Another year, another student accommodation crisis. Versions of the same human stories are reported annually, detailing the hardships of finding accommodation or students missing lectures due to long commutes or even dropping out because the entire exercise is made so difficult.
What should be an exciting new beginning for young people around the country instead becomes a time of stress and frustration for many. Government failures are evident at almost every stage of leadership, policy and delivery.
[ Units for thousands of campus student beds unbuilt despite having planning permission ]
The National Student Accommodation Strategy was launched in July 2017 and included a projected increase of student numbers of 27 per cent by 2030. The strategy was rooted in making the case for the expansion of Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA).
It projected that by 2024, there would be 54,654 PBSA bed spaces. The projection for 2019 in that strategy was for 40,687 student beds.
Rift opens up between DAA board and its CEO Kenny Jacobs
Rathmines home of former taoiseach now owned by son, Sherry FitzGerald founder, for €3.75m
FBI releases photos of ‘person of interest’ in inquiry into Charlie Kirk shooting
Here is everything that is wrong in Ireland’s planning system in one project
Yet five years later, in June 2024, Niall Gargan, head of research for Ireland at real estate company JLL, told the Dublin Chamber of Commerce there were about 40,000 student beds registered with the Residential Tenancies Board.
In January 2024, a new strategy was flagged. That month, three ministers – Simon Harris, Darragh O’Brien, and Paschal Donohoe – made a trip out to DCU to announce their agreement on “a long-term policy on student accommodation”.
Harris said: “This vision and policy will inform a new Student Accommodation Strategy, which will be published later this year.” Donohoe said: “I look forward to the publication of the full strategy in the coming period.”
Alas, the dog ate their homework. There was no new strategy published in 2024.
Last February, Labour leader Ivana Bacik asked the minister now responsible, James Lawless, for an update on the new strategy.
Lawless said the new strategy was “in development following approval of a long-term policy in January 2024″. So at that stage, over a year had passed from the approval of long-term policy to Lawless saying the strategy underpinning that policy was “in development”.
In March, he was asked again, this time by Rose Conway-Walsh of Sinn Féin. Again, he said the strategy was “in development.”
Last June, Lawless told the Dáil he was going to bring the strategy to government “later this year”.
It’s now September. The kids are off to college. I hope they don’t look to ministers to learn the importance of deadlines and delivering assignments on time.
[ Rent-a-room offers homeowners a €14,000 tax free windfall and students a place to stay ]
The issue isn’t just beds, of course. It’s affordability. PBSA, long viewed as the “golden goose” of private real estate because of its profit yields, is very expensive. As an accommodation option, it is not viable for most students.
PBSA follows the money and is geared towards the international student “market”. This isn’t a secret and is frequently laid out in industry reports. For example, a report by Lisney on the PBSA outlook for 2025 stated, “since 2016/2017, student numbers have grown by 17.9 per cent. However, more importantly in terms of the PBSA sector, the number of international students has jumped by 63.4 per cent”.
I genuinely wonder how any average-earning family can afford this stuff at all.
Cheap digs, flats and shared houses are long gone. What we have instead is a highly valuable asset class and investment vehicle
It’s €250 a week to rent a bedroom with a couch-bed in student accommodation in Ballymun, Dublin.
In Galway, one student accommodation listing features a room with two sets of bunk beds. The rent is €165 per person per week, meaning it will cost a young person €660 a month to sleep in a bunk bed with three other people sharing the room. The rental revenue from this 11sq m room alone will be €2,640 a month.
The regressive and unaffordable student accommodation model followed by the Government is an example of the financialisation of a specific segment of private housing.
Cheap digs, cheap flats and cheap shared houses are long gone. What we have instead is a highly valuable asset class and investment vehicle – and a rolling, worsening student accommodation crisis.
The impact on the built environment is also profound, as is the knock-on effect on urban working-class communities, who – in Dublin city in particular – are contending with the construction of gated PBSA developments in areas of the capital (particularly Dublin 1, Dublin 7, and Dublin 8). These are areas in which people traditionally have had much lower rates of progressing to third-level education plus acute housing needs.
We were told that private PBSA was the answer to the student accommodation crisis. It might have been if it were affordable, but it’s hardly in the interest of those who are in the business of profit to make it so.
Segmenting housing markets based on the desires of private investors never works out. You don’t need a strategy to tell you that. Unfortunately, the human cost of this is serious.
Once again, there will be countless students couch-surfing, homeless, dealing with draining commutes. They will be denied the fullness of student life and the opportunity for independence, privacy and housing security.
They won’t get to experience the freedom and happiness they worked so hard for in their school years. Once again, they pass their tests, yet the Government fails theirs.
