Census 2022 Missed A Golden Opportunity To Do This One Big Thing With Housing
Over the course of the coming weeks close to two million Census 2022 forms will be collected from homes across the Twenty-Six Counties. While the census included a number of new questions, it failed to ask one very important question according to Cathaoileach Éirígí Brian Leeson. Speaking from Ballinteer in Dublin Leeson said,
“Census 2022 will record a vast amount of information relating to every aspect of our daily lives - information that will shape future policy in relation to transport, education, healthcare, employment, energy and many other important sectors.
While Census 2022 did include a series of questions relating to housing, it missed a golden opportunity to establish the true extent of hidden homelessness and hidden housing need across the state.
Brian Leeson calling for Universal Public Housing on the site of the former Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum
As things stand the only solid figures that we have relate to those who are in emergency accommodation and those who are on the waiting list for social housing - a figure the government claims is now less than 60,000.
Anecdotally we know that there are many more people who are earning too much to qualify for social housing, but not earning enough to rent or buy housing that is suitable to their needs.
This category of hidden homelessness and hidden housing need includes adults who are living with their parents, siblings or friends - adults with decent incomes who under any other circumstances would establish an independent household in a home of their own.
We also know that many of these adults also have children of their own living with them in their parents, siblings or friend’s homes. Census 2022 will capture these enforced multi-family arrangements as single households, without establishing if these arrangements are borne out of choice or necessity.
It would have been very simple to include a subset of questions in Census 2022 that explicitly asked individuals and families if they were sharing a home with other individual or families by choice or not — to ask them if they are being prevented from establishing an independent household of their own because of the extortionate cost of housing.
Questions of this sort would have established a baseline for the true level of hidden homelessness and hidden housing in this state. And this in turn would have given us a much better understanding of the number and types of homes that need to be built in the coming years.
While the opportunity to establish the true level of housing need was missed in Census 2022, there are other ways to get this information.
Today, Éirígí is calling on the government to create a new online register to establish the true level of housing need in this state — a register where people who do not qualify for social housing, for whatever reason, would be able to log their housing needs.
Éirígí brings the Universal Public Housing message to RTÉ
This online register should also give people from all income-backgrounds the option of registering their interest in renting public housing. Most critically this option should be open to people who are currrently renting in the private sector.
I have no doubt that the real demand for public housing in this state could be measured in the hundreds of thousands of individuals and families, as opposed to the less than 60,000 that the government claims.
I also have no doubt that the government will strongly resist any attempt to establish the true extent of housing need and the true demand for public housing.
They will resist because they know that those figures will expose their own gross incompetence and bias toward a model of housing that is controlled by private landowners, developers, bankers and landlords.”