Chai Brady
‘Avalanche’ of homelessness feared after pandemic if Government fail to protect vulnerable, writes Chai Brady
Homelessness, which is now a crisis within a crisis due to the pandemic, was brought to the fore of public conscience once again when RTÉ highlighted the story of a man who was repeatedly refused a hostel bed because he was not from Dublin.
The Carlow man Joe Nolan, who is in his 50s, had been living in a multi-storey car park in Dublin for more than four months. On Monday January 18, RTÉ Investigates revealed that because his last registered address is in Carlow the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) told Mr Nolan that he could not avail of emergency accommodation in the city.
He was offered a hostel bed later that same day, after public outrage. The drastic issue of Ireland’s housing and homelessness crisis – overshadowed by Covid-19 – will undoubtedly still be here long after the pandemic’s conclusion.
Focus Ireland’s Services Manager John O’Haire tells The Irish Catholic there is concern that after Government measures to protect tenancies during the pandemic are lifted, there will be an “avalanche” of evictions.
Eviction ban
Currently there is an eviction ban in place. It was introduced for any period when people’s movement is restricted to 5km from their home as part of Covid-19 restrictions. This means that tenants cannot be evicted when the country is at level 5 restrictions and for a 10-day grace period after they are lifted.
There are also rental laws to protect tenants economically affected by Covid-19, who have fallen into rent arrears and are at risk of losing their tenancy. These protections include a rent freeze and a 90-day notice period when ending a tenancy.
The Government previously said the steps they have now taken couldn’t be done, Mr O’Haire says, “then we had a pandemic and we could do it, so it proved there’s certain things that can be done and it took a pandemic”.
“We had a housing emergency anyway so that should have been enough to do some of these things,” Mr O’Haire says, “but further than that it’s still only a plaster when the actual problem is there’s not enough accommodation.”
“So my big fear is after Covid, and please God all of this will end soon, there will be a pent up demand or avalanche waiting among landlords for properties to be sold or moved on, and the pandemic has proved it doesn’t have to be that way.
“The moratorium on evictions helped in reducing the number of families coming in and if we can match that with some housing supply, we wouldn’t be far away from solving the problem. That has to happen with a matter of urgency. Homelessness doesn’t need to be a part of the new normal when we have a new normal.”
Mr O’Haire continued saying that the number of families presenting as homeless to their services has also dropped during the pandemic, which he puts down to the tighter restrictions.
Anti-social
“I mean I fully agree that if there’s anti-social issues or there’s drug dealing or serious violence, you have to take steps to resolve that, which may lead to eviction, however what we’ve seen in the last few years is actually most families are becoming homeless due to issues in the private rented market, like rent, availability and all of that. Those families then become homeless because the landlord is either selling or the rent has gone up or whatever, it’s not to do with the person’s own personal issues.”
Despite the challenges, he says Focus Ireland have continued to find people accommodation during the pandemic.
Paul Sheehan of Cork Simon echoed the need for Government to continue to help people keep their accommodation and that with the charity have been calling for an emphasis to be placed on prevention rather than reaction.
“We were saying rents were too high in the private rental sector, that needs to be addressed. Evicting people into homelessness, that needs to be addressed,” he says, adding that the number of new people seeking assistance from Cork Simon “reduced to a trickle” during the pandemic after the Government introduced the measures to stop evictions.
Mr Sheehan said they have had a “fantastic experience” working alongside the HSE social inclusion team and Cork City Council during the pandemic, with the Government’s measures being “what was needed to address homelessness”.
“If it took a pandemic to do it, so be it, but at least it happened and I think we’re all learning from that experience now,” he says.
“The vast majority of people using our services are depending on that private rented market to exit homelessness and for the last few years they’ve been pretty much been locked out of that market just because it’s so expensive and costs continue to rise,” Mr Sheehan says.
A 2015 Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) in Ireland, compiled by the CSO, found almost one in six people in Ireland (17%) are at risk of poverty. It was also discovered that 61% of people in rental accommodation are at risk of poverty.
Cork Simon found that 27% of people seeking support at their Soup Run live in private rented accommodation, which reflects the poverty trap people are falling into, after rent and bills are paid some people are left without the means to buy food.
Mr Sheehan, speaking of the Government’s response to renters during the crisis, says: “The mantra all along was look, it can’t be addressed, it’s impossible, but it can and it’s proven so we would like if a good, hard, long look could be taken at that and seeing how that can be done for the longer term. I think everybody involved in addressing homelessness has learned from this experience of the pandemic in that there are other ways to do things.”
According to latest rental report (Q3 2020) from Daft.ie, asking rents in Cork City increased by 5.2% from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020; they increased by 2.5% in Cork County during the same period.
