fly to another country before you could get in. So it was very difficult for people to travel to Ireland to seek asylum.
It isn’t that people didn’t need asylum from Irish and so it cushioned Ireland somewhat in terms of migration trends. Or when other countries were receiving a lot of people coming in, refugees from Iraq and whatever wars you’ve had, they couldn’t get here. Primarily because it’s an island.
And so the only experience of Ireland hosting refugees would have been limited to those crises, a major crises around the world. So you think about the Chilean situation, Bosnia, Vietnam. 575 I stay in Knocklisheen now. It used to be a military camp that was used to house Hungarian refugees
When Ireland didn’t have homes then that was in the 1950s. They didn’t have anywhere to put them, and so they put them in the military camp. And when they asked the Limerick Council to house them properly,
We had that rhetoric that we are hearing now from the far right of our own firstt. 583 The refugees aren’t going anywhere either. They need shelter too,they can’t stay in the camp forever. And so that experience meant that Ireland didn’t have a developed reception system for asylum seekers.
And if you go to other countries that have a lot of experience in receiving asylum seekers, their reception system would be much clearer in terms of when you’re going to get to a decision here. Here you don’t have that. Nobody in Ireland can tell you when you’re going to get a decision
From the Department of Justice on your asylum claim. Your file is going to gather dust until they get to it. You’ll be invited for an interview. And then you’ll wait for the results of that interview, and then you’ll appeal and then wait for an invitation to the appeal hearing.
After that hearing, you’ll wait for a decision on that. It’s a lot of waiting because it’s never really properly developed. 600 You do well in terms of hosting programme refugees, the experience of programme refugees and asylum seekers who land at the port of entry spontaneously.
It’s very different because a programme refugee would be planned. You already identify the supports that the people are going to need and you handpick them in refugee camps in Greece. You will have seen announcements from governments when they announce that they’re going to take a certain number of refugees
From Greek or Italy and wherever. That is planned, it’s easier to handle than, say, the number of people that we have now. If you look at 2002, was the highest point that Ireland had, 11,634 people coming to seek asylum. 20 years later, guess where we are: exactly where we were in 2002.
By end of October, there were 11,142 people who arrived spontaneously in Ireland to seek asylum. Added to that is more than 60,000 Ukrainian refugees who arrived availing of the Temporary Protection Directive from the EU. They all need to be housed somewhere. In general, in Ireland, the answer for asylum seekers has always been
To put people in the direct provision system that they’ve created . If Trinity offered this space to house asylum seekers, the government would take it now. Just put in one bunk bed there, another there, another there. And they are that desperate for spaces. The ESB building in East Wall,
It’s an office block, it isn’t built for people to live in, but they took it because they were that desperate for spaces. They need homes to put people. But we know that’s not a home. But direct provision itself was not designed to be a home. I live in an institution.
When you walk into the Knocklisheen Direct Provision centre it’s not a home. I have to go and have breakfast, lunch and dinner with more than 300 people. That’s not my home. I walk in there. There are signs all over. I don’t have signs in my home.
I’ve had a home before, but I don’t have signs in my home The rules and regulations that govern your everyday movements in that system. But what we get from bureaucrats and civil servants and politicians is panic. We got that in 2000, when Ireland
Rolled out the system of direct provision. Quite a lot of the explanations for the number of people coming to Ireland. There was starting to see a rise in the number of people coming to seek asylum. So if you think about 1991, they only had nine people less than ten people in one year
Came to Ireland to seek asylum and then they started seeing 39. And then you start to see here 7000 people and then you get that panic with politicians talking about people coming here for your welfare. Wonderful welfare. I don’t know if you imagine if they sit in their offices and imagine
That asylum seekers somewhere in Africa or in Asia, where most people come from to seek asylum in Ireland, have a brochure with all the different welfare systems in the European Union, and they go through a rational process of selecting which country they should book a flight to. I don’t think so.
Who told you have the wonderful welfare system. You don’t. So you get quite a lot of that speculative. And we are seeing the same rhetoric now, when the Tánaiste, Deputy Prime Minister was commenting in the Dáil, he was asked the question why is Ireland treating Ukrainians differently to the way it treats
Asylum seekers and he says: “well, they’re coming here legally”. By implication, he’s telling the Irish Public that asylum seekers aren’t coming here legally. Illegal immigrants. We had that rhetoric in the year 2000 when they rolled out of it, but it can never be illegal to go to a country,
To a port of entry and seek asylum. It’s perfectly legal. Irish Law, EU law allows you to do that. But that’s not the message that he’s sending out. And we’ve had that when they were rolling out direct provision 20 years ago. For us that necessitates some sort of response
From the bureaucrats, because once they are telling you that we are illegal, it tells you that you should have less sympathy for me because, you know, if you perceive me to be illegal, how do you treat people who break the laws? Not very nice, not very hospitable.
They have much more sympathy for them. So they deserve whatever they get kind of thing. And so it kind of builds a wall, when we should actually be opening up, it doesn’t actually build the discourse that we need to have around migration. So when you see things that happen in East Wall
That people chanting get them out, it’s terrifying for the asylum seekers who are there. Get them out to where? A lot of them aren’t in that building because they chose to be there. The state put them in that building. But the discourse that we get from politicians
Actually encourages the kind of behaviour you’re seeing from the protesters. If they’re talking about illegal migrants and welfare tourists. I don’t think anybody came here for the food that they offer into direct provision, the three meals a day or the beds in there.
