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I DON’T THINK the Government has a clue how just how crazy high rents are in this country and how hard it is to rent or buy a home. Just look on Daft.ie and you can see how truly outrageously high rents are. €3,100 for a one bed apartment in Dublin — yes, you read that right. That’s €37,300 a year to rent a one bed room apartment.
If you are a nurse or a teacher or anyone on any sort of average income – your entire take home pay couldn’t cover that rent. It’s not just Dublin – rents for a one bed apartment in Cork are €2,000 a month, in Limerick they are €2,800 for a two bed roomed apartment. How are families, workers, or students supposed to cover rising costs of food, energy, heating and these astronomical rents, which are only going to get higher if the Government has its way in the coming weeks? The Government plans to ram through legislation that will remove rent caps on new tenancies and allow landlords to increase rents to these unaffordable ‘market rents’.
The Minister for Housing, James Browne, and Taoiseach Micheál Martin said in the Dáil yesterday that the new rental measures will bring ‘certainty and security’ for renters. The only certainty the new measures will bring is the certainty of even higher rents, a worsening cost of living crisis for renters and ongoing evictions, increasing homelessness.
The big change is that landlords will be able to reset rents to the ‘market’ rent between tenancies (when a tenant leaves voluntarily) and again every six years in new tenancies created after 1 March. Currently, there is an annual rent cap of two per cent, even when a tenant leaves.
Landlords will massively increase rents for properties being re-rented, and then every six years, renters will face the nightmare of their rent being brought up to the ‘market rent’. It shows how out of touch this Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government is with the reality of people’s lives. They think it is a good policy decision to allow rents to rise even higher in the middle of a devastating cost of living crisis.
The Taoiseach asserted (wrongly) that current tenants will not be affected by the new measures. Well, the reality is that existing renters will be vulnerable to huge pressure from landlords to pay a higher rent when the new measures come in, even if that is illegal. Some landlords will inevitably try to get tenants to leave so that they can charge the astronomical ‘market rent’. The new measures will effectively incentivise landlords to evict lower paying tenants to get in higher paying ones.
Despite all the claims that the Government will empower the Residential Tenancies Board to enforce the laws, anyone who has rented in this country knows landlords will take advantage. The data shows a huge number of landlords do not even register with the RTB – will they follow the law or charge market rents? They are already breaking it. Students, struggling with high costs, will be the big losers, as they often only rent for a nine month period and change tenancies more regularly.
The Government is trying to spin and hide that the new measures will do nothing to stop the tsunami of ‘no fault’ evictions of existing tenants that saw almost 20,000 rental households receive notices of eviction last year. Existing renters get no additional security of tenure as new tenancy protections only apply to new tenancies after March 1st. So hundreds of thousands of existing renters will still be vulnerable to the massive wave of evictions ongoing. And when they are evicted, they will be forced to pay for a new place at the more expensive ‘market rent’.
The question is, why is the Government implementing a policy they know will make things harder for renters and younger generations trying to find a home? The Government says it is allowing rents rise in order to incentivise the private market – institutional investor funds – to hopefully build more rental properties, increasing supply.
But more unaffordable rental units are not the supply of homes we need, and it’s not what people want. My concern is most especially for younger generations stuck renting and the future renters who are having to pay all their income on rent and will never be able to buy a home. It appears the Government are playing a game of politics with housing, where it’s all about delivery numbers – not a supply of affordable homes.
The investor funds tend to build big rental apartment blocks that inflate overall housing delivery numbers, and so, come the next election, the Government will be able to say they are ‘turning the corner’ on the housing crisis once again. So let’s be clear about this. The Government is tinkering around the edges of rent controls, allowing rents to rise even further, so that global wealth and vulture funds will come in here and build unaffordable rental properties. Our young people will then have to rent out and be stuck as permanent rental fodder for vulture fund landlords. The Minister for Housing makes it clear on this in the press release announcing the changes when he said, “Landlords will be able to reset rents to market rate, between tenancies, a change which is viewed as critical to retain existing landlords and to attract new investment”.
The Government is even working directly in partnership with investor funds at the global investor fund conference MIPIM in Cannes in March, aimed at bringing in more “international investment houses and pension funds, real estate developers and asset managers” to turn more of our homes into financial assets for wealth funds.
The institutional investor lobby is clearly writing the housing policy of the Government and the Minister for Housing. They got a VAT cut in the Budget that will see them gifted €390 million each year of public money, along with apartment size changes that reduce apartment standards. This Government is turning the public purse, renters and effectively our younger generations into a permanent slush fund for large institutional funds and corporate landlords. This is no way to run a country.
There is a better way that can actually deliver affordable homes for our younger generations – just look at Denmark, Austria and Sweden. Why don’t we even remember what we did in this country when our councils built social housing across this country?
There is a clear solution – build affordable housing on a massive scale up and down the country through a state construction company, control rents, ban evictions, and treat housing a human right, not an investment asset.
Unfortunately, the Government appears determined to push through its rent hike bill, but we will not let them do it without a serious challenge. They have underestimated the extent of public anger and the impact of their rental measures, and it is important they hear about this.
Raise the roof – the coalition of trade unions, civil society groups, CATU, the tenants union and opposition parties is coming together to oppose it. If you are affected, if you are concerned, raise your voice, take action, contact your local Government TD, let them know, there is another way, drop the daft rent exploitation bill.
Rory Hearne is a Social Democrat TD for Dublin North West, spokesperson on Housing, local Government and the Gaeltacht and the author of GAFFS; Why no one can get a house and what we can do about it.
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