Bedsits can b e part of solution to housing crisis

THERE was a time when many of us literally ‘grew up’ in a bedsit. Fresh from school and anxious to get away from home, the bedsit was a place where you learned about life, about living in a community rather than a family, and even where some of us late developers had our first amorous experiences.

For those who don’t remember those far-off days, the bedsit was a room in a sub-divided old house, furnished with a bed and a basic cooking unit like a hob, a small fridge (if you were lucky) and a kettle. Down the hall was a basic bathroom shared by the tenants, where you got out of the shower rapidly when there was a severe rap on the door from a short-taken neighbour.

There was usually an old black telephone down the hall and you were expected to take messages for the other tenants – and sometimes even try to steal a date with the girls who rang up looking for somebody else.

My first bedsit was on the third floor of an old pub on Longford’s Main Street – which had the added advantage that sometimes the owner left six-packs of Harp lager stacked in the back hall. If you got lucky and came back with a friend when the house was in darkness, you could ‘borrow’ a few bottles to add to the gaiety of the occasion.

Travelling through the trendy Dublin streets of Ranelagh today, it is difficult to imagine that at closing time, this was once a scene of brawling builders’ labourers who populated the broken-down Victorian red-bricks lining the side streets.

Rathmines, also in Dublin, areas of Cork and Limerick, and most rural towns had buildings and whole areas where old houses were broken up into bedsits – sometimes 10 or more, depending on the size of the building.

Some of them were grotty, many of them ‘sub-standard’ even by the standards of the time, but they were cheap and if the décor was often dismal, there was usually a cheerful camaraderie among the residents.

If there was a certain glamour for those of us escaping from home for the first time, there is little doubt that a fair cross-section of the buildings had weeping walls, damp, rodent infestation, and were probably dangerous fire traps.

An added disadvantage of living in a cheap bedsit was that there was a tendency in those days to escape the tedium by treating the local pub as your living room, which in the end proved a far more expensive proposition.

In more recent years, with the onset of a new affluence, standards improved, and televisions and telephones were installed, but there was still a basic feel of transience about them. That was the main advantage, for both tenants and landlords. There was constant movement, with people moving on because of their jobs or a change in their fortunes, while others were constantly moving in to fill the newly vacant bedsits.

The advantage of the bedsit was that it was yours. Sharing houses with strangers could be problematic, especially when they were shift workers in the local meat factory and didn’t seem to know the difference between night and day. Renting a house was out of the question and apartments were rare, so for most of us the bedsit was the answer.

All that changed three years ago when bedsits were banned. New regulations closed them down in favour of ‘studio apartments’, many of which had to have expensive parking spaces attached, even if the resident was a cyclist or used public transport. It is estimated that only 2,000 bedsits survived from a stock of around 10,000. N OW, as the housing crisis escalates, it seems that Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy, who lived in one in Berlin himself, is about to ‘bring back the bedsit’ – even if that alone has little chance of solving the crisis.

But it could be a creative way of freeing up other property, provided that proper regulation is enforced by county councils to ensure that standards are maintained and old fire traps are not pressed into service with tragic consequences.

Housing policy for the last four decades has focused on building housing estates outside rural towns and cities – thus denuding them of their natural population. As a result, many small towns are now a wasteland after 6pm when the shops close.

Some time ago, a local auctioneer gave me a tour of Boyle, Co Roscommon, pointing out the vacant shops and buildings lining the streets. His solution to the problem of the ‘death of an Irish town’ involved bringing people back into the main streets by converting empty and unused buildings into flats and bedsits. It could have the double effect of solving a part of the housing crisis and bringing life back into small-town Ireland.

Debating the issue yesterday, there were fears that bedsits and sub-standard accommodation could become a dumping ground for low-income families, the vulnerable and the addicts. That would be a disaster.

Bringing back the bedsit – the 2017 version – won’t solve the accommodation crisis, but it could re-introduce cheaper accommodation for single people or couples trying to accumulate a deposit to buy an apartment or a house of their own.

Innovation is needed at all levels to solve the accommodation crisis and the bedsit should be part of the solution.

You could try to steal a date with girls ringing up for somebody else