During Take Back The City’s first housing clinic of 2024 ten families sent formal complaints to Stormont’s new Housing Minister, Gordon Lyons - people facing eviction, suffering from health issues linked to poor conditions and struggling in accommodation that ignores and exacerbates their disabilities. There will be many more before the year is out.

Figures from the Department for Communities show that in the first six months of 2023, over 8,500 households presented to the Housing Executive as homeless (62% of them were accepted as officially homeless). This level of need, coming as it does on top of decades of unmet demand, and relatively stagnant supply, means that Northern Ireland is facing levels of unprecedented accumulated homelessness.

By the end of March 2023 the number of households in temporary accommodation had topped 10,000 for the first time. As of September 2023, the number of households recognised as officially homeless was at 27,566 – an increase of nearly 5% in six months. In October 2023, Housing Executive Chief Executive Grainia Long spoke to the Belfast Telegraph about record numbers of people in temporary accommodation.

Parents have been forced to remove their kids from school, in numerous cases school staff have written the Housing Executive pleading for families who are being ripped from the communities.

By the end of the fiscal year 2021/22, over 30% of the Housing Executive’s temporary accommodation budget was spent on ‘non-standard’ accommodation like B&B’s and hotels; a figure likely to be much higher now, as in recent months newly recognised refugees and long-standing homeless households have increasingly been placed in expensive private sector hotel accommodation. The private profits and the human cost are massive. People in work have been moved too far away from their jobs to be able to keep them. Parents have been forced to remove their kids from school, in numerous cases school staff have written the Housing Executive pleading for families who are being ripped from their communities. GPs and consultants have written letters urgently requesting that their patients not be dispersed so that they can attend appointments and continue with treatment that they have already begun.

In purely practical terms, people housed temporarily in former hotel rooms do not have access to cooking facilities. Some hotels used by the Housing Executive are in remote locations, inaccessible to shops and services, and the only meals available are those offered by the hotel restaurant – at prices that are beyond the means of the people placed there. Some people report being forced to live on cold prepared food that they are able to bring in and store in their hotel room.

The ripple effect of our growing housing crisis is felt everywhere, yet it is not as high on the political agenda as in the Republic of Ireland where elected representatives are championing the cause of the homeless and challenging the profit making of private power.

For the people of the south this story is déjà vu. In 2016 in Dublin, house price and rents began to rise and the state dramatically withdrew social housing new build shifting to private market subsidies. A wave of homelessness followed, with families stuck 2-3 years at a time in overcrowded hostels and single rooms. This compounded human misery was matched by an accelerated rise in private house prices and rents and increased social division as scarcity has been enforced by private sector control of the market.

Increased supply of public and genuinely affordable housing is the only solution to our growing housing crisis – when will we learn?

More information available on this issue in our latest policy brief.