A single issue that’s causing sleepless nights
‘A better plan would have been to phase out the bedsits’
THIS week Lunchtime Live went on the road to Cork, where I interviewed a councillor about the new situation of more single people seeking one-bedroom accommodation on the housing waiting list, than families seeking two and three-bedroom homes. And why is that worrying? Well, because there are NO one-bedroom units available. Councils no longer provide them. Instead, the smallest units provided are now two bedrooms — which of course single people have to compete with couples and families for.
The people in question are mainly, though not exclusively, older single men and we’re letting them down badly. They’re usually unemployed or on low income. They’re unmarried or sometimes separated and traditionally they come behind everyone else on the social housing list.
Years ago, these men would have very probably lived in bedsits. But we outlawed them in 2013. They were seen as substandard places to live. And I think it could be argued that they were. However we didn’t replace them with equally cheap, better forms of accommodation. No, politicians from leafy suburbs decided that no one should live like that and with a stroke of a pen a whole swathe of cheap accommodation was wiped off the property landscape around the country without any alternative plan for where those people might live. Oh, and coincidentally, our homeless figures started to climb at the same time. We let unachievable aspirations trump practical realities.
Problem was — in reality, if you could barely afford a bedsit, you had no chance with a two-bedroom apartment. And saying, “Oh no. No one should live in a tiny space like that” (even though it was all they could afford) was the modern political equivalent of saying no one should eat slice pan — ‘‘let them eat cake’’.
Now it would seem not only are bedsits gone but one-bedroom flats are gone too. So if you’re someone who might have once lived somewhere like that, chances are you’re now either in a house share situation, a hostel bed or you’re on the streets. And politicians not only watched it happen. They made it happen.
A better plan would have been to phase out the bedsits. Raise standards of new builds going forward, but hang on to whatever basic accommodation we had until we were sure that everyone who was in those places had somewhere else to go before we threw them out of places we considered beneath them on to the streets. But we didn’t do that. We closed down bedsits, studio apartments and one-bedroom, sheltered accommodation for the elderly all over the country on the basis it needed to be bigger and better. And consequently we forced the cost up and availability down of homes for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
I asked the people who came on our phone lines, would they be willing to live in a one-bedroom apartment? They said they would live in a studio if there was security of tenure and their own front door. They were worried sick about what was going to happen to them and where they might live in the future. The people I spoke to were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, renting rooms in houses with people they didn’t know and afraid that they could be asked to leave at any time and would have nowhere to go. Not one of them had a pension beyond the State pension. Not one of them had a plan for how they were going to put a roof over their head when they reached retirement age. Not one of them viewed their futures as anything other than bleak.
These were not all people on social welfare. These were older people, on low paid jobs, who are not currently in social housing. But when those jobs go — as they will within a decade or so — they will not be able to afford their current, less than adequate forms of accommodation. They will need social housing urgently. I believe there is a tsunami of such people coming down the line. Currently we have no plan to deal with them. But suggesting they should live alone in a lovely two-bedroom flat — while in reality they are more likely to end up in a homeless hostel — is an insult to everyone involved.