NIMBYs, landlords or the Taliban - who is responsible for Ireland’s housing crisis?

A story of power and incentives

Four minutes before the meeting was due to start, I looked up from my laptop. I had been making last minute edits to the speech I had written earlier that day, adjusting the tone slightly, when I noticed two people zipping around the Council chamber. Both held scraps of paper, urgently pleading with other Councillors, like myself, for their signature. After they had reached me, and I had agreed to sign their ‘emergency’ motions (which would receive precedence over the planned business of the meeting), I saved the Word doc, closed the laptop and rubbed my eyes. We would not reach the issue that my speech was on. We would spend most of the meeting grandstanding on something none of us had any power over. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last. I was resigned to it at this stage.

This meeting of a local council was just one small cog in the giant machine of policymaking in Ireland. It affects many parts of our lives in minor ways, so that continuous small dysfunctions seem to have no major effect in terms of the overall performance of the State for its people. But these small dysfunctions, repeated across dozens of organisations are what constitute a failure. To make this point a bit more concrete, let’s illustrate this in the area of housing.

I must have read a hundred articles explaining the causes of the housing crisis, and I’m still blurry on it. Academics and journalists have done Trojan work to try to explain this to the public: the courts, the planning system, local residents objecting, labour costs, taxes, supply chain issues. Pundits will argue about density and size and where to build.

Yet I’m still left with another, more fundamental ‘why’. Why can they not change this situation?

The answer is that this is a story of incentives. In particular, the misalignment of incentives and power. Many of those who are charged with solving the housing crisis do not have the incentives to actually solve it. And where they do, they often lack the power to act on them. The result is that we see policy and process failures repeat themselves. What we see in the housing crisis is an example of the broader difficulty in fixing many issues in our society when we ignore incentives.

Occasionally, when a Department, state agency or local authority has missed targets, we will hear a refrain from the media that civil servants and politicians are lazy or incompetent. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Even when they want to do their best they can be impeded by a tsunami of competing incentives from other actors and from inside their own organisations.

People turn to blame politicians. For local Councillors, this is often a problem of their own making, as many of them make election promises on housing. The reality is that they have almost no power to deliver on that promise. Their primary influence in terms of housing is to lodge observations on planning applications (despite the common perception, Councillors cannot actually ‘object’ to a housing development in any meaningful sense - they can simply point out how a plan does or does not align with planning guidelines, which, if the system is working well, should already have been noticed by the planners themselves).

National politicians often do the same, and accusations that they have either ‘blocked’ a housing development (from their detractors), or that they have ‘saved’ their area from awful development (from their supporters), are also misleading. So we’re left with the question of where the real power lies. The logical response is the Minister for Housing. Let’s consider his power. From a brief scan of the actions under Housing for All, the Government’s plan for housing, here is a non-exhaustative list of organisations that are responsible for delivering the actions (and which the Minister for Housing can plausibly blame for impeding housing delivery):

