Executive Summary

The Green Party sees housing as a social good and part of our birthright as Irish citizens, and will enshrine that principle in law.

We hold that a secure, warm and conveniently located dwelling is the minimum requirement for human happiness and that this should be available at a price affordable by every citizen. We believe that a spectrum of housing choices should be available to citizens in terms of tenure and type, which will meet their housing needs at different stages of their lives.

We recognise the benefits of widespread ownership in property and we will ensure that this aspiration is as achievable for younger generations as it was for their predecessors.

However, we do not believe that an affordable home is sufficient in itself. Rather, homes need to be conveniently located for transport, local services, job opportunities, social centres and recreational and nature spaces to provide full life satisfaction. Compact settlements with coherent public spaces and varied individual building expression, pragmatically planned for easy material recycling, local energy generation, and even local food production, is our vision for the development of housing settlements.

Ireland is in the midst of a housing crisis at present. High and unaffordable house prices in most parts of the country, and particularly in the urban centres, have combined with escalating rents for private rented housing and a poor record of provision of Local Authority or other non-profit housing for those who can neither purchase nor rent in the private market.

We believe that practices such as land speculation and the hoarding of zoned land have distorted the housing market and impeded the provision of affordable housing. Government policy has made some attempts to mitigate the effects of this basic flaw through special provisions for low income and vulnerable groups but these attempts have failed by any economic and social criteria. We believe that strategic Government intervention to alter the balance of rights between private landowners and the common good is necessary to ensure fair and equitable provision in both private and social housing.

In order to address this housing crisis, in Government the Green Party will:

• Recoup a fair share of the value that is added to urban and rural land which is zoned for development and ensure that this value is returned to the community
• Ring-fence this revenue for the development of sustainable settlements
• Begin to shift the tax burden from labour to ?smart? taxes on the site value of land including residential investment property and second homes
• Give pre-emption rights to local authorities to purchase property at point of sale and make more active use of existing compulsory purchase powers
• Ensure public investment in social and affordable housing through the full and consistent implementation of Part V of the Planning & Development Act 2000
• Promote Cost Rental and Community Land Trusts providing permanently affordable homes where equity can be built by renting or by purchase
• Progressively limit the amount of money that lending institutions can lend for house purchase in order to reduce the price of housing.
• Set up a Housing Authority, under the auspices of the Department of the Environment, whose objective will be to shape and influence the development of housing policy through research, market analysis and information and advice
• Commit to ensuring the provision of 10,000 social housing units per year until the waiting lists are clear.
• Reform the Land Register, direct the mapping of all property in land using the best available technology and ensure that all interests in property are registered and this information is made fully transparent and publicly accessible

We are confident that these policies will firstly halt, and then reduce house values ? by stimulating private sector, financing public sector and facilitating third sector supply streams.