If you sat down with asylum seekers, you would actually get the experiences that drove them to come here in the first place. And so Minister O’Donoghue rolled it out again in the year 2000, not to meet the needs of asylum seekers when they introduced
The direct provision system, but actually to deter others from coming here. They wanted to make sure that they created a system that was akin to what the UK was introducing. The New Labour government in the UK had removed asylum seekers from the general welfare system.
It was like that in Ireland too and asylum seekers had the same access to the Irish welfare system as an Irish national would have. They removed asylum seekers and introduced the direct provision system to replace that. So to meet the needs of asylum seekers, they were provided with a bed and lodge.
If you’re provided with that, then you have no need for money. You have no need for rental accommodation assistance. The state will decide where to put you so they can ship you off from any part of the country with no say on the matter as if you are livestock.
And they have moved people. Interestingly, some politicians expressed outrage when Ukrainians were given transfers overnight with very little time. They were moved from hotels that they were staying in and at short notice, they said: “you’re taking them out of schools” well
We’ve been doing this to people in direct provision for the past 20 years. Move them from Tipperary to Sligo with no say in the matter. Tipperary to Donegal. Cork to Letterkenny. No say on the matter. Nobody expresses outrage about that. You will see again in the statistics data on that.
It’s actually people like me that are in direct provision. One in every two people who are in direct provision are from Africa. A third of them is actually from Asia. So it’s black and brown people. Then the policy is different. And so we’ve already spoken about that.
The big change was the habitual residency condition when that was introduced and not only affected asylum seekers and other migrants, it affected Irish people. So if you are Irish and living abroad and were coming back, you would have,in order to have access to the Irish welfare state or talk about housing, access
To higher education funding. You would need to have lived in Ireland for at least three years before you can have access to that. And that’s still the rule today. And a lot of it was introduced because they wanted to cap that welfare tourism thing. But interestingly, again, I’m not picking on Ukrainians,
But actually they did introduce a new policy especially for Ukrainians that allows them to have access to higher education funding immediately. Currently asylum seekers and Irish people would have to wait for three years. They don’t have to wait for it. In 2020
The Catherine Day Advisory Group, a group that was established by the government, made the recommendation that asylum seekers should be treated no differently to the way Irish citizens are treated in terms of accessing public service. This is the access to third level education. It was shown by government reports
The Value for Money report from the Department of Public Expenditure, but also the Catherine Day advisory group that it is cheaper to keep asylum seekers at the same level of support that you provide to your own people than to keep them in
Direct provision. Its much more expensive to keep people in direct provision. The hotels are making a killing they’re making millions out of it. And they don’t have to worry about occupancy rates because they are all these asylum seekers coming in. Think about hotels in winter, they don’t get fully booked.
But if a hotel is suddenly booked with asylum seekers, a €100 per night for each asylum seeker that’s €3,000 a month for one asylum seeker. It would be cheaper to pay rent for that asylum seeker. You’d get change. So the policies don’t make sense.
They might use them as deterrents, but if you look at the numbers of people coming into the country they’re not really deterring anybody are they? And again this is for my law school, my legal scholarship on direct provision tends to focus on the removal of welfare and
The stripping of rights for asylum seekers. We don’t see that much legal challenges. So when even when there are rights that are undermined in the direct provision system, we don’t see people challenging those. It’s difficult to do so because they aren’t provided with legal aid.
And so how do you get to a court when you don’t have money to pay for a solicitor in order to go and challenge that right? Sociologists again would frame it along a racial line, a racial segregation. If you take a person purely because they come from outside,
They aren’t like you, they don’t look like you, they don’t speak like you. They’re different. And you place them in one particular location you tell them that they live there and they only live there. And we use the same bus. Nobody else uses that bus in Knocklisheen
Because there’s no public transport that goes into Knocklisheen. It’s a camp in the middle of nowhere. And so we have to use that segregated bus. We go to the post office to queue for the €80 weekly allowance now. 788 We all have to go into and do that. Nobody else does that.
It was only during the pandemic that they actually allowed asylum seekers to have access to that weekly allowance through banks. Even then, banks started recently to allow asylum seekers to open very basic things like a bank account. They made big fanfare about it. It’s like: “Hey, we’ve ended our racism”.
“Now we can allow you to have bank accounts “Yay we are going to allow you to drive a car.” Like we should be applauding you for allowing people to do very basic everyday things. And so we did have some changes in policy over time in the past 20 years.
NVH v the Minister for Justice allowed asylum seekers to actually work, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government to ban asylum seekers outright from working. If they didn’t give them certainty of time for how long they’re going to wait for a decision.
They could have chosen to simply give that certainty of time, say maybe six months. We’ll give you a decision. Then they wouldn’t have had to allow people to work. But we are lucky that they actually allowed some people to work. Not all asylum seekers are allowed to work.
