Folly of abolishing bedsits only to promote co-living is now becoming clear
housing
department in 2009, to ban bedsits with effect from 2013.
The letter,
from Enid O'Dowd
, outlined a decision of a private landlord to sell a house he owns in Rathgar, south
Dublin
. This house has, up to now, been let in four units. The landlord is selling to avoid facing the expense of bringing the premises up to the standard required by statutory regulations.
Nobody knows exactly how many bedsits were eliminated in 2013. These were the first and cheapest rung on the
housing ladder
. They suited students, single people, separated people and many others. It appears that perhaps as many as 15,000 bedsits disappeared around that time.
Many bedsits formed part of substantial private houses which had been converted to bedsit use as the middle classes deserted city centres to live in suburbs in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The irony is that wealthy middle-class people have taken advantage of the abolition of bedsits to reconvert those substantial houses to trophy homes on leafy residential roads. Strangely, the initiative to abolish bedsits came from Threshold, the housing charity, which convinced the department that nobody should live in a dwelling unless it has separate bathroom and kitchen facilities.
READ MORE
Sharing such facilities was viewed by Threshold and the department as inherently undesirable and substandard. By further irony, the same department was to be found sponsoring what it described as 'shared living accommodation' or 'co-living' developments (involving the use of shared kitchen and other facilities) less than six years after it killed off bedsits.
Equally ironic was the emergence of house-share rentals among many young people who could not, or did not want to, own or rent a place by themselves. Those arrangements almost invariably involved sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities.
Many bedsits were very basic and a great number of them were in less than good repair. But the folly of abolishing bedsits as substandard in an era of house sharing demonstrates the futility involved and the harm done by ill-considered legislative intervention.
The landlord described in Enid O'Dowd's letter is letting four dwellings in one house at below-market rents. The landlord's hand has essentially been forced and he is now selling up. The house in Rathgar will become a single owner-occupied dwelling.
Why, oh why, does any planning regulator need power to dezone housing development land in the present circumstances?
I am not arguing for the abandonment of basic standards in rented accommodation. On the contrary, we have seen some horrific examples of several bunk beds being crammed into rooms. These are obvious instances of ruthless exploitation of vulnerable and otherwise homeless single workers. But I strongly believe that the response of successive governments (albeit combinations of the same political parties in the main) to the housing crisis has been close to hopeless.
Limiting rents to existing levels and increases by reference to consumer price indices is futile. As the expense of being a regulation-compliant landlord increases, and as the freedom of landlords to realise the value of their original investment is curtailed by ever-increasing rights of tenure for tenants, the result is inevitable. The market becomes more and more dysfunctional. Landlords who preferred to charge below-market rents in exchange for trouble-free lettings to careful tenants are penalised in comparison to those who are in a position to let dwellings for the first time at today's inflated rent levels.
This simply does not make sense. Nor is it sustainable. With a rapidly increasing population and a sclerotic system of planning and development control under the aegis of the same department that attempts to regulate housing costs and standards, it has become clear that State intervention should focus on increasing supply.
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All the indications are that departmental and governmental initiatives to increase housing supply are faltering. Our planning laws, including the activities of the Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR), act as an impediment to increasing the housing supply. Why, oh why, does any planning regulator need power to dezone housing development land in the present circumstances? What local authority has engaged in harmful over-zoning of housing development land in the last 10 years?
As early as the Housing Act 1966, local councils in their capacity as housing authorities were legally charged with ensuring that the demand for housing was met by their planning strategies, development plans and use of powers of compulsory purchase to provide sites for housing.
In the wake of tribunals investigating planning corruption, the housing department came up with the OPR to police the sector. But when you think of it, the whole planning and development process, including An Coimisún Pleanála, combined with the role of the courts in judicial review, is designed to be preventive rather than enabling.
We need a radical change of direction.
