Other countries facilitate shared ownership and the building of housing schemes where some facilities are owned in common, writes Stephen Bourke
“There’s this grey area between people that aren’t able to be on a housing list, and people that just don’t have capital resources, or aren’t even able to plan far enough ahead to get a mortgage,” said housing campaigner Barry Phelan.
“If you can afford your rent, you’re doing well. With the 20 per cent up front, [a mortgage is] impossible as a single person,” he said.
But as a group? Phelan proposes a co-operative model – in essence, a house-share that is owned by its tenants rather than a landlord. He said he was sick of the precarious lifestyle and short tenancies common in the Irish rental market.
“Over nine years, I’d lived in 11 different places,” he said. “When you move, you still have boxes you haven’t unpacked from the last move.”
Last year, he and some friends formed a company and took out a loan to buy a derelict house on Aughrim Street in Dublin 7. They’ve been refurbishing it since they moved in in May last year.
“I can unpack my stuff at last,” he said.
To spread the model, Phelan is forming an Irish wing of a British organisation called Radical Routes, which helps co-operative groups secure finance. Under the Radical Routes model, co-op groups form a company limited by guarantee and borrow on the basis of a business model – bypassing landlords and allowing tenants to be in charge of their own homes.
That allows tenants to put money into the drill holes in the wall, put money into renovation, and more importantly, set their own rent and decide when it’s paid. One of the Aughrim Street co-op members wanted to open a bike shop downstairs. That flexibility allowed him to stock the shop first, before he had to pay rent.
While Phelan attacks the problem of affordability from the perspective of a tenant, Hugh Brennan of the Ó Cualann Co-housing Alliance plans a developer’s solution.
The “co-housing” model is different to a co-op. Individual dwellings are owned outright, but other facilities are left in common ownership to encourage everyday interaction among residents and to build a sense of community. The idea emerged in Denmark during the 1960s, before being imported to North America.
Brennan is planning to go ahead with a pilot co-housing development somewhere in south Dublin or north Wicklow in the next 12 months. Half of the development will be social housing, while the other half will be affordable private housing for “a complete mix of age, of ethnicity, of income.” The Alliance is even open to including student housing – but doesn’t want to become a landlord.
Brennan intends to deliver housing at €150,000 per unit by negotiating concessions on development levies and site prices from local authorities – and by cutting profit back.
“If you look at the cost of building a three-bedroom, fourteen-hundred square foot house out of blocks, traditional concrete block cavity construction, or timber-frame construction, it can be done for that price,” he says. “In terms of our mark-up, we can control that.”
Social cohesion and levelling the playing field is fundamental to the Ó Cuallan proposal. “We were hoping that the centre area would be pedestrianised, and your vehicular access would be around the back. We tend to put a big value on our cars and they are a huge status symbol,” said Brennan. “If they’re not present at the front of your house – if they’re hidden behind – it takes away that one other thing, that oneupmanship.”
“We’re a social enterprise. For me, the important part of the social enterprise is the enterprise. If it’s not making money, there’s no social dividend,” said Brennan. “We limit ourselves to a 5 per cent profit, and 50 per cent of that goes back to the [wider]community.”
Both models face an uphill battle, especially for finance. Negotiations with two Dublin local authorities are ongoing, but the Ó Cuallan scheme still needs to find a site which will make the plan viable. Even with mortgage approval for half of the homes, the Alliance still needs to borrow from the Housing Finance Agency.
Although British laws governing co-operatives were updated in the 1950s, Ireland retains the original Industrial and Provident Societies Act from the 1890s which, Phelan says, is outdated. Without a strong tradition of co-ops In Ireland, Phelan says, it’s difficult to get the proposal accepted by financial institutions.
“There are places you can go for advice, in Britain at least. When I was buying [the house we’re living in now]and ringing solicitors they were talking to me about it as if I had ten heads. I suppose people are used to doing it a different way.”