'The social contract is completely broken': Ireland's housing crisis

Every day before dawn, Aoife Diver, a teacher in Dublin, gets into her car and drives up to 90 minutes from her uncle's house to the other side of the Irish capital.

After school, he gets back in the car for the reverse commute. On a recent evening, Ms. Diver, 25, sat in stop-and-go traffic, the red of the front brake lights glowing through the windshield as dusk turned to darkness.

This was not always the case. She used to share a house with five friends near the school where she works in south Dublin. But when her rent and bills reached almost half of her monthly salary last year, she knew she had to move back in with family.

“There are very few homes available, and what is available is way out of my reach,” she said. “Eventually I will probably have to move somewhere else because I will never be able to afford a house or apartment in Dublin on my own.”

The skyrocketing cost of private rental properties has left many people struggling to afford housing in Dublin and other Irish cities, leading some to move abroad and others to travel long distances. The crisis has priced teachers and social workers out of the communities they serve, left professional couples unable to buy homes, and left lower-income people fearing homelessness.

The recent one xenophobic riots in Dublin capitalized on the grievances of people struggling to cover their housing costs and exposed to the world the deep fractures the crisis has caused. But the problem is decades in the makingsay experts, and has become the driving force behind Irish politics.

“Policy has created this crisis,” said Rory Hearne, an associate professor of social policy at Maynooth University, west of Dublin. “They are not immigrants, they are not asylum seekers,” he added, naming groups far-right accused of driving up demand for housing. “Housing policies have created this housing crisis, and the complete refusal to develop public housing and build affordable housing.”

Although it is a major problem across Ireland, the housing shortage is felt most acutely in the Dublin region, which is home to around a quarter of the country's population, just over five million people. Two-thirds of Irish people aged 18 to 34 still live with their parents – one of the highest figures in Europe according to EU statisticsbringing the continent's average to 42 percent.

The average standardized monthly rent in Dublin is now 2,102 euros – about $2,200, and double what it was a decade ago, according to official figures. With average salaries in the capital last year approximately €3,285 per monththat is out of reach for many.

The biggest cause, analysts say, is the failure of successive governments to invest in social housing, which local authorities once built for those who couldn't afford to rent privately. During the Celtic Tiger period of the late 1990s and early 2000s, as Ireland's economy boomed, private construction exploded and landlords were encouraged to snap up rental properties as investments, attracting less affluent buyers were pushed out.

Then the market collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis. Housing projects were left half-completed. Houses were foreclosed. Ireland has the National Asset Management Agency, or NAMA, which acquired portfolios of delinquent loans and later sold them at discounted prices to so-called vulture funds. For a while, development came to a standstill, and as supply shrank, prices were driven up.

Even before the crisis, there had been a shift from social housing built by local authorities to greater dependence on the market for years. Now that construction has restarted in recent years, the emphasis has shifted more to short-term rentals or luxury construction projects.

Dr. Hearne said that as more people lost their homeownership and social housing shrank, anyone not already in the housing market was increasingly pushed towards the private rental market.

Younger people today are often stuck in expensive rental properties or living with their parents, and cannot see a future in which they can become homeowners, he said.

“I think the social contract for the younger generations has been completely broken,” said Dr. Hearne. “These used to be the times when people got married and had children, and now they're stuck in their parents' homes.”

Lower-income tenants often rent privately, with costs subsidized by the government, rather than in special social housing. With limited protection for tenants, their situation can be precarious.

“You have the most vulnerable households, single parents, low-income families who are in the private rental sector, and if they are evicted they cannot afford the new rent so they become homeless,” said Dr. Hearne, and noted that homelessness reached record levels this year.

John-Mark McCafferty, the chief executive of Threshold, a charity that supports private renters, said Ireland was “as a society sleepwalking into a private rental sector that has really picked up the slack after decades of underinvestment in social housing.”

“That is deliberate,” he added, “regardless of who has been in power since the 1980s.”

Twenty years ago, he said, the people who came to Threshold on the brink of homelessness were often single men with mental health or addiction issues. But in recent years, families and working households have often been at risk.

There had been hopeful signs, Mr McCafferty said, that more affordable housing would be developed among non-profit housing associations could take some pressure off the private rental market.

A spokesperson for Ireland's Housing Minister said the government was nearing completion of a review of the private rental sector “and will report on how Ireland's housing system can be improved to provide an efficient, affordable, viable, safe environment for both landlords as tenants.”

In December, on Grafton Street, a busy shopping street in Dublin, a middle-aged woman pushed a cart filled with her belongings, a sleeping bag and a tent folded, past a storefront full of glittering Christmas displays.

People who grew up in the city are being priced out of places they have always called home. James O'Toole, 49, has lived for 14 years in Tathony House, a former factory converted into apartments in central Dublin. But his landlord plans to sell the property.

Mr O'Toole, a community worker, and his wife, Madeleine Johansson, 38, a city councillor, said they could not afford anywhere else in the city they serve.

The couple and other tenants legally challenged and won an initial eviction notice. But last month the landlord served eviction notices again.

“It's like we have to fight whether we want to or not,” Mr. O'Toole said. “And I refuse to go to my parents' house while their 49-year-old son moves back home.”

Mr. Doyle led to controversy last year above an artwork of Irish police officers attending an eviction during the famine. The idea of ​​evictions and lack of access to housing is particularly resonant, Mr Doyle said, because of Ireland's centuries of British rule, during which the callous absentee landlord became a byword for oppression.

More than a hundred years after the founding of the Irish state, housing is once again an acute problem. “For a lot of people,” he said, “it feels like a betrayal.”