Social Housing Waiting List In The Six Counties Reaches A Staggering 50,000
The number of households on the social housing waiting list in the Six Counties has now passed the 50,000 mark. This stark milestone was confirmed in official figures published by Stormont’s Department for Communities last week.
The number of households on the waiting list has risen by more than 30% over the last decade and reveals a worsening housing crisis. More than 33,000 of those households on the waiting list are classified as "full duty applicants" (FDA), which effectively means they are homeless.
These latest figures should not shock or surprise anyone, but they do hide darker details which Stormont does not want the public to know. Why does Stormont not provide a more detailed analysis of these figures? How many are single households? How many are couples? How many are families with young children? How many are families with an ill or disabled parent or child?
The answers to those questions would undoubtedly push the true waiting list figures even higher. How many people are truly in need of a home in the Six Counties? 60,000? 80,000? 100,000?
In October of last year, the DUP’s Gordon Lyons, the Stormont Minister in charge of the Department for Communities, slashed funding which had enabled housing associations to build new social housing. At that time, community-based organisations, including the Federation for Housing Associations, warned that Lyons’ cuts would result in higher construction costs, with some social housing projects likely to be delayed or abandoned altogether.
Now, with over 50,000 households on the social housing waiting list, it is difficult to see how those funding cuts could ever achieve anything other than making it more difficult to build social housing. Furthermore, those cuts have also had impact on the ability of housing associations to maintain existing properties, which could lead to a situation where homes become uninhabitable, leading to increased pressure on already existing social housing stock.
It must be remembered that the current system of ‘social housing’ is a creation of the political establishment. It has physically divided our society by creating segregated low-income housing developments. Concentrating poverty in this way was always going to lead to concentrations of the social problems that are associated with poverty. This in turn stigmatised ‘social housing’, a reality which suited those who profit from privatised housing.
Éirígí - For A New Republic wants to see the creation of a completely new system of housing across Ireland - we want to see the creation of Universal Public Housing, or UP Housing for short. UP Housing would provide those in need of housing with the secure, affordable homes both partitionist states deny them.
UP Housing would see the state building hundreds of thousands of new homes and buying up hundreds of thousands of existing homes. This ‘build and buy’ programme would address the overall lack of housing supply and help to create a better social mix within our current housing stock.
UP Housing would be open to everyone that is in need of a home, regardless of their income. Retail workers, pensioners, teachers, students, unemployed workers, builders, nurses and every other occupation would live side by side in UP Housing developments. This sort of mixed-income housing would create balanced communities and end the stigma associated with the failed model of ‘social housing’.