Sir, – A letter writer ( September 8th) asks “why we cannot build public housing, as we did in the past”?
When Marino in Dublin and other successful social housing developments were completed, Ireland was an economy with high unemployment, low salaries and relaxed employment laws. Even then, while the outputs of past public housing initiative were welcome, the costs, complexities, and inefficiencies were significant. They are much higher now.
Demand for housing varies, both over time and geography, and so when it comes to the provision of housing you need elasticity in the workforce.
Public sector housing workers would need to be employed either centrally by the State, or by local authorities. In either case, it is unlikely that an employee based in Galway, for example, would accept being assigned to long-term projects in Waterford one year and in Louth the next. The additional costs of housing, travel, sustenance, etc, for temporarily relocated workers would also need to be borne by the state.
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Public sector employees are for life, not just for a project. Unless you can keep every single worker fully busy permanently up to retirement, then they will either sit idle for long periods on full pay, or need to be made redundant during lull periods, and then rehired later when demand increases again. Both options are hugely costly.
The next thing to consider is that the demand for construction workers is already at maximum. It would take many years to train enough new staff to provide the levels of public housing required. In order to employ enough workers in the short term, the State would need to compete directly with the private sector for staff – staff who are already employed in construction. Taking workers from a private company building houses to work for a local authority building houses will not deliver more houses.
Taking workers from the private sector through the lure of higher wages or better benefits would also result in wage inflation, with consequent increases in the cost of delivering housing, and in the price of the finished product. Private companies, unable to compete with the endless pockets of the state, would be put out of business.
These are the main reasons that the State has had a policy of engaging in partnership with private developers to build public housing. While the notion that a private individual might profit from the provision of a public service is anathema to some, it is a practical and common-sense approach that considers long-term impacts, as well as short-term gains.
The construction industry was able to expand rapidly from the late 1990s due to the enthusiasm of new young EU citizens from former communist countries to spend a few years here earning a nest-egg they could take home. Those workers are long gone, and economic conditions in their own countries are now such that a repetition of that phenomenon is highly unlikely. Even if thousands of skilled workers did chose to come to Ireland from somewhere else, where would they live? The first 20,000 homes to be built would need to be reserved for them and their families.
These are just some of the problems that the State faces when attempting to provide housing directly. They are not trivial, and overcoming them is a task that will not be accomplished quickly, regardless of which party is in government. – Yours, etc,
JOHN THOMPSON,
Phibsboro,
Dublin 7.
