The Housing Crisis Is a Crisis of Capitalism

James O’Toole, a tenant facing eviction from Tathony House in Dublin, explains how the housing crisis is deeply rooted in our current economic model.

I’ll soon be homeless. I work and I’ve always paid my rent but like many other workers I face eviction into emergency accommodation. Rents are just too high and the government’s measures to prevent homelessness are useless.

Out of 15,000 eviction notices only 1,000 landlords have sold to councils and the guidance to people facing eviction to avail of homeless HAP is insulting when there are clearly no HAP properties available.

It’s not just workers in Ireland who face a severe housing crisis - it’s happening everywhere. Poor families in the USA are being squeezed from every side. In 2021, as housing costs rapidly spiked, families earning less than $30,000 had almost no money left after paying for rent and utility bills – averaging about $380 a month, compared with nearly $600 two decades ago.

On any given night in January 2023 there were more than 650,000 people homeless in the USA - an increase of over 70,650 people from 2022. This increase is caused by a wave of evictions following the lifting of the US Covid eviction ban. But this housing crisis is not limited to the US.

There are 1 million homeless across the EU. In France there is a huge lack of housing and it takes a worker over 6 months to get a small studio in Paris. Rents have been capped in Paris since 2019 but still rose by 1% in one quarter of 2023.

In other major French cities the rise has been much higher: Over 10% in Bordeaux and nearly 15% in Aix-en-Provence. Paris isn’t the only European city experiencing a severe housing shortage at the moment.

In London, the average rent for a one-bedroom flat in the city centre is now €2,500 per month, while the median monthly salary is €2,600. The same thing is happening in Amsterdam, with the average rent being over €1,500 per month - more than a third of the average salary in the Netherlands.

In Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam they’ve come down hard on Airbnb holiday lets to try and force supply back into the market. But the problem is the lack of social housing and a refusal to challenge the market - which is after all just code for rich individuals.

The market is just rich people making investment decisions that then impact on workers’ lives. Landlords have been conducting a war on tenants - for example in Paris where rents are capped landlords have been evicting tenants and selling properties in protest over a more regulated market.

Even in Finland where they introduced a “housing first” policy to tackle homelessness and end it by 2027 they’ve had to give up because rents in the private sector are rising so fast they can’t meet their targets.

There has been an international 40 year war on public housing - it’s called neoliberalism and used to be called Thatcherism. It’s the economic religion of our times and its mantra is to destroy everything public, to outsource and privatise.

When I was growing up in Fatima Mansions council flats in Dublin’s inner city I saw first hand the running down of the public housing estates, they intentionally destroyed them to turn them into ghettos so they could demonise social housing and drive working class people into the arms of private profiteers.

They offered a surrender grant to encourage workers to leave the area and then introduced a social housing threshold so low that only the poorest households could qualify - they created pools of poverty so they could point at them and say “oh no social housing is terrible!”

But the lack of supply of social housing from the state hits every worker by pushing up demand for housing which leads to rising rents and house prices. Neoliberalism is international and that’s why the housing crisis is international, it is just like the system that creates it.

But we need to open a front of struggle against this monstrous system here at home in Ireland. It starts by mobilising thousands of workers on housing and if our unions won’t do it we need to form our own grassroots coalition to take to the streets in our thousands and demand housing for all.

Working class people in Ireland feel beaten down and humiliated by the housing crisis - we need to bring people together and feel a renewed sense of collective strength.

In a housing movement socialists have to be clear - the problem isn’t just one of policy, it’s a crisis of capitalism, of neoliberalism and we have to remove that system in order to win a planned approach to housing, where social housing is open to all workers and what remains of the market is regulated and under the control of the working class.

There are 166,000 vacant properties across Ireland and the government is wondering what to do with a projected €30 billion surplus they’ll get over the next 3 years. Hand it over. We workers know what to do.