At the end of every summer, thousands of students touch down again in Ireland, after a summer working abroad. They approach the new college year in a spirit of hope, not just that they will perform well enough to pass all the academic challenges, but that they will have a good time – at least some of the time – in the process.
This year, that is looking like a forlorn hope for many. That Ireland has, for some time, been in the middle of a housing crisis is no secret. That it is at its worst in the big cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway is equally widely known. Well, the bad news is that things are going to get worse. Because we are about to witness the annual rush of students looking to secure a dwelling for the academic year. No one knows just how bad the situation will become, but what we can say for sure is that (a) demand will far exceed supply; and (b) rents will be higher than the majority of students can afford.
The first sign of trouble will be the age-old tagline ‘Students need not apply professionals only’. There is an image of students as existing in a world that's somewhere between Animal House and Project X, conjuring the spectre of wild parties, broken furniture, and neighbours kept awake until the early hours. To pretend such things never happen would be silly but it is even more ridiculous to imagine that this is a fair representation othe vast majority of students. Mostly, students are well behaved, responsible young adults who want somewhere to rest their heads and watch Home & Away.
Students go to extraordinary lengths – from using aunts as referees to telling white lies about which course they’re studying – to find housing. And yet what they are offered is so often totally sub-standard. It really is incredible what some landlords will attempt to get away with.
Jackie Taheny is a student at UCD, where she’s studying English. Unlike some of her colleagues, she has managed to get accommodation sorted ahead of time. Unlike the majority of people in, well, the developed world<, she’s sharing a house with 15 other people.
“It’s pretty tight,” she says, with a resigned look on her face. “We have no sitting room or anything, because our landlord has made everything into a bedroom. We have a tiny kitchen, with a small two-seater couch, a few dining chairs and the kitchen table. Whenever I take people over, it’s an ordeal. My dad was shocked when he saw it.”
For the privilege of living in this den, Jackie pays a whopping €400 a month. “And that’s for a shared room,” she points out. “The people in single rooms pay more.”
At least that suggests some semblance of structure – a set price for each room. Not every landlord is as upfront about things. Indeed, there’s no shortage of landlords looking to take advantage of the current boom in demand. Things are particularly bad in Galway right now. Jessica Watts, a student at NUIG, has experienced this first hand.
“We viewed a place that was priced at €1,000,” explains Jessica, who has been on the lookout for more than three months. “We went straight to the letting office to get a tenancy application, filled it out and brought it back the following day, when we discovered that the rent had gone up by €100 overnight. Later in the afternoon, we got a call saying the rent was now €1,300.”
By way of an explanation, they were told that the price hike was as a result of the high level of interest in the house. After they had the good sense to refuse to pay the higher amount, the house remained on the market for two weeks. “One thing’s for sure,” Jessica reflects, “he wouldn’t have dared treat professionals the way that he treated us.”
Perhaps even more bizarre was the situation which confronted students at one property in Clonskeagh, a prime location for UCD students. There, a number of separate individuals (or groups) were shown around the residence. They were then invited to email the landlord with their references – and their bids.
No, that’s not a typo. Rather than adhering to the advertised price – or even raising it, like the greedy Galwegian – the proprietor explicitly asked for students to bid on the house. How better to prey on people sense of insecurity and panic?
The working assumption is that, once the papers are signed and keys collected, everything will then run smoothly. Certainly, that was the expectation for Jamie Conroy, a student at UL. He arrived in Limerick to spend his first night at his new abode. He had already moved into the accommodation – and, indeed, had no complaints – until he opened his living room door.
“I saw a new telly through the window,” he says. “I figured one of the new roomies had brought it, and wanted to check it out. I opened the front door, and there were shoes and jackets lying on the ground. When I went into the living room, there were two people going at it on the couch. Turns out to be the landlord’s daughter and some lad she’d brought to the house for a bit of nookie.”
We’d be lying if we said we didn’t get a giggle out of Jamie’s story, but still: you do not want to have to deal with the sight of the landlord's daughter's boyfriend's arse out of the blue, do you? Suffice to say that any professional adult who found themselves in that position would have raised hell.
And, of course, that’s assuming that there’s even a house in the first place. In the queue of hustlers eager to make a buck from the rental market, scam artists are lurking. One Trinity College student, who asked not to be named, tells Hot Press how she very nearly fell for one cynical charade.
“We responded to an ad online, and got an elaborate story; ‘the house was my daughter’s, but she’s moved away, and I can’t get back to oversee the letting myself...’ sort of thing,” the student says. “He asked for our references, so we obliged. He told us how the payment would be done, and the method seemed a bit weird, so we googled him. He came up on scamwarners.com.”
The advertised property didn’t even exist – the conman had the exact same pictures posted on numerous websites, offering the apartment in different cities all over the globe.
The presence of scam artists, though, is not the greatest concern here. Instead, it underlines just how bad things are, and how desperate students feel, scouring one city or another for somewhere – anywhere – to lay their hats.
Purpose-built student accommodation in Dublin provides approximately only 3,000 beds – painfully little, considering the number of students in the capital. Colleges and Student Unions can only do so much to alleviate the pressure, and they have looked to local authorities for support. The President of the UCD Students’ Union, Marcus O’Halloran, wrote an open letter for the attention of Minister of Environment, Community & Local Government Alan Kelly, requesting a meeting to discuss the housing crisis. Minister Kelly has yet to respond.
The greatest danger is that all of this uncertainty and stress is going to have a huge effect on people's studies. Can we entertain a scenario where attendance at our third-level institution is controlled not by aptitude, intelligence or ambition, but by a personal housing budget?
The rent book cannot be given precedence above the textbook. Something needs to be done, and sooner rather than later.