Council housing estates are NOT ghettos - they’re a source of pride

A passionate plea to our policy makers to get back to building social homes on a large scale

Twenty years ago, a group of academics from University College Dublin published Social Housing in Ireland, A Study of Success, Failure and Lessons Learned. Led by Professor of Social Policy Tony Fahey, the book remains the benchmark study into social housing in this State.

During the course of their work, the research team spoke with hundreds of residents in seven council estates in Dublin, Dundalk, Sligo, Limerick and Cork. Through household surveys, focus groups and structured interviews with tenants, teenagers, community workers and others, they built up an intimate picture of what it is like to live in council housing.

They examined topics including the impact of the built environment, residents’ quality of life, social-order problems, relationships with local authorities and other State agencies. They also made important recommendations for future government policy. Unfortunately, almost all of them were, and continue to be, ignored.

Contrary to the widely held assumption among politicians and policy makers that council housing was a failure, the report found that this ‘ignores the widespread success of local authority housing and fails to recognise that non-provision of such housing would have amounted to greater failure for the less well off...’

The authors found that ‘residents in local authority estates were generally proud and satisfied with the working-class culture of their neighbourhoods’.

This led to the report’s key recommendation that: ‘There is no justification for assuming that large-scale housing provision by local authorities (…or voluntary housing agencies…) is misguided or doomed to widespread failure or should be drastically scaled back.’

The report went on to recommend that ‘social housing should be raised to a level where it accounts for between 20 and 30% of total new housing provision’ and that ‘output should be doubled from the present level of around 4,500 units per year to a level in the region of 9,00010,000 per year’.

The recommendation was a direct challenge to government policy at that time. Since the publication of A Plan for Social Housing in 1991, the State was no longer in the business of building large-scale council developments. A position that has remained unchanged.

Not once in the 20 years that have passed since Social Housing in Ireland was published, has the annual output of social housing reached 10,000 homes. During their 14 years in office, from 1997 to 2008, Fianna Fáil managed an average output of 6,843 social homes a year. Fine Gael’s current plan, Rebuilding Ireland, promises an average output of 6,812 per year over six years up to 2021.

Given the population growth and rising housing need during the intervening period, the proposed 10,000 annual output figure needs to be significantly adjusted upwards to meet current demand. The report was also cautious of the emerging policy preference for tenure mixture, commenting that ‘small size in local authority estates and spatial contiguity with settled housing do not guarantee social integration’.

While not opposed to policies promoting greater social and income mix, the report rightly pointed out that ‘social differentiation and segregation are due to a more complex range of factors than the size and location of housing areas alone’.

Tellingly, the report intimated that council tenants ‘would probably resent the implication that they required an infusion of middle-class households and middle-class values in order to bring their neighbourhoods up to satisfactory standards’.

The UCD team also made important recommendations in terms of promoting best practice among social landlords, increasing the current funding to local authorities to maintain housing stock, and better strategies for tackling anti-social behaviour. Some of these proposals were ignored while others implemented in a piecemeal fashion and regularly subject to funding and staff cuts, particularly during the recession.

However, the report’s key finding, that well planned and properly managed public housing estates are good places to live and provide tenants with a good quality of life and should be delivered on a scale commensurate with housing need, was, and continues to be, ignored. Instead we have had a succession of ministers setting their face against the evidence, promising to never again build large-scale council estates.

They smear such developments with pejorative language by calling them ghettos and extol the virtues of mixed-tenure models of social housing delivery. The consequence of such ineptitude is not only the demonisation of working-class communities, but a policy that will never deliver sufficient numbers of social homes to meet existing need.

Today, we need up to 130,000 new council homes, when you add all those on the housing list with those in insecure and expensive private rental sector HAP and RAS tenancies. We also need tens of thousands of genuinely affordable rental and purchase homes for those above the threshold for social housing but unable to afford to rent or buy in the current market. Meeting this combined social and affordable need would require at least 15,000 houses a year or 50% of the current National Development Plan targets for all housing.

The best way to meet this need is through a return to large-scale councilled public housing developments with subsidised social rental, non-subsidised affordable cost rental, and non-subsidised affordable sale housing. Unlike the 1970s or early 80s, these estates would cater for a broader range of people and professions ensuring a greater income and social mix than either traditional council or private housing estates. This could be funded through a combination of low-interest long-term loans from the Housing Finance Agency, the European Investment Bank and the Credit Union movement, as well as increased exchequer revenue from the capital plan. No additional taxes on low and middle-income families would be required.

Social Housing in Ireland was a groundbreaking study when published 20 years ago. Some of its research team, such as Michelle Norris and Cathal O’Connell, have gone on to become the country’s leading policy experts in social housing. But more importantly, its observations and recommendations are as relevant today as they were in 1999.

It should be read by every person serious about tackling the housing crisis and re-read by all who have forgotten its important lessons. In fact, I may just send a copy to Minister for Housing Eoghan Minister. You never know, even he might learn something from it.