Introduction: a New Housing Crisis

This Chapter details how the Irish housing systems, and housing systems across the world, are experiencing a structural ‘shock’. We are in the midst of an unprecedented housing and homelessness crisis. This details the dramatic increase in housing inequalities and exclusion, from the rise in homelessness, mortgage arrears and foreclosures, to the collapse in home-ownership rates and, in particular, the emergence of ‘Generation Rent’ and ‘Generation Stuck at Home’. This new Generation Rent is being locked out of traditional routes to affordable secure housing such as home ownership, social housing and secure low-rent housing. They are being pushed into private rental markets with unaffordable high rents and insecurity of tenure, or forced into hidden homelessness, couchsurfing, sleeping in cars, or pushed back to live with their parents. Ireland has had the largest fall in home ownership rates among European Union (EU) countries in the past three decades. This chapter shows that the current housing situation and crisis is not a temporary blip, but a deep and profound structural crisis that is in danger of becoming a permanent crisis. Our national and global housing systems are in crisis and this is a key juncture.