You have to wait six months to get the work permit and if you have a first instance decision within that six months, negative or positive, you won’t be allowed to work. Most decisions that come from the IPO are negative in the first instance. So people have to actually appeal
In order to get any form of legal status to stay in the country. I’m wrapping up now. So we resist because, well, the white paper changes tells us now We saw a news article The Catherine Day advisory group chairperson said it doesn’t look like we’re going to end direct provision.
They had set a 2024 deadline, that they are going to end direct provision in the white paper. It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now because you end direct provision you have to put the people somewhere. The call was that you integrate them into Irish society,
Have them living independently in the community and there isn’t housing available to integrate people in the community. You see that 4000 people in direct provision already have their legal status. They have either refugee status, subsidiary protection or humanitarian leave to remain, and they have the same entitlement to housing support.
So they are approved for social housing and they are on the housing waiting list. They are looking for homes with HAP like other Irish homeless people, and they can’t find accommodation anywhere. And they are deemed homeless by law because that’s how you get onto the housing waiting list
And on HAP but they are not included in the homeless statistics. And so we are underreporting. When you talk about homelessness, they don’t include asylum seekers and refugees, thousands of them. That’s just the people who are in direct provision with status. There are thousands of Ukrainian refugees in hotels.
They’re going to stay in hotels forever. They have to live somewhere. I will pause this. So the point that I wanted to drive home was that what we experienced 20 years ago in Ireland, you saw the numbers that we had 11,000 people in 2002
That caused the panic in government to roll out the system of direct provision, to warehouse people in a bid to deter people from coming to Ireland to seek asylum actually didn’t deter anybody from coming here. We are still seeing a number of people coming to Ireland to seek protection.
It’s going to happen. Migration is a human phenomena. It happens around the world. There are over 100 million displaced people around the world. Ireland is much more connected to the rest of the world now and those people will make it to Ireland. But the question
That the state has to answer is how you’re going to receive them. Are you going to be hostile to them? Or are you going to be kind and compassionate? I’ll pause there And we’ll later engage in questions. Now,thank you very much Bulelani, for sharing
Both your personal experiences and your research with us so openly this evening. You speak about rules, regulations and statistics, but they all, in fact, represent people’s real lives. So our final speaker this evening is Nasrin Saraji. She’s an award winning architect and professor of architectural design at UCD.
She’s also one of three associates running the Atelier Saraji Architects and associates in Paris. She’s taught architecture internationally, and she’s received distinctions for her services in education and architecture practise from the French government; in addition to many other honours and awards. The title of Nasrin’s talk this evening is “Living in France:
The Conditions and Architectures of Social Housing”. She will discuss three different housing projects demonstrating the system of competition, financing, allocation and quality of social housing in France. Over to you, Nasrin. You’re very welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for inviting me and waiting for me
To be here in Ireland, at least every month I’m here for a week. These two talks show us how architecture can be both effective but also ineffective. Sort of, you know, economy rules architecture and humanity is architecture’s responsibility. However, I don’t know what to say actually, after what I’ve heard here.
However, I’m going to have to plod on and show how we try to sort of deal, but also negotiate with the economy and always have, whatever we do as architects, humanity as our responsibility. I’ll probably talk about some figures and facts later on
When we have the discussion, because I don’t want to sort of overshadow my talk by showing how France is ahead in social housing, because it actually it seems like that with the figures. But in fact, there is a lot of shortage of housing in France as well, especially when we compare the populations.
Now, I’m going to talk about three housing schemes, one in Paris, where there is huge density, but also population of Entre Muros or within the walls of Paris. There are no walls, but there is a periphery. 2.6 million. Another housing scheme is going to be in Clermont-Ferrand,
Which is only 140,000 population of the city. And the other one is in a town which is called the city by its sort of legal status, but it’s only 7000. So what architecture can do or what we have tried to do with these projects is going to be shown later.
And thank you very much for that fantastic sort of introduction to me. I don’t know if I really deserve it. We do live in hugely contradictory times. We’ve lived in contradictory times for a long time. But we do also, as architects, always see the silver lining.
We have to, because if we don’t, we have to stop doing anything. This man here, to architects, he’s well known. He was called Le Corbusier, Swiss architect that became French before and after he became the architect that we knew of the 20th century. He did say something very interesting.
He said, I will change the way people live. Now, that led into the International Congress for the Modern Architecture to solely concentrate on housing as its absolute responsibility right after the war. Not only in France, but of course, in the whole of Europe. A group of young architects
Came in and said that, in fact, what Le Corbusier is preaching to us is and this, again, to architects, it’s a very basic sort of knowledge. But they came and said that the way that Le Corbusier is talking about housing and living, it’s extremely abstract,
And what we need to do is to change that scale and bring housing and living to be the home. The scale of it has to be at the scale of the neighbourhood, the scale of it has to be at the scale of the settlement. But it also has to be something that
Goes beyond that the meaning of living, but actually becomes the way that one lives in a way. Now, again, all of you architects know that in 1972 it took about two years, in fact, for the the whole of the area of Pruitt-Igoe in the U.S. to be demolished .
