Summary: <br> <a href="https://twitter.com/SharedIreland/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Niall Keenan</a> founder and chairperson of the <a href="https://sharedireland.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Shared Ireland</a>. <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> Sinn Féin <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40030688.html" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">are calling for a complete ban on co-living</a>. Their housing spokesperson, Eoin Ó Broin, a very talented politician who’s been on this podcast before, not sure if those two are connected, said announcing this that the new housing minister Darragh O’Brien of Fianna Fáil, when he was in opposition was vehemently opposed to co-living, and he, O’Brien, had challenged his predecessor Eoghan Murphy, and then Taoiseach, now Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, that if they thought it was acceptable, they should try living in it.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> In case you’re not sure, co-living is basically a student dormitory type arrangement. People get bedroom of about 12m2, about the size of a smallish single bedroom, and share kitchen, living room and bathroom facilities in a block with maybe dozens of other residents.<br> <br> <br> <br> I’m pretty sure that Eoghan Murphy and Leo Varadkar, and Darragh O’Brien for that matter, would not be interested in that type of accommodation, but to be fair, I don’t think that there would be nobody who it would suit. If I was a student, or maybe coming to a city to start my first job, it could be quite a sociable way to live, get the right crowd and you could party every night, that might be quite attractive to some people if it was a cheaper way to get accommodation.<br> <br> <br> <br> But that’s the thing. It’s not cheap. I’m not clear of his source but Eoin Ó Broin quoted a price of €1,300 per month for the privilege. Never mind students, if we had a normal functioning housing market, that would be hugely expensive for people in good jobs.<br> <br> <br> <br> There’s an international rule-of-thumb that it’s reasonable to spend about a third of your take-home pay on rent. A single person in Ireland <a href="https://salaryaftertax.com/ie/salary-calculator" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">would need to be grossing €70,000 per year to justify that</a>. <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/average-full-time-salary-in-republic-nearly-49-000-1.4289348" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">The average full-time salary in Ireland is less than €49,000</a>. Queuing for a shared bathroom and trying to squeeze your shift into a single bed might be a viable lifestyle in your early 20s, it’s not something that someone aspires to do when they are well into their career.<br> <br> <br> <br> And that’s the problem with this. Co-living isn’t being offered to people who are up for the lifestyle. It’s being offered to people who simply can’t find, and can’t afford anything else. And Eoin Ó Broin makes another excellent point about this. Giving permissions for these co-living projects pushes up the price of land – if you can wring €1,300 a month out of someone for every tiny bedroom that you stack high, why would you go to the bother of building decent housing?<br> <br> <br> <br> Ó Broin is absolutely right that these have the potential to just lower the bar for everyone’s accommodation. And yet Ó Broin’s solution for is absolutely wrong. He’s demanding a change to the planning act that basically bans co-living.<br> <br> <br> <br> Why would we ban it? There are some people who would genuinely like that type of accommodation, although I don’t think that there’s so many of them, but even if they didn’t matter, this is not going to solve the housing crisis, it’s not going to improve things even a little bit.<br> <br> <br> <br> Sure developers may, instead of building co-living, build some houses and apartments more suitable for the bulk of the population.
