In the six years before Mary Osakwe and her family moved into her housing association home in Balbriggan, she and her family had been forced to move seven times in six years, mostly because private landlords announced they would be selling up.
“The worst one was when we were given 45 days’ notice which expired two weeks before I was due with my second child. That was very stressful,” she recalls.
In 2021, Osakwe, her husband and two young children secured a three-bedroom house in a cost-rental scheme at Taylor Hill in Balbriggan. A couple of weeks after moving in, she remembers, a neighbour in the new development asked on the WhatsApp group they had set up whether anyone fancied planting bulbs so there would be flowers on some of the common areas the following spring.
[ Almost a third of tenancies in Dublin had rent increases above RPZ limitOpens in new window ]
“I thought, ‘I’ll do that because I’ll actually be here to see them bloom’,” she says. “For the first time, I actually felt like we could make friends. Because of the secure, lifetime tenancy we had now, we could actually get involved in the community.” Three years on, she is chairwoman of the residents association.
Osakwe was speaking on Thursday at the launch of Security, Affordability and Place, a report on the impact of cost rental housing, a still small but growing form of housing provision intended to provide high-quality homes on secure and affordable terms to people often priced out of the private market, which was commissioned by approved housing bodies, Clúid, Tuath and Respond.
She and her neighbours have first-hand experience of some of the challenges it identifies, not least about the lack of infrastructure serving new developments in growing suburbs.
“We’re fighting for infrastructure that should have been addressed when they built the place,” she says, citing lack of community space, GP surgeries and creche spaces, and warning that school places will be a problem in coming years due to the volume of building in the area.
“It’s good to see in the report that they are considering things because they’re planting the seed of the community when they give us our homes but we’re the ones building the community.”
Affordability is raised in the report too, with the rents charged for accommodation provided to between a third and a quarter of tenants not necessarily meeting the most commonly used measure of affordability in terms of the percentage of net household income it represents.
Osakwe says the €1,150 she and her partner pay is well below the local market rate, however, and with clear structures in place for controlled future increases, there is welcome security on the financial front too, she says. There are also significant savings on heating and other costs because the houses are new and energy efficient.
Social policy lecturer at UCD Michael Byrne, one of the report authors, says cost is a still real issue, both for a significant portion of the renters now and potentially for more into the future as tenants suffer a drop in income upon retirement.
“We shouldn’t forget the successes in terms of affordability,” says Dr Byrne. “There is a very large cohort who have reduced their housing costs as a result of moving into the sector, and they’re getting something much, much better than they were getting in their previous private rental housing.
“But there are still issues identified in the report and a number of possible ways of addressing cost, say, in. terms of grants to housing bodies or subsidised interest on the money they borrow to buy the houses.”
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