But in 1972, exactly at that time, July 15th, 3:32 p.m. modern architecture was under siege and it was demolished. The thousands of houses and apartments were demolished because of the fact that everybody was saying that it was given to not migrants or immigrants or illegal or legal,
But it was given to a bunch of people that didn’t know how to live, didn’t know how to use housing, were bringing drugs into the place, etc., etc.. If anybody is interested in looking at the history of Pruitt-Igoe, I would suggest that you watch a YouTube movie which is called Pruitt-Igoe
And Its Myths, which basically shows that it was the planning and the way that the maintenance of the housing was developed that made those people that were so enthusiastic to arrive in this housing to actually want to leave it. So there are very interesting sort of myths that happen in terms of how
Architecture becomes the sort of the the problem or the form of architecture becomes the problem of living and specifically housing in this case. Now, we know that this is very recent, what happened with Robin Hood Gardens in London, not that far away from us, Pruitt-Igoe being in Missouri.
But this is much closer to home, home for me, Europe, here for me tonight, Dublin and Ireland, but an incredible topic whereby Alison Peters Smithson but also the team ten but also the architects of the 20th century who were absolutely convinced that housing is the future of architecture
Was demolished in order to be able to bring that land to be much more effective in terms of the development that would have to be on it. Now I ask myself, therefore, is individual housing really the solution? No. Where? When, for who? How much? How often? is a very complex question.
Maybe we can talk about it. Now I believe that as an architect that housing is not a product and living is not its by product. So housing cannot be looked at simply as investment. How do we look at that? It’s the three projects that I was telling you in France.
So you have Paris. Sorry about the jumping up of the PDF, but that’s what’s happened when I printed this for the screen. We started by an exhibition some time ago. In 2007, I was asked to do an exhibition on housing, which I called sort
Of paraphrasing a little bit, changed it, but paraphrasing Le Corbusier by housing “Substance of our Cities”. Now, this exhibition was basically concentrating on collective housing and not in any way individual homes. In Paris, the problem that we have had forever has been its density. The client for
This project was quite important because it’s the Erratepe or the Bus and Metro Network of Paris relies on the work of Erratepe. But it was also to do with the fact that if we look at these two maps,
You can see that the metro map and the bus map of Paris are equally dense, but that also shows the density of the underground and the overground substance of Paris in itself. One of the first studies that we did was to show what it would mean to have proper houses and proper homes.
According to the architectural regulations that we have to be distanced from one another and the kind of land that it would need to have in order to have the number of apartments that we were supposed to have. So 213 apartment buildings here, or 213 houses rather, and
The area that it would take if we were actually going to use the regulation of City of Paris, which is ground plus seven in this case. Not everywhere, of course. So this project, now, you can see exactly how it fits into this density that I’m talking about was something that was quite important
In terms of its section and the way that we were dealing with it, because the buses and their depot had to be under the building, plus the number of cars that were to be parked over. But also how we were going to bring this density but not clump
It all together in such a way that it would actually close the site but allow for an opening of the site in all directions where it was . So the section of this of this project is much, much more important than in fact that’s plan and its organisational plan that we had.
So you can see here clearly the hundred and 33 buses that are underneath the two levels of parking for social housing, we only have 0.83 cars per square metre, there are 16,000 square metres. You can calculate the number of cars.
And the other thing that was quite important for us was to bring in to use the buses in order to bring in the site of the nursery for the children higher up because the site being on the ground would have been buried underneath.
So that all of a sudden the section of the building becomes quite important. And how you work with that in order to bring the children up onto the ground as opposed to leaving them down there. Now, again, for architects, this is a humourous thing, but
I do believe that housing is the pantheon of architecture as well. But I think that this shows, for those of you who have been in the Pantheon, or otherwise, is 43 metres across, this is the courtyard that we have that carries the 200 housing. So you can see that the front
Street line of the 350 square meters of bicycles and this. But you can also see the repetition that one needs to deal with. At the same time, what is very interesting in housing, is that repetition somehow needs to become also extremely different in terms of the way that one one perceives the housing.
Otherwise both the density is there at the same time we need to somehow create some form of belonging in this dense area. So what we do see is, in fact, the openness of the apartments around this courtyard. What we don’t see is, in fact, the sort of infrastructure which is underneath it.
When it comes to the creche or the nursery for the children, it’s something that that has to work both with the housing, but also for those children that are coming from outside and are not really part of the housing scheme itself. So the combination of the accessibility
Of the creche was quite important in this case. There are therefore in these units, 20 private units. And I do believe you’ll see it in this one, but also in another project, that the private housing is no different from the social housing for us. 1091
And what it does is that the only time that the private housing and the social housing for us, at least as architects changes, is when it becomes in the internal choice of those that are going to actually be taking the parquet flooring and gold faucets
If they want to, as opposed to what we have for the social housing. But otherwise, architecturally, in terms of the sort of the form of the building, in terms of the spaces of the building, in terms of the way that they are articulated, nothing changes.
So whether it is the private housing or the the social housing, there is no difference except for the surfaces. In fact. So in these apartment buildings, we have the possibility of having a duplex with private terrace, with a balcony, three bedrooms, North-South orientation and €700 a square metre. Now,
I don’t know where we can find that in Dublin. But it is possible to build in such a way to be able to live decently in our cities, even if it comes to be the city of Paris, which is extremely expensive. So again, it is up to us as architects
To be able to deal with the private and the public always inject the public into the private in such a way that it actually allows for a different kind of life to happen. Here we have these gardens, which are the surface area of the bus depot.