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You can win at life by being a good loser
We all screw up. Failure is part of life. But not all of us can brush it off easily. A society that divides people into 'winners' and 'losers' amplifies the cost of failing. Through our smartphones and in our daily conversations, we're constantly reminded that there's always someone else doing better. How should you deal with failure? And how do I resist that niggling sense that, deep down, I'm a loser? Krzysztof Rowiński, a lecturer in cultural studies at Trinity College Dublin , is part of an international network of academics researching our understanding of failure. They met in Dublin a few weeks ago for a conference titled Fail Worse – a subversion of Samuel Beckett 's famous quote: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Some of their initial findings can be distilled into four general points: READ MORE 1. 'Redemptive' failure narratives may be part of the problem 'If you look at library catalogues there has been an explosion of books that explore failure as a form of success – self-help books, coaching books, business books,' Rowiński tells The Irish Times. 'I saw that as a larger outgrowth of our optimistic culture where paradoxically failure narratives are on par with success narratives. But it's only because those failure narratives are redemptive failure narratives.' Examples of the genre come from tech bros such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk , who love to talk about the failures they experienced before becoming obscenely rich. 'If you're not failing, you're not taking enough risks,' says Musk. Rowiński tracked the use of 'fail better' as a phrase in public discourse. 'In late '80s you see a moderate interest and then it blows up in the '90s.' This coincided with the rise of the positive psychology movement and, more importantly perhaps, a drift internationally away from holding the rich and powerful accountable for their failures. 2. Political corruption and extreme inequality means some people can avoid any cost from their failures There is a recognition of failure in corridors of power 'but always with a sense that we can overcome it with technology, or therapy, or some intervention', says Prof Debbie Lisle, of Queen's University Belfast school of history. Another member of the 'failure studies' network, she believes many of the world's biggest problems are exacerbated by 'toxic positivity'. When it comes to war, the migrant crisis or climate change , 'the normalised dominant responses are all about this myth that we will overcome our failures and everything will be fine. Like climate change: 'It'll be fine; don't worry about it because we will use technology and adaptation; it's going to be amazing' ... and no it's not'. We need 'a different vocabulary', she says. 'We're f**ed!' is her starting point. 'I start there and I make no apologies about that – but I'm not depressed about that. I'm like, let's be modest and humble and realistic about what's achievable, how we can create solidarities however temporary, probably dissonant, to try to do something.' 3. In other cultures everyone is a loser – so cheer up Ireland is heavily influenced by the capitalistic, Anglo-American view of success and failure. Contrast this with eastern European countries. 'In our part of the world, the perception of failure is different,' says Adriana Mica, a Romanian-born sociologist who set up the Failure Lab at University of Warsaw. 'Failure is something like a skin but nobody treats it too seriously ... You see this in post-communist countries and postcolonial countries; they don't trust failure. They think failure is something politicians use as a rationalisation.' This is not entirely healthy from a political viewpoint. It results in a situation where 'we are suspicious of success' and cynical or dismissive about failure. 'We did some research about Covid policy failures and people were saying: 'What policy failures? Covid was a scam.' So it's completely different.' Her research is looking at why students drop out of education, and whether it is due to 'failure deprivation', or because they had 'no taste of failure', before reaching college. This may be a greater problem in more affluent societies. In countries such as Romania and Poland, she says, 'I think we still remember the hardships ... but it can change very quickly.' 4. You're a winner in God's eyes In her latest book The Genius Myth, journalist Helen Lewis explores our understanding of 'natural talent'. Questioning the common perception that people 'deserve' their success, she draws attention to the relationship between capitalism and forms of eugenics. In previous centuries, financial rewards were distributed between 'superior' and 'inferior' races. Today there's a movement, tacitly supported by powerful figures in the United States, to rank human value by IQ score. Speaking to Hugh Linehan on The Irish Times Inside Politics podcast , Lewis said, 'as someone who was raised Catholic and is now an atheist', she was 'surprised' while writing the book 'that I began to feel more warmly towards Christianity as a kind of social operating system because of [its] teaching that every one of God's children has a worth in his eyes – and that no one is better than anyone else'. [ Justine McCarthy: We need to talk about why we're all so angry Opens in new window ] But you don't have to bring God into the picture to realise you're a winner. Keeping a sense of perspective is key. The truth is you can 'win' at life by being a good loser.
