Riverside Manor: an opportunity to win, or lose, for affordable housing

When approved housing bodies like Clúid Housing buy up majority or whole developments, they are limiting the options for many young families to buy their own homes, writes Brian Byrne.

Such bulk buying of estates contributes to the ‘hidden homeless’ problem, where adult children have to remain in their parents’ homes because there are no affordable homes to buy.

This is the core of the issue which has blown up in Kilcullen, where Clúid is negotiating to buy the remaining Phases 2 and 3 of Riverside Manor. Under the current plan, 64 of the 100 homes in Phase 2 would then be leased to Kildare County Council to rent to people from its housing waiting list. Clúid would rent the rest to its own tenants.

The Riverside Manor residents are NOT opposed to social housing in the estate. They want a fair system where there’s a mix of private owners, affordable housing options, and social housing tenants who in many cases would eventually aspire to buying their homes. The planning system was re-designed years ago to ensure each estate offered this mix, but the affordable housing element has now apparently been cast aside here.

If AHBs buy whole blocks of developments, by their nature they only offer term leases, without the option of the tenants ever being able to buy out their homes. That’s the big difference between these and the traditional ‘Council houses’. We have excellent Council-built estates in Kilcullen, which offered the option for the original tenants to buy their homes. In most cases they did, and this has also allowed children to inherit a home and provide generational continuity in the community.

It suits AHBs to ‘buy in bulk’ from developers, and it suits developers too, as there’s only one transaction, albeit probably at lower per unit prices than if they had sold each house individually. It also arguably suits the Housing Departments in local authorities, as they can ‘tick the box’ by supporting AHBs and get a substantial chunk of people off their waiting lists by leasing from the AHB and re-renting to their own tenants.

A key role of local authorities is to deliver housing for those who need it. In this instance, Kildare County Council are doing so. But there's an opportunity for them to broker a better deal for Kilcullen and ensure that affordable housing is also offered. The authority could insist the developer hold back some of the houses to give young families in Kilcullen the opportunity of buying a house in their home town. 

The AHBs need the Council’s backing so that they can access the 30pc capital grants available from Government for the housing they will lease to local authorities. And this is where Kildare County Council should be using their leverage.

Instead of supporting a proposal which will have 70pc or more occupiers in the development as their tenants, they should be insisting that the development offers the mix of housing which was described at the beginning of this piece. Private, affordable, and social. Balance.

That was one of the underpinning ideas behind the move decades ago to require that 10pc of all developments should be for social housing. And behind the affordable housing support initiatives by the state at various times. All that seems to have gotten lost, though, in the undeniable housing crisis of this time. But ticking boxes and ‘box-buying’ homes for expediency is not the answer.

This is a complex matter. It needs to be dealt with in a way that takes account of that. If, as is probable, half of those people on Kildare County Council’s 480-plus housing list for Kilcullen aspire to eventually buying their own home, supporting initiatives that freeze them out from this is just plain wrong.

Kilcullen, and every town, deserves the opportunity to provide homes for their residents. Kildare County Council should fight hard to ensure that both social and affordable housing can be delivered in Riverside Manor.

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