1. The 31 Local Authorities

2. The Housing Agency

3. Civil servants in his own Department

4. DoTaoiseach, DoTransport, DFin, DETE, DPER, DSP, DoJ, DFHERIS, DoE, DCEDIY, DoHealth, DECC, DRCD, DTCAGSM

5. OSI

6. Approved Housing Bodies

7. The Land Development Agency

8. Irish Water

9. Tusla

10. NDFA

11. HSE

12. Age Friendly Ireland

13. NIHE

14. Attorney General’s Office

15. OPR

16. Construction Sector Group

17. Industry Representative Organisations

18. RTB

19. Enterprise Ireland

20. HBFI

21. Housing Finance Agency

22. Heritage NGOs

23. The Heritage Council

24. The Local Government Management Association

25. CCMA

26. SEAI

27. CSG

28. EPA

29. CIF

30. PII

31. OGP

32. HDCO

33. NBCO

34. Pyrite Resolution Board

35. NTA

36. ESB Networks

37. Regional Assemblies

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

I am not being flippant. It’s essential that many stakeholders are brought together. Some, like Irish Water, are crucial for providing utilities for housing. But hoping that dozens of organisations will seamlessly collaborate solely through ‘inter-Departmental groups’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’ is not the urgency required for a crisis. For many of these stakeholders, their primary incentive is not to build housing. In particular for other Ministers, their duty is to deliver on their own mandates. These will come first if there is a clash of priorities. For other organisations, like the Heritage Council, delivering on their mandate can mean impeding housing delivery. And no one can really compel them to do otherwise. This is part of the logic that the government has given for bringing in the new ‘housing tsar’: to smooth out these blockages and incentives.

That list does not even include other groups who could also legitimately impede housing delivery, such as An Bord Pleanála (now, An Comisiúin Pleanála), the courts, environmental NGOs, and residents’ associations.

And none of these are monoliths - many of these organisations have competing incentives and powers within them. To illustrate my point, let’s consider just one of these: Local Authorities. These comprise officials (non-elected staff) and elected Councillors, both of whom have separate powers in relation to housing. As mentioned, Councillors can’t really ‘block’ any individual housing development, but they have the power to set planning guidelines and zoning about where housing can be built. Nominally, the officials will guide them in this process, but the Councillors can ignore their advice if it is not expedient. More importantly, it’s hard for a Councillor to understand whether the officials’ advice is sound - they, of course, have their own incentives and priorities. A Councillor could pour an infinite number of hours into looking into how guidelines interact, how best practice in one country could work in Ireland, or how best to word amendments. But every hour spent doing that is one hour that an overworked Councillor spends not having time to deal with constituent requests directly, to do their full-time job, or, most importantly, to do the things that make life worth living like spending time with family and friends.

This is not to doubt the bona fides of individual Councillors. But again, this is about incentives and power. If you are a busy Councillor who wants a high-reward, low-risk contribution, one thing that often works is debating a motion on international affairs. They are emotive, likely to get media attention, and can be drafted in no time. In the arithmetic of a Councillor, more media can mean more votes, for very little work. Enter, the Taliban.

When you see a Councillor milling around the chamber looking for you to sign their motion which has just been scribbled down on the torn page of a copybook, it starts to feel a bit disheartening. They arrive to you with something that sounds well-intentioned, but for which the council has no power: recently, for example, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council supported a motion to call for legal recognition of the systematic oppression of women and girls by regimes, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan. I know this because there was an article about it. I did not see any articles about discussions of any other issues on the Council agenda (or of the issues that did not get discussed because of it). So it makes sense for the Councillor to bring that motion forward. We can all agree that this is a worthy motion. We can also all agree that this is not what Councillors would ideally be spending their time on.

This is not a judgement of these Councillors or the causes they support. I voted for similar motions when I was a Councillor (and I would have voted for this one). Rather, it is an indictment of the local government system that they work within - they feel that they have almost no power or incentive to change the issues that they actually have control over. So they emphasise issues that they know will get them attention and votes, regardless of what they can actually do about them.

This contrasts to the unnoticed and unrewarded work that is important: a constructive amendment in the Council chamber, a phone call to Council officials or a deep-dive into the blockages in planning guidelines. Worse than being unnoticed is being penalised. Many Councillors who make it more likely that housing will be built, such as by refusing to support NIMBY (‘Not In My Back Yard’) calls to ‘oppose’ large housing developments, will be actively punished for their stance at the ballot box.

This is just one example of where incentives are completely out of line with solving complex policy issues like housing. The job of Government is to look under the hood and work out where these exist, and how to align them to achieve their goals. Rather than just a ‘housing tsar’, we might be better served by ‘incentives tsars’ in our Departments and agencies to identify these blockages and conflicts, and align people on their mission (whether this should actually be the Ministers’ role is another debate). Despite the best will in the world, a system of competing incentives and diffuse power will always impede delivery. Any policy that wants to tackle the country’s biggest issues, like housing, will need to address this fundamental issue.