The suggestion of using cost rental to alleviate the dire conditions of Ireland’s housing market isn’t a new one, but it’s been mentioned several times recently by higher-education stakeholders as a way to make student accommodation cheaper. However, anyone who’s been paying attention to the government’s attempts to tackle the housing crisis will tell you that talk is cheap.
This week, Higher Education Minister Simon Harris suggested that college-owned flats could be rented to students at a capped rate. This obviously makes perfect sense on first glance: students get better value for their money, and private accommodation providers would be forced to lower their rates to compete.
But Harris’s admission that he will have to be “conscious of the process” betrays the lack of will among his own colleagues to take steps which will make a college education more affordable. Fine Gael is the party of “let the market take care of it” – Harris will have some work to do to convince his fellow Cabinet ministers that this model is worth pursuing.
But he may have an even harder time getting universities on board: it’s difficult to imagine the likes of Trinity and University College Dublin happily lowering their rent rates at a time when they’re desperately searching for alternative funding streams. Harris said himself that “there’s no point giving with one hand and taking away with the other” – if colleges suspect that cost rental will leave them out of pocket, they’ll run for the hills.
Harris would do well to get the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) on board on this. USI has argued the benefits of college-owned student accommodation before, though this Editorial Board questioned how paying rent to a university rather than a private landlord would automatically make the process cheaper. Government intervention could be the answer, but other stakeholders will need to be convinced.
Cost rental is a perfectly sensible model which has been used in Ireland before to great success. But if the government isn’t able – or willing – to implement such a model to help homeless families or young professionals priced out of Irish cities, why would they bother doing it for students?
