Homelessness in the Dublin region
A new three-year plan seeks to address the main causes of homelessness in the Irish capital
STRATEGY
Image: Istock
Mary Hayes
Director, Dublin Region Homeless Executive
Over recent months, a range of partners – including those with lived experience – have worked together to develop a three-year plan to respond to homelessness. A key part of this work has seen the four Dublin local authorities, the Health Service Executive (HSE), voluntary agencies and other key statutory partners take stock of the current position and learning from the last couple of years. So what did we find?
Access to affordable housing
It is stating the obvious, but we know that access to social and affordable housing is the single most effective response to homelessness. In July 2018, there were 1,367 families in emergency accommodation in the Dublin region and by July 2021, this figure had fallen to 700 families. In large part this was due to increased supply of private rented accommodation and fewer presentations. This is still too many homeless people, but the point is homelessness is not an intractable problem.
Homelessness is directly linked to the right supply of social and affordable accommodation – this alone is sufficient to prevent or eliminate homelessness. Regrettably, family homelessness has risen again due to supply constraints in the rental market. While there is a strong pipeline of social housing supply across the four Dublin local authorities (driven by local authorities and Approved Housing Bodies), it is not yet keeping pace with the level of housing need. However, it does give us hope that, as social housing delivery ramps up, we can talk about ending homelessness and deliver on it.
“Homelessness is directly linked to the right supply of social and affordable accommodation – this alone is sufficient to prevent or eliminate homelessness.”
Housing First
The single best day in my year as director was reviewing the Housing First tenancies. Having worked in homelessness in Dublin for, let’s just say a couple of decades, I recognised the names of people in tenancies that once we believed would be homeless for a very long time.
There is a huge commitment to Housing First in the Dublin region and the government has given us an ambitious target of an additional 707 tenancies between now and 2026. These will be targeted at rough sleepers and people who have experienced chronic homelessness. There is an additional pilot being run with the Probation and Prison Service to target homeless prisoners and break the cycle of prison and hostels.
Upstream prevention
We can do more to reduce the number of people who experience homelessness through upstream prevention. We know a lot more about from where and in what circumstances people are becoming homeless. In our region, there is a Hospital Discharge Protocol to manage discharges from hospitals and this has the capacity to expand into identifying the services and interventions required at community level to prevent homelessness.
More generally, we know that targeting private rented tenants who are in rent arrears, as we did when the moratoria on evictions were lifted, was critical to keeping some households from experiencing repeat homelessness last year. In Dublin we have used Homeless Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) funding to successfully prevent thousands of households from becoming homelessness and to support people out of emergency accommodation. This scheme, supported by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage (DHLGH), increases the subsidy available to households to rent form private landlords.
In numbers
1,367
families in emergency accommodation in the Dublin region in July 2018
700
families in emergency accommodation in the Dublin region in July 2021
707
Housing First tenancies target by 2026
“We must pay due attention to the quality of emergency accommodation and the experience of people who are using homelessness services.”
Importance of quality
Homelessness expanded rapidly in the years from to 2014 to 2018. While we want our focus to be on preventing or reducing homelessness, we have to recognise that for the more than 900 families and approximately 3,300 single adult households, we must pay due attention to the quality of emergency accommodation and the experience of people who are using homelessness services.
Commitment to end homelessness
The thing we take for granted sometimes is what counted most when we needed a rapid, multi-agency response to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic. In Dublin, there is a wealth of strong, principled, resilient people working to end homelessness.
We count on these people to get us safely through extreme weather, fires, floods and the unexpected. I hope that someday very soon they will no longer be needed to run homelessness services and will instead turn their attention to the comparatively easier job of providing social housing.
