Finding a home - the costs and difficulties involved

She was moving from her home to take a very well-paid attractive new job in a big city, and had to find a place in which to live. She was not looking for anything big and fancy, she said, just a small apartment, where she could cook her meals, and sleep, with an attached bathroom, within cycling or walking distance of her workplace.

“A place I could call home and maybe occasionally entertain my friends”, she said. Because this was the first time when she would be living away from her family home, she thought all of this would be easy, but it wasn't, she said, and it took her several weeks before she was successful.

The apartment into which she will move within the next few weeks is on the top floor of a privately owned three-floored house, the owners of which live on the first floor. It consists of three small rooms and a very tiny bathroom. Although the kitchen is equipped with a cooker, washing machine and dish-washing machine, the apartment is otherwise unfurnished. 

When I met her, she was, laughingly, wondering how she was going to move her bed and a few other pieces of essential furniture up three flights of narrow stairways. She was going to have to “recruit my family and friends to navigate”,  she said.

And neither had she anticipated the cost of renting - €3,000 a month, plus the cost of electric power, water consumption and garbage disposal. She also signed a one-year lease, which made provision for a three-months' vacation notice on either side. “If my owner/landlords don't like me”, she said, “they can always say they want the apartment for a family member”.

From her experience, and from talking with contemporaries, she says that she now realises that her generation of young people, however hard they work, will never be able to own their own homes. Such is the astronomical expense, they will, unlike their parents, always be renters.

She said that residential property, even at early planning and development stage, was being bought up by international pensions' funds, investors' funds, rich Russians and even richer Chinese. The so-called vultures.

We are familiar with this story. It is reflected in our daily news: the statistics on  homelessness, the numbers of  young families cooped up in hotel rooms, the lack of play-space for children. And while it is accepted that for many social reasons there will inevitably be unfortunate people who 'sleep rough' , the fact is that many, many families now registered as 'homeless' are hard-working, but they cannot afford the very high cost of renting nor do they qualify for the prohibitive mortgages now necessary to buy a home. Market forces, vulture investments, have priced them out of that basic human right – a home.

This story is not exclusive to large cities in Ireland. It was told to me by a high-salaried young woman in search of a home in Berlin.

In 2018, the Irish Bishops, in conference, issued a Pastoral Letter on housing. (It was largely unreported because our so-called liberal media does not do bishops-speak). It is the subject of a challenging article in the October issue of 'The Furrow' under the title 'An Economy that Excludes' by Suzanne Mulligan. I quote “As rents continue to soar and mortgages remain out of reach, many find themselves with little alternative but to go into emergency accommodation....what does it say about our economic priorities if people in paid employment are unable to buy or rent a home”.

The bishops stated that “the provision of housing cannot be left solely to the market, it should not be treated as a commodity”. Indeed as we would all agree – a house is more than bricks and mortar. It is a home. It is a basic human right - “fundamental to our well-being, our safety, our happiness and as such a pivotal role in our flourishing”.

It seems to me that if this comment on market forces and, inherently on the exclusivity of the rights to private property, was made by some trendy leftie on the back streets of Ballymun, it would have been the subject of a much advertised Prime Time. But its hard-hitting relevance was ignored. It challenged a vital provision in our constitution to the absolute and inalienable right to private property, to do with it whatever we wish to do with it. That includes the right to sell residential property, homes, to the highest bidder in the market, even if that includes international cartels whose only objective is to create massive profits for their investors.

It is now the assured recipe for homelessness, making it impossible for ordinary hard-working people to ever acquire a  home of their own. It is Vulture Capitalism versus the Common Good. (The alternative, of course, is social housing but the powers-that-be seem incapable or reluctant to go down that route).

Our current Irish government will, no doubt, make an election ploy in the next election on their achievements in the reform of our constitution to accommodate same-sex marriage and free access to abortion. But, it seems to me, that the right to a place – a home – in which to live, supersedes almost all other human rights. But will any government, or for that matter any politician (even the Ballymun lefties) risk their re-election by advocating that we, at least, look at the present constitutional status of property?

And even if, perchance, some brave (or foolish) politico were to hint at the necessity for such reform, would we, smugly sitting in our comfortable homes (with mortgages long since paid), vote for him or her? And that's the rub!