So the bus depot was creating 3600 square metres of roof. And instead of just leaving the roof, it becomes an associative garden area. In Clermont-Ferrand it’s a totally different problem. The problem here is having a series of social housing and a series of private housing.
Now, in terms of, again, as I said, of the plan or the sections or architecturally, there are no different when it comes to the difference. We, at least in the office, have always privileged the the possibility of creating a series of types within the repetition of housing.
So here we have created what we call 19 ways to live, and every apartment is different in terms of the way that it is orientated, the way that it deals with the outside, the way that you get into it, etc., etc.. So that architecturally is possible to
Do, not always, but most of the times, if the architect is of course ready to take that into housing, it could also be very repetitive and and basic, but still. So it actually allows for a building which is social housing and private again.
It would come back to this sort of the what is the difference: the terraces, the balconies, the material of the of the shades, the number of windows, the size of the windows, the spaces, the orientation of the spaces in the building are the same for the social housing and the private sector.
So here again, you can easily see that we have the wing of the social housing and the private housing the same again. On the street we do create a variety of units. This is the loft unit. These are three bedroom units, etc., etc..
So this is something that I think that most architects are capable of bringing into the problem of living in our cities today. Now, I think that we have to stop so that you have some time to actually bring up some questions. This is the small town of 7000 inhabitants.
We were in charge of the planning of the 72 hectares of the housing, 1200 housing units that were supposed to be built over a period of five years. The first thing that I brought up to the attention of the mayor was to say: “but you’re only have left four years of your mandate,
How are you going to do this, 1200 units?” Who is going to finance it besides the city , and what kind of demographic increase are we thinking about in order to have 1200 housing? Quite frankly, only one of these areas has already been done. The rest of it is still in waiting.
And this is I’m talking about exactly 18 years ago. So things in architecture, they’re not fast at all. They’re extremely slow. They’re very slow. And what was very interesting is that we actually came up with a series of plans to increase the number of collective housing that there was.
But then at the end of the day, what was extremely important for the mayor to come up with a series of singular houses and not collective housing. But then in order to increase the number, they had to be attached to one another. So they are not semi-detached. They’re actually attached.
They’re attached, but you only go through your own entrance. And that’s the only difference that you have with the ones that you actually go through a common entrance. So this is where it was the whole site that I showed you is this whole site here and which goes beyond the screen, actually.
And this is the only part that is done. So what do we did as as the urbanists of the project is that we said these could be purchased in terms of land and a series of regulations and people could do whatever they wanted to do with it.
But the regulations, we had to go through the planning permission. So these were attached housing that was done by a series by some architects. We went through a competition. I was running the competition for the for the mayor. And these again, were a series of architects and other series of architects.
And the mayor asked me to do 35 of the housing schemes, the collective ones, social ones, in order to prove that it was possible to actually work with the regulations that we had put into place. So in order to prove that the regulations were capable
Of being actually realised, we had to do that. So one of the regulations that I had brought in was to say that in every 500, 450 housing units, we have to have a public programme. That public programme here is certainly 250 square metres,
But as a public programme and centre for the children area, because one of the problems that we hav in an urban site like that is that it all becomes housing and therefore it becomes a problem like the Pruitt-Igoe, which there is no common amenities for anybody.
And therefore it becomes just what the French used to call the City de Trois or the the cities for just sleeping in. And therefore and we went ahead with that and the mayor was extremely open. And we actually started with this project.
It also gave us the possibility of increasing the density of the housing, because by putting a public programme on the street, you can actually increase the density of the building and therefore have five floors as opposed to having two floors. Therefore, there are ways that one can deal with
And then by connecting the front of the building, with the back of the building, we could actually increase the number of units by 15 units extra. So these tricks are tricks that probably architects bring into the equation in order to be able to
Not only negotiate, but sometimes get the better hand of the economy, which actually doesn’t allow us to do some of these things, but also to give some sense of comfort and some sense of homeness to the people that can’t really afford these things because these are extremely, extremely cheap social housing units.
But also, again, as I said, you know, by putting the damn centre underneath it, it actually gives us two floors extra here, by bridging it over, it gives us two floors extra here as well. Regulation wise, urban regulation wise, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it if we had the housing
Coming to the ground, it would have finished at this level. So these are again, you can see it here with the units that are behind it. And it allows for, you know, the public spaces and public programmes that are a necessity for collective housing. We had to negotiate that.
