Letter: Blame property owners for lack of affordable housing

Jude Webber’s article (“Housing policy helps Sinn Féin leave most of its troubles behind”, Global Insight, December 14) touches on important matters far beyond Ireland. Much of the English-speaking world has problems of unaffordable housing with similar causes to Ireland’s.

Ireland’s planning regime largely dates from the 1960s, and borrowed greatly from England’s Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Owners of property could no longer develop, extend or demolish structures or change the use of properties, except with official permission. Additionally, neighbours and strangers were able to object to such permission without demonstrating any significant loss of value to their properties, or any public harm.

As decades passed, this has progressively blocked the supply of homes that people on median incomes can afford without parental help. While supply has been constricted, financial liberalisation since the 1980s, and Ireland’s transformation in 1987-2001 to a high-income economy have boosted demand and prices.

Governments have tried many things, but unless they rethink the concept that property owners’ rights to respond to demand — and develop their properties — must be curbed, and that non-owners can veto such responses to consumer demand, matters will not greatly improve.

Jonathan Malone
Singapore