A Winter of Housing Discontent is Coming
National Homeless and Housing Coalition Call for People to Start Mobilising on Housing Crisis
Announcing September Days of Housing Action and Protests
It has become obvious in the past 18 months of the pandemic that the housing crisis affects people from all walks of life and increasingly so. Homeless deaths have escalated to an alarming level. Homeless individuals and families are spending longer in emergency accommodation. It is impossible to rent somewhere to live at an affordable cost. Tenants have little to no protection. It is impossible to buy somewhere to live. More than 55,000 households are in difficulty with mortgage arrears. Accessing housing continues to be an issue for students. Traveller accommodation budgets remain unspent while increasing numbers find themselves in homelessness. Elderly pensioners are finding themselves homeless. People wait years, sometimes more than a decade, on local authority housing lists. Overcrowding, substandard accommodation in both the private and public housing sector is commonplace. Hundreds of thousands of derelict buildings scatter the landscape.
Meanwhile, government policy in the past five years has increasingly favoured vulture and cuckoo funds and corporate landlords. They get tax breaks. Standards are lowered to make it cheaper for them to build student accommodation, co-living and build to rent. By benefiting private landlords and property investors, the price of accommodation continues to escalate making housing ever more unaffordable. These same funds are buying up entire estates, whole apartment blocks and sometimes they are leaving them empty so that they accumulate in value.
People’s lives are being put on hold because they cannot access secure, affordable, quality housing. An entire generation is being treated with contempt by this government and every piece of legislation passed that favours the landlords and funds is another kick in the teeth to those caught at the coal face of this crisis – a crisis made by government policy and made worse by them.
The huge protests of people affected by the Mica scandal recently are an indication of the thousands we will see on the streets in the coming period.
The National Homeless and Housing Coalition are calling on people to begin to get organised in their communities to prepare for a time when we can put the pandemic behind us and mobilise in our tens of thousands – the housing movement must rise up from every street, from every village, town and city across the land just as the water charges movement did. Ahead of a national pre-Budget housing protest planned by Raise the Roof in October and in order to build in communities all over the country for the national October protest, the NHHC is calling:
September 11th – national day of local actions in communities
Member organisations of the National Homeless and Housing Coalition will be reaching out to housing action groups and other organisations representing those affected by the housing crisis in towns and cities across the country to organise local housing actions that will highlight the crisis in their areas. These actions will be the building blocks for building a mass movement that will mobilise on the streets into the winter.
September 15th – Dail Eireann Kildare Street at 5.30pm
We are calling on people to gather at the Dail on the first day back after the summer recess to mark their cards – a winter of housing discontent and protest is coming, stop putting the needs of funds and investors first – invest in the people, build public housing on public land, lower rents, give us security, access and affordability. We want homes, not investments.