We had to bring it home. We had to insist on it for something like about seven years in order to be able to do it. So thank you for listening and we can go through the facts maybe later. And thank you, everybody. I’m going to step in for BláithÃn, my name’s
Nathalie and I’m the director of the Irish Architecture Foundation. Ronan, Nasrin, Bulelani take a seat. And we have actually 10 minutes. Actually maybe we can go on a bit longer if you need to ask more questions. I just wanted to really thank you all for your contribution to this
Event this evening, but also your contribution to this whole Housing Unlocked initiative. Just to set the context, when we started the idea of the Irish Architecture Foundation to do something about housing has always been part of our daily programmatic conversations for for a long, long time and how to do it,
And given the fact that it’s such a significant and important debate to get involved in, and we have touched upon it over many, many years through, say, Open House, Dublin, the Festival for Architecture. We’ve done debates on open housing and they’ve always turned into a kind of an argument and an emotive
Sort of discussion or debate that never really solved anything or came to any conclusions or any such thing. And I’m also not saying because Ronan and you said it, you don’t have the answer Bulelani you were saying like these things make no sense. And Nasrin, you were talking talking back to the basics
Of what architecture is about, responsibility to humanity. It’s ruled by the economy, all of these things. And these are things that touch upon the work we do here. And also when we decided to do Housing Unlocked and we approached the Housing Agency and we said we’d like to do something
Because the Architecture Foundation, we don’t represent the Institute of Architects. We don’t represent anything except that we want the built environment to be something that is there for people and that architects play a role on that. That’s why it’s actually great that Nasrine as you were bringing up sort of
The purpose of architecture and last year we had a discussion with Shelley McNamara, who was here a minute ago and has left Shelley MacNamara from Grafton Architects and Lacaton & Vassal. And I remember Jean Philip Vassal saying that architecture is the most important challenge for architects
And for architecture, and I fully agree with that. So when we were doing this show, we specifically did an open call for ideas to help unlock whatever is stopping the logjam for why we can’t do what you all have been saying here tonight and what the common denominator
Is between your very, very different presentations and viewpoints is the common denominator is a passion. And number two is a frustration right across here. And and I knew that this was going to be the hardest discussion that we were going to have.
The exhibition is literally only half of what we’re trying to do here in our occupation of the former Science Gallery. The talks and the events like this that you’re part of are actually supposed to animate the ideas that are outside and take them further, etc., stuff like that.
So I just knew that like last week we were talking about Housing Histories and today we’re talking about Housing Now, which is like exposing a nerve really. Which is why we asked Emma Geoghegan to chair it, so I could sit in the audience and poor Emma get well Emma.
And I knew this would be an emotive evening and, again and I hope it has stirred up some questions from the panellists. And here I am, I did have a question but I’m trying to sort of, I dunno, explain to you why the Irish Architecture Foundation is doing Housing
Unlocked, why we are doing these events and why you were here. And also that I knew that this would be the one of the most challenging of our discussions. History is history, but important, and we can learn from it. And actually, Nasrin, you did 100 years of history of housing, and I’m sure
There is a common denominator of how we continually fall into this cycle. Then next week we’re talking about the future. But this evening and now it just seems like we’re still not in a good place when it comes to housing. And the other common denominator is housing for all.
You were saying by joining the red and blue coming together. But even a Bulelani, you’re not even described in the goal. Do you know what I mean? So it’s even worse than that. Sorry. It sounds very depressing, but it is. And there’s a lot to do. There’s a lot to do.
And I’m just wondering, does anybody in the audience, in our 10 minutes we’ve left have any questions for any of these wonderful presenters and contributors? I’m just wondering, and it’s probably for Ronan and Nasrine, maybe together somewhere. I couldn’t but to be taken by a comment that was made by the head
Of some the Irish Green Building Council or something last week. And do you remember maybe Ronan, because you’re in the country, perhaps. Do you remember what the person said? They said that, you know, sustainable housing isn’t affordable and affordable housing isn’t sustainable. So is it really. That’s a good one.
Yeah. Is it that bad? What’s your take on that? Yeah, it it comes back to What I was saying at the very end was if I were in the policy space of housing, I would feel it my duty to be laser focussed on how many resources
Does it take to provide someone with a good quality home ? And in some ways the high cost of building, say, rental accommodation is because in Ireland we demand A rated from our newbuilds and they don’t in other countries and some countries do, but some countries don’t. That’s not a false economy.
That’s a long term. That’s a that’s a good economy. But if there’s no countervailing measure, right. If you could build C rated at, it would cost significantly less and maybe you would have those blue and red lines lined up. But you choose A and you create a gap
Then it’s up to policy to say, okay, well, actually we’re doing this for a good reason, but we need to have, for example, a grant that allows you to that group that’s being priced out to afford those homes. I was slightly more optimistic
In the sense that if policy can think in those terms, that there’s a benefit to doing the right thing, but there may be a cost and taking into account the cost, and you can do a countervailing measure. But at the moment, we’re stuck with, okay, we’ll bring in this good regulation.
And then actually we haven’t tracked it through and see what the impact is. So we’re stuck in the bad place, but actually it won’t take take that much to turn it into an opportunity. It will ask of the taxpayer. But it’s the right call. Right.
We should be building energy efficient stock to take that one particular example. But you see energy efficiency is it all depends on how you calculate it and what the politicians say about it. Today, we’re taking energy efficiency as a technology driven thing. Energy efficiency also means to have an apartment
That is double sided North-South, that you can open the windows in the summer and in the winter to close them. It is not only about the solar panels on the roof. Of course, we had to have on the Paris housing a number of square metres of solar panels.
