A ‘mad hatters party’ was how one local described the very public row between Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy and Minister of State Catherine Byrne at the launch of the St Michaels estate regeneration plan last Monday.
Unfortunately the bizarre behaviour of the Fine Gael Deputy for Dublin 8 distracted the media from the real significance of the announcement. For the first time in 20 years, central Government was allowing a local authority to develop a large scale public housing project on public land with public finance.
Since the publication of Delivering Homes, Sustaining Communities by the Department of Environment in 2006, housing policy has been geared towards private sector led mixed tenure developments.
While Councils would still build social housing on public land, this would be mainly through small scale infill developments of no more than 75 homes. From now on large scale housing developments would be delivered by private developers on private land with social housing secured through 20% Part V obligations and the Rental Accommodation Scheme.
In the years after the crash private sector building ground to a halt and capital funding for social housing was cut by 90%. But demand for social housing continued to rise.
In desperation some Councils looked to their land banks to see if they could leverage the value of the asset to deliver some level of housing. The Land Initiative was born.
Councils would master plan the site and contract in a private consortium to fund and build the development. Thirty percent of the site would be bought back by the Council for social. Twenty percent would be affordable, the details to be decided at a later date. The remaining fifty percent would be sold at market value with the developer pocketing the profit.
Critics of the model complained that the tenure mix was based on the finance requirements of the lenders and not local housing need; that the private houses would be sold at unaffordable prices; and that a valuable public asset in limited supply was being sold off with no commensurate public gain.
Though the Land Initiative was a bad idea born out of necessity, the then Housing Minister Simon Coveney made it into a virtue. He claimed that these “flagship” “pathfinder” projects were going to deliver on the scale needed to tackle the housing.
The reality was very different. The tendering process has been torturously slow. In most cases contracts have not been signed. There is little certainty with regard to delivering any affordable rental or purchase homes.
Calls from opposition politicians and housing campaigners for Government to publicly fund Council led mixed income developments have fallen on deaf ears. We were told that Councils don’t have the capacity or expertise to lead such large scale developments nor the experience of delivering mixed tenure developments.
And yet last Monday Minister Murphy launched a large scale publicly funded Council led mixed tenure development. This represents a substantial shift in Government policy.
So why did the government change its mind? The answer is to be found in the convergence of a number of factors that forced the Government to do something it never intended to do.
St Michaels is the least suited of the pilot sites for a Land Initiative project. It has been on the losing side of two earlier failed public private partnerships. It is also the location most prone to gentrification and thus spiralling housing costs.
The local community has a long history of mobilising in support of the needs of the local area. The St Michael’s Estate Regeneration Team and their Fair Rent Homes campaign launched last April cogently made the case for a publicly funded development combining social and cost rental housing along with community facilities and employment opportunities.
In parallel to this Sinn Féin took a strategic decision to have St Michaels estate removed from the Land Initiative.
Over almost 12 months in private engagements with senior officials in Dublin City Council and the Department of Housing we argued for a public funding model. We also made clear that we would use our strength on the Council to block the development if the private funding model was pursued.
In September 2017 Dublin City Council South Central Area Committee agreed unanimously that St Michaels should be removed from the Land Initiative. This was endorsed by the Councils Housing Strategic Policy Committee in October. A similar call from TDs was supported by Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, Independents for Change and People for Profit during a Topical Issues debate on May of this year.
Meanwhile Eoghan Murphy was coming under increased pressure for his failure to deal with the affordable housing crisis. Two years on from the launch of Rebuilding Ireland and not a single affordable home to rent or buy had been delivered through any central government scheme.
Desperate to show that he was doing something on affordability, Murphy needed an announcement. So much so that Dublin City Council was pressured to launch the proposal before all the details were finalised and Damien English, the line Minister for regeneration projects including St Michaels was dropped from the launch.
Unfortunately for Minister Murphy his colleague Minister of State Catherine Byrne rained on his parade, her anger driven by the very significant shift away from a private sector led development.
Under pressure from communities, opposition politicians and the public, the Government may finally be doing the right thing on housing – funding public housing on public land on a scale commensurate with social and affordable housing need.
St Michaels is an important development because it will provide an opportunity to demonstrate that the public funding model is better for tenants, communities and the taxpayer.
Now lets see the same model used for the Grange/Kilcarberry in South Dublin, for Shanganagh Castle in Dun Laoghaire Rathdown and for Damastown in Fingal.
First published in the Sunday Business Post on 29.7.18
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