The Simon Communities in Ireland’s latest ‘Locked Out of the Market’ study (November 2020) notes private rented supply is at “chronically low levels across the country”. It found there were just 72 properties available to rent in Cork city over a three-day period from September 21-23, none of which were within Rent Allowance/Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) levels. Just 57 properties were available to rent in Cork City suburbs during the same period – only one of which was within a Rent Allowance/Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) limit.
Goal
Regarding issues for people attaining housing in Cork, Mr Sheehan said: “Our goal is affordable housing, we’ve been around for 50 years this year. When Cork Simon was founded by a small group of volunteers back in 1971, rough sleeping in the city was at an awful rate and that group of volunteers were the first to start counting the number of people sleeping rough and to start taking note of who is without a home.
“A lot has changed in the last 50 years but we’re here for the long haul and our goal now is to find as much affordable housing as we can for people who can’t afford the high cost of housing as it is today. We’ve started a fairly intensive programme of finding those houses, in some cases building those houses, we have a project under construction at the moment which will become eight independent living flats hopefully by the middle of this year people will start moving in.”
The construction of the houses was halted during the first lockdown but due to revised restriction for level 5 the project was deemed essential so has been allowed to continue.
Mr Sheehan says: “What we’ve learned over the last 50 years really is that all of the reasons – and there are many – that push people into homelessness can only really be effectively addressed for the long term when people have a roof over their head, and it’s a place they can call home.
“When people don’t have to worry about where they will sleep and where they will get their next meal and the plethora of other concerns brought on by homelessness, they are in a better position to address other issues,” Mr Sheehan states, adding: “When you take all of that out of the equation people are in a much better place to be able to address all of those issues, poor mental health, alcohol and drug use, more often than not they’re disconnected completely from family, many have had very traumatic childhoods, left the education system very early and you add all of that together and it can make for complex situations for people and we stick with people for as long as they need us really.
“What we’ve been doing for the last five to six years is rather than having people jump through hoops before they can find a place to live, if you house people as quickly as possible no matter what their circumstances, nine times out of 10 they’re able to address all the other issues very effectively and for the long term.”
Mr O’Haire similarly said Ireland’s lack of housing must be urgently addressed, as it “undermines” all the efforts of charities. “Despite all the support and all the things that we do to help families, children, young people, single people, at the end of it all there’s simply not enough housing and we need to be able to have that as a realistic goal for people who are trying to resolve lots of complex issues and at the end of the day they need somewhere to live and that’s the most important thing.”
In another attempt to tackle Ireland’s seemingly endless housing crisis, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O’Brien published the Affordable Housing Bill 2020 on January 20.
The bill is expected to provide for the introduction of three new schemes delivering on the programme for Government commitment to put affordability at the heart of the housing system and aims to prioritise the increased supply of affordable homes. One of the schemes aims to see the introduction of a new form of tenure in ‘Cost Rental’. This legislation will provide the basis for the first 400 Cost Rental homes in the State which will be delivered in 2021. It is said there will be many more in the pipeline in the years thereafter.
Affordable
There is also an affordable housing scheme aimed at mitigating the affordability challenges faced by young working people, “many of whom are caught in a rental trap”, said the minister.
He also said: “The scheme will increase housing supply as it helps to improve viability by bridging the gap between the maximum mortgage that might be available to a household and the actual cost of a new home for ordinary income families. In Budget 2021 we have put aside an initial €75m for 2021 to start the scheme up and will boost this with additional private investment.” These schemes must lead to real changes for people faced with housing insecurity or caught in extortionate rental accommodation, as the situation continues to cause homelessness and subsequently pressure on Ireland’s charitable sector.
Working with homeless families, and being a father himself, Mr O’Haire says the pandemic has created unique challenges for everyone but being homeless has added a new layer to an already severe situation.
“It’s extremely stressful anyway to be homeless, now we have families who are trying to do a combination of things, whether it be work, educate their children and get their homework done in emergency accommodation,” he says.
“In normal times, the sort of building blocks for family life, for young people, is seeing their friends, is sporting activities, all of those things get taken away from families when they’re homeless because they often have to move to a hotel, or to a hub or somewhere far from where they grew up, those connections are lost with their local community and now on top of that they don’t even have that connection of school and seeing friends so they are further isolated with the stress of being couped up in emergency accommodation.
“That’s a huge disconnection for young people, for all of those supports to be taken and that’s a huge challenge for parents as well while also trying to find accommodation, you may have kids with special needs, so to try and do all of that in the middle of a pandemic is incredibly challenging.”
Both charities have had to be creative in their response to Covid-19 and the subsequent restrictions in order to continue supporting vulnerable people and keep staff and volunteers safe, all while trying to maintain the services they provide.
Cork Simon is in a “much better place” than the first lockdown in March which hit them like a “fast moving rain”, according to Mr Sheehan.