But that’s only in order for the housing association to be able to buy out the credit that they’re supposed to buy out from EDF, Electricité Du France. But otherwise, these are all technocratic calculations that come into it. The sort of the capacity of the architect is to actually be able to
Make good housing. Now, how they calculate that. It’s just like a fridge, you know, a good fridge. They put A, double A, triple A, but it’s in architecture we have more capabilities than the sort of the fan of the fridge. So I think that politicians sometimes it’s like what you were saying that
They say that they are illegal immigrants. It’s exactly that word. Illegal immigrants. We hear it in France every day. Illegal immigrants. Therefore, we are allowing for this or that. But I’m going to stop there. Thank you, Nathalie. And thank you to the Architecture Foundation, all the work you’re doing on this.
I’m glad you started with the idea of motion, because I think the problem we have is we keep emoting the problem and saying it’s this problem. We have 11,000 people homeless. But if you were to look at it in terms of cold, hard statistics, it’s
Only like 2% of the Dublin population and surely two in 100 we should be able to find space somewhere to fit people. So back to Ronan’s point 2016, you’re working off those statistics, there are 400,000 residential units that were vacant in that survey. That surely should be capable of mopping up the gap.
We have a major problem in terms of how we are accessing the data. There’s a lot of vacant property, investment property, people are quite happy to invest in property and leave it vacant. It happened in London. It happens here. Happy to let the increase in values
Climb without worrying about it ever going south in the bank or somewhere else. So there’s a lot of underreporting of key data lines, whether it’s empty buildings and that. And there’s a great temptation like this initiative to chase solutions and say there’s a solution, there’s a solution, but we don’t really
Have a grip on the problem. So back to Ronan’s point about building more houses and if we’re serious about what it says and building for all and the previous housing policy, the only way that those numbers can be achieved is a full industrialisation, literally an emergency building programme of all housing facilities, notwithstanding
Nasrine’s point about the need for quality and space and everything else. And we’ve known since the earliest Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne that perimeter housing, row housing was a solution that was abandoned and ignored by Corbusier and everyone else for high density towers in the middle of fields. So we all know the solution.
We all know how to do it. We just need to connect the dots with the data. And perhaps Ronan might speak towards serious gaps in how we’re reporting some of the statistics. And so I agree wholeheartedly on the poverty of the data infrastructure around housing. Now what I will say is
As of 2010, it was incredibly poor, the lack of information we had that would be standard in other places. We have come some distance. We now know transactions. We have a register of rental properties. There’s some issues with that, but it’s on the way. The information quality, the data infrastructure is getting better,
But there’s quite a number of areas where we don’t know who owns all the land. Right. That’s a starting point. Right. A cadastre is common across Europe. We don’t have one in Ireland and we don’t know who lives where. We don’t have a register of who lives in what dwellings
At the moment. We’re going to be relying the CSO will be publishing in the New Year some stats on vacancy based on energy providers that they can tell which you know, dwellings have no energy or just a fridge running. They, they know that kind of information now and they can publish it.
What I would say is that it cuts both ways, as in 400,000, but you actually look at the number? And then actually 150,000 are holiday homes and then 35,000 are under construction and 25,000 are long term care. The actual number of I think quick win vacant is probably 40 to 50000.
Not that we shouldn’t target that, but that is about one year of need in a 30 year need cycle. So we should definitely do it and we should definitely have the information infrastructure. But just as you were saying, we shouldn’t ignore it. I’m probably saying it’s not the solution.
I think we shouldn’t then ignore the rest of the need as well. There’s a question there. So I was just wondering that it seems that so much of the issue is to do with policy and just like people’s ideas are there already,
Like we can see all the architects have all of their ideas. But I’m just wondering, is there a way in which people you guys may think that we could lobby together, like as come together as a bigger group to actually lobby the change because it’s the government that need the change.
It’s not you guys, you guys have the ideas. But is there any way that like there can be a better platform are like, you know, I don’t know. It’s all there. All of the solutions. It’s getting the government to change and maybe the people of a bigger voices like yourselves and architectural firms.
And I mean, I’m sure there’s profit being made in the architectural business as well through this. You know true this but I’m just wondering is there another way that people can categorise the change. There are a lot of box specialisations whereas if people as you’re saying can come together
Like we’re product designers and we’re just looking for like opportunities in areas where, you know, we can see areas we could design or improve. And you were saying that there’s a lot of waiting involved when you’re come into Ireland through the immigration process.
And is that done through paper or is it like letters or when you say you’re waiting, are you waiting through or what kind of communication are you actually receiving. They trying to bring it online now but it’s a problem because not everybody who comes to Ireland have good knowledge of the English language
And they need to translate them into various different languages. They don’t have standards for interpretation and translation of foreign languages in Ireland, and therefore any Tom, Dick and Harry can use Google Translate and say that they’re a translator basically in Ireland, that’s the problem that we have.
They are trying to bring them online, but we still face the same problems in terms of bureaucracy, even if it’s online. If you submit an application online, you will still have to wait for a civil servant to go through the file to invite the person to an interview.
Once they’ve made the interview, they have to issue a decision. That recommendation has to be sent to the person and their lawyers. If it’s negative, they have to submit an appeal and again, they have to go and consult with their lawyers.
And the only thing the state is trying to do now is to reduce the number of days that a person has in order to submit the appeal. They are not making a regulation that compels them to issue a decision timely. So they are only focussed on the applicants rather than fixing the bureaucracy.
