To provide homes for everyone on the Dublin city housing waiting list, Dublin City Council would have to almost double its housing stock.
It owns about 25,000 flats and houses. The number of applicants waiting to become tenants of the council has hit 21,592, more than 2,500 of whom have joined the waiting list in the last year.
For the first time the council has released figures on how many individuals are in need of housing in the city. These 21,592 applicants represent just over 42,000 people – 25,617 are adults and 17,489 are children.
The number of applicants on the list classified by the council as homeless is relatively small at 1,310. These represent people who have no home address to give the council when applying for housing, and who live in emergency accommodation, including hotels.
The council’s most recent figures for people living in emergency accommodation indicates that not all those who are homeless are applicants for council housing. Up to the end of June more than 3,300 people were living in emergency accommodation in the city, 1,122 of whom were children.
The reason for this disparity is that qualifying for council housing is a rigorous and often lengthy process and many in emergency accommodation have, almost by definition, come suddenly to that position.
Those 42,000 people are mainly those living in the private rented sector – about three-quarter of applicants – with about a quarter living with parents or other family members. However, these applicants should not be perceived as people who are private tenants but just happen to want a council house. Everyone on the list has had their need for housing established by the council and more than a third are living in overcrowded conditions or have particular medical or welfare needs.
In addition to the people hoping to become local authority tenants, 6,260 tenants are seeking transfers, almost a third of whom have been on the transfer list for more than 10 years.
While these might be seen as the lucky ones, given that they are in council housing, many live in unsustainable situations. A quarter of those seeking transfers live in overcrowded conditions. Many, having started with a one-bedroom council flat, now have children.
Ministerial direction
Others need to move out of flats that cannot be adapted for their needs, such as a requirement for wheelchair access. There are also older people seeking transfers who want to move to smaller housing. The availability of transfers, has all but dried up, however, with the growing number of people trying to get into the system and the direction from Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly for 50 per cent of social housing to be allocated to homeless people.
National housing policies have conspired against council housing becoming available to new tenants; children have succession rights on the death of a tenant; tenants of council houses, though not flats, have for decades had the right to buy their properties; and, for several years, almost no new council housing has been built.
As a result, few council properties become available to rent. The council housed 960 applicants last year, almost half of whom had been waiting more than five years for a house or flat.
Doubling the existing stock of houses and flats to accommodate all those assessed as having a housing need is clearly an insurmountable task given the council’s resources. The solution has to rest with the private sector, which most on the housing list are desperately trying to leave.