“All of our services operate pretty much 24 hours a day, there’s a very high footfall, there’s a lot of interaction between people who use our services and our staff and volunteers, so we had to move very quickly to reorientate a lot of our services.”
In their emergency shelter Cork Simon had to reduce rooms to single occupancy whereas before they held two people, in order to ensure people could maintain social distancing and self-isolate if necessary. They also had to reduce the number of people accessing their day service, which hit rough sleepers hard as often they have nowhere else to go Mr Sheehan explains. They also had to reorientate their high support housing around the city and had to suspend visits regarding their housing services for people living independently – except in more “extreme cases”.
Concerns
There are concerns that the pandemic may have affected the charities ability to meet the ‘new homeless’, with Mr Sheehan saying: “Our soup run operates indoors and we had to change that to an outdoor service, a takeaway service only, and that hit people using that service quite hard because often it’s their only social interaction of the day and it is an opportunity for staff and volunteers to get to know people, particularly newer people on the scene, to get to understand where they’re coming from and what their needs are.”
However, he says that even though there was a reduced capacity, Cork Simon are not aware of anyone who fell through the cracks, saying: “We had that concern earlier on but it doesn’t appear to be the case, we’re certainly not aware of it. When we had to reduce capacity in our emergency shelter it wasn’t the case where we just turfed a load of people out and said fend for yourself. We worked closely with the local authority here and with the HSE social inclusion team and we found people bed and breakfast rooms on an emergency basis and then those people were able to come to our day service at an agreed time and work through the support that they needed. So while it added more work layers we were still able to work through it so we’re certainly not aware of anybody who wasn’t able to access services because of the various lockdowns.”
The effect the pandemic has had on homeless people can’t be underestimated, with Mr Sheehan saying: “There was a story of one man in one of our high support houses in the very early days of the first lockdown, he went into his local shop and the shopkeeper certainly was keeping her distance, he didn’t understand that it was because of the virus and he thought it was because of his situation, that he was homeless, and he became very upset.
“They’re the kind of things that people experienced. There was fear, there was huge degrees of worry, particularly amongst people who were using the shelter because they were mixing with a lot of other people or for people who were sleeping rough, they were feeling a lot more alone and isolated than they would previously and I’ve heard it being described as people experiencing a crisis within a crisis that they were already experiencing.”
Charities
Both charities have made sure staff were trained in how to respond correctly to Government restrictions and stay safe while keeping people availing of their services safe, particularly because many of them would be in the vulnerable category due to their age or health condition.
Mr O’Haire said Focus Ireland “put an incredible amount of effort into our compliance with Covid regulations, we do an internal training, we’re constantly changing and adapting to make sure that we’re fully adhering to all the Covid guidelines, that we have enough PPE, that we’re maintaining our social distance, hand washing, the basics and we’re really putting a lot of effort into making sure that works”.
Positive
On a positive note, Focus Ireland has been able to keep most of their services open, Mr O’Haire explains, but says: “The negative is that because we’re doing the social distancing and implementing all the regulations, what suffers from that is that human connection.
“What we really strive to do as an organisation is to try and build that human relation with somebody, from there we can then establish some trust and from there we help intervene to make sure that we exit them from homelessness and get them somewhere to live.
“People have complex issues it takes time to build that relationship with people and that is definitely made harder when you’re trying to social distance and you have a mask and all of those things. We’ve also seen, for the people that use our services, they’ve come under a lot of stress, they have poor mental health, and they really crave that social connection and that support from people – and we do it – but because we do it with a mask and we do it the right way now Covid-wise, it just makes things more difficult. We’ve seen that deterioration in people’s mental health and it’s not just their day-to-day experiences, they are bombarded with the news and from conversations about Covid so they’ve become fatigued and they struggle like everyone else through this. Thankfully we’re there to support them.”
Last week Focus Ireland called on the Government to commit to ending homelessness with a campaign that has already received significant public support. Since the #EndHomelessness campaign was launched nearly a month ago 7,000 people signed a petition urging the Government to make a clear plan to end the ongoing homelessness crisis at the time this paper went to print.
According to figures from the Department of Housing, there are 8,484 people homeless in Ireland and over 2,452 of these are children. Focus Ireland believes that the Government must reclaim the vision of ending homelessness, otherwise the State will be abandoning these people to a very bleak future.
Charities have done their best to respond to a housing crisis that continues to deteriorate, and additionally they are contending with a virus that has caused an unprecedented necessity to transform and adapt their services. While Focus Ireland and Cork Simon welcomed the Government’s measures to protect people from becoming homeless and called for the protections to continue past the pandemic, their major appeal, as Mr O’Haire says, is for “housing, housing, housing”.