This is a crisis in housing
As overnight queues spring up to view homes without pricetags...
SCENES reminiscent of the Celtic Tiger at its most ridiculous were visible in west Dublin yesterday as a large group of people queued in the bitter cold and rain to buy a house they don’t even know the price of yet.
Twenty-two people, some of whom began queuing at 6.30am on Monday, and at least one of whom called in sick from work, sat in the rain under umbrellas in the hope of securing a property – even though the 24 houses for sale at the new Beechwood Heath development in Hansfield, west Dublin, won’t go on sale until midday on Friday.
Deck chairs, rain coats, umbrellas and sleeping bags were all neatly lined up outside a showhouse for one of the pretty red-brick semidetached homes.
The hopeful buyers all have their €2,000 deposits ready to hand over despite saying they have no definite sense of how much the homes are going to cost. One man, who did not wish to be named, said: ‘I have asked the retailers [Kelly Walsh property agents] in several calls, but they wouldn’t tell me how much the houses are. I don’t know if they will be €300,000 or €350,000 or €600,000. I don’t know. But I am approved to buy a house and just hope it is in my price range. I am stuck between not queuing in the rain and risking the price of the houses go up by €20,000 or €30,000.
‘I had to take the week off work. I have a good job, I am working in a good job but I had to ring in sick in the hope of getting one of these, but I don’t know what I am buying – I just need to buy. I am renting in Navan for €1,200 for a twobedroom house. I might as well have a mortgage.’
A mother of two sitting in the rain said she had left her children at home with their father. ‘I have never seen anything like this before but I am number 21 in the queue and I am staying here,’ she said.
Asked if she was cold, she said: ‘I am freezing, I will probably catch a cold, but I have a lot of warm clothes on and I have to get one of these houses. I have my family and we can’t rent any more.’
Another man, who is second in the queue, said he wanted a house for himself and his brother.
‘It is embarrassing for us to sit here like cattle, it is really embarrassing,’ he said. ‘It is not something anyone wants to do, but what can we do? We rang the sellers and they are saying we are not selling until Friday, but you know, there is a queue there. So I just came down and set up a camp. Some of us were thinking of pitching a tent.’
Yesterday, as the numbers began to grow, the crowd decided to form an orderly queue by writing out who had arrived first. They then covered for each other and minded each others’ spaces if another wanted to sleep in their car or use a nearby toilet. ‘The neighbours are letting us use their toilet and giving us food,’ said one woman.
Another man said his fianceé, whom he plans to marry next year, saw the houses for sale online and so they decided to join the queue. ‘She is a teacher, so she can’t really take time off work but I don’t work full time. The boom is back.
‘The last time this happened was during the Celtic Tiger, people have money to spend now but this is really horrible.’
When contacted, Kelly Walsh said it had no comment to make.
‘I had to take a week off work’
CUTTING through all the talk and debate and political to-ing and fro-ing on the issue of housing is the reality of people queuing overnight this week, in the rain, in the hope of securing a house for themselves.
A house they don’t even know they can afford because, despite the hardship involved in getting to the top of the queue, nobody camping out for the 24 houses that go on sale in Clonsilla on Friday even knows precisely how much the specific properties cost.
It’s a stark image and an even starker reality, and one that serves only to bring us back, once again, to the key point – we are not building enough houses.
This newspaper has consistently pointed out that there is an obvious solution – to build more houses and apartments, and to build up. What’s wrong, after all, with good-quality high-rise developments in a capital city?
Not enough is being done to help alleviate the housing problem. More units need to be delivered. It’s up to the Government to make this happen.