And like from what you said, there’s so many intricacies there that it seems like the best way forward and for architecture and for economy is co-creation workshops where people come from of lots of different specialisations can come together. I think that’s this platform is so good.
But like I suppose the question that Connor was asking is like, how do you take it to the next step where you can approach government and do you see a way forward for that? Could I could I make one sentence I don’t know how to conversation, but I’m on the Housing Commission,
Although I’m not speaking here on behalf of the Housing Commission. And the Housing Commission was set up to try and advise the government on the beyond the electoral cycle. So medium to long term and there was a consultation period for the constitutional right to housing that’s closed down,
There will be a recommendation going to government but there’s also a consultation period on wider health of the housing system that will be opening, I would imagine, in January or maybe February. So that might be somewhere where that kind of opportunity specifically to talk about stuff beyond just one or two years. Right.
The government is now quite understandably focussed on what can it do ahead of the next election. Right. Because that’s whether it’s going to do. That’s exactly the question. That’s exactly the answer to your question. Yeah. Architects, this Foundation, you know, the lobbies, I don’t think that the lobbies can do it.
One has to put the accent on the opposition. I mean, I was going to tell you that the social housing in France, it is a policy of public interest. It is a policy that is called public interest. If housing is not part of that public interest, it cannot happen.
So one needs to bring the politician into it. I don’t think lobbies can do it, quite frankly, because lobbies today, they are looking for other. I mean, even activists. I mean, I have an activist next to me here, but I think that it needs to
One needs to play the politicians off one another because that’s where it happens. You know, we need to bring in politicians into here and say, why is it not happening? You know what are saying? Are there any politicians in here? Maybe there are. I mean, look. No, they are they all have so
Much investment in property like I mean, that’s one of the issues as well. Like, I mean, they don’t want to sell. Well, what I would say and I’ve been occupied with politicians on all sides, I’ll talk to anyone if they’re interested in improving the health of the housing system.
Everyone comes with their own position. And there will be people who own property and the people who don’t own property but haven’t met a politician that didn’t want to actually improve things. It’s Hanlon’s Razor – Never, accept the excuse of malevolence, what can adequately be described by incompetence. Right.
It’s generally that they don’t know how to do it quickly enough. So they reach for buttons and they press it. Will this work? We better be seen to be doing something. This is something. Let’s do that. Rather than take a step back. How does this housing system work?
What are the different bits that go here? If the Central Bank, the Department of Justice, which regulates estate agents you know, the Department of Housing, Department of Finance, Revenue Commissioners, they’re all involved in housing. And nobody takes a step back.
Back to your point, what is the process involved in all these different things? So personalising it, my aunt is in a nursing home and we tried to get her place rented out to refugees from Afghanistan. And it was an absolute nightmare in terms of getting all the different bits
To talk to each other. They had never heard of this before and they didn’t know. Like they were like, Well, we’re not going to give you this information. We’re like, I need the information. Otherwise the City Council will cancel their HAP application.
And the City Council is like, well, you should have got that information. You know, all these different bits not used to talking to each other and I’m stuck in the middle trying to connect the dots when it should be just a simple transfer of a file. But some of it is intentional incompetence.
I think a lot of it is just unintentional incompetence. This is not something they’re prepared for. The RTB doesn’t see itself as having a role for asylum seekers or refugees. Dublin City Council does, but it has nothing to do with rental registration or it is not my job.
In someone else’s job, you sort it out. What is more collective responsibility in understanding of all the different elements of the process for all these different kinds of housing need? I think you’re right and as I say, use the Housing Commission consultation as an opportunity to bring those points.
And apologies for speaking to you. You’re launching a new consultation in January or February. Yeah, I’m not sure.It will happen. Just not confirmed. The timing. Yes. Can you do it here and can these people come to IT? I can’t speak for the Commission and can you.
But thank you for putting me on the spot. It’s an invitation. I can certainly bring it to the Commission and we’re meeting next week and say, what are our plans around not just making it available online, but making it meaningfully available for people to contribute?
You can even write things up on that window as well. Everything in this room is a white board and there’s lots of people walking by. We do have to go. Bulelani did you want to say anything? You looked like you wanted to say something. And I was just going to say that.
To get politicians to do something, you need to show them there’s something in it for them. And we were very good at doing that in South Africa. So you throw the dog a bone, it will bite. And that’s what you need to do with the politicians.
So when we approach a South African politician about anything, any programme, we just need to tell them that somebody is going to have an opportunity to make money. It’s housing, developing land, somebody is going to have to make money and they are all interested in that.
Everybody then might tell you they are not, but they are all interested in that. So there’s an opportunity here for somebody to make a living, somebody to get rich. It’s not what we want to enrich people,
But to get them to move from A to B, sometimes you have to tell them, I think that’s what we’re doing anyway. Okay, that’s sound advice. I want to thank everybody, everybody for coming and for all your contributions over here. Fantastic. And thank you all.
And just look out for the invitation to the Housing Commission events that we’re going to have, Because we have an extension we’re supposed to be leaving here on the 21st of January. But the Provost has given us an extension till the 17 February.
So we’re just we’re just going to keep going with this conversation. Thank you.