Government to begin paying older people to downsize

Brendan Burgess

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Property revolution: Government to begin paying older people to downsize
  • Pay older people to downsize and move - report
  • Half of new apartments ‘must suit the elderly’
  • Land agency chief ’s radical rent-for-life plan
  • 'Property tax very low compared to elsewhere’

From today's Indo

Not sure if this is aimed at private housing or social housing.

In Dublin alone, about 5,000 people live on their own in 2,3& 4 bed units.

They should be told to share or rent on their own.

There are a total of over 12,000 spare bedrooms in social housing in Dublin alone.

There are 50 families of 4 or more people living in one roomed units.

Attached is a Briefing Note done by Karl Deeter and me.

Brendan
 

Attachments

  • Briefing note on overcrowding and undercrowding in Dublin Social Housing.docx
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Immediate action is required

·People living on their own should be told to find someone else in the same position and share with them.
If the 2,258 people living in 3 and 4 bed houses moved into the spare room in the 2 bed houses, then we would immediately have 2,064 three bed houses and 194 four bed houses immediately available to house people.

We should not build any more social housing in Dublin other than one bed units and gradually move everyone living on their own into these.

We should immediately stop the sale of any social housing at a discount

We should ban successor tenancies – where a child inherits their parent’s social housing.

Long term action

Housing needs should be reviewed every 5 years and people should be moved to more appropriate housing whether that is larger or smaller.
 
We bought our own houses upgraded along the way. We spent a fortune getting our house and gardens to their present state. Mrs Lep and I are not moving for anybody. Move into a downsized apartment yourself Mr Varadkar.

Come, up with another idea Mr Varadkar. We went through life paying all our due taxes, didn't do 3rd Level because we couldn't afford it, couldn't get grants for our offspring for their 3rd Level. Half our children have emigrated, never to return fulltime. We don't qualify for state pensions. We never drew unemployment benefit.

Mrs Lep and I are not the conscience of the state.
 
Leper said:
Mrs Lep and I are not moving for anybody. Move into a downsized apartment yourself Mr Varadkar.
Click to expand...

Who is forcing you to move ? What is wrong with making options available for people who might like to move ?
Are you opposed in principle to incentives?
 
Reactions: mtk
Early Riser said:
Who is forcing you to move ? What is wrong with making options available for people who might like to move ?
Are you opposed in principle to incentives?
Click to expand...

This is another scheme dreamed up by politicians to try to convince the public that they are concerned about Ireland's housing crisis. People like me owe the country nothing and now Mr Varadkar expects us to sell up and live in inferior accommodation and do what successive governments should have been doing anyway. We've invested our lives in our home and made it into what we wanted. We didn't cause the housing crisis. We are good citiziens, paid our taxes without thought, took on part time jobs to put our kids through university, never claimed unemployment benefit, never claimed any form of social welfare.

. . . and who will get our house, if we went down the incentive road, I've no reason to believe some deserving family will. Some TD's will even be making representations for some serial freeloaders to get what we've attained. Incentives - I gave up on these years ago, such is the honesty of the dynasties of freeloaders Ireland has in abundance.
 
I need the space at this point in my life but I could see myself downsizing in old age.

The main things that would put me off aren't financial though. I would only ever downsize to an apartment in very precise circumstances:
  1. Top floor
  2. Small development with mostly owner occupiers
  3. High charges and sinking fund in good shape

Most Irish apartments have awful soundproofing and the main way to avoid this is to be on the top floor. Management and maintenance of large blocks with lots of non-resident owners have problems. There are plenty of AAM threads on this.

I would also want a small development where your interests are generally aligned with other residents, and where it is easy to get agreement.


It's very hard to find all of these in an Irish apartment.
 
Mr Leper - As rants go that is an interesting rant.

All we have at the moment is a newspaper article. There does not seem any reason to suspect that there is any proposal to oblige you to leave your house. From what I can gather, for the private sector the proposal is to make more attractive alternatives available for people who may wish to downsize - and, perhaps, some form of incentive in some situations.

There is no suggestion that anyone (and certainly not you specifically!) is being obliged to take such options. However, I would be surprised if some people might not - and be glad of it. Maybe you would regard them as freeloaders? But if it helps free up family homes in urban locations close to major centres of employment its seems ok to me. Do you think it a good idea that people have to buy houses 30-40 miles away from their work while retired couples (or individuals) are "trapped" in family homes locally for want of alternatives? (If someone is selling privately to downsize what has the TD got to do with it?)

At the moment, the options for downsizing are generally poor, unless people want to uproot in their retirement and move somewhere far away. Even at that, the options may not be great.
 
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I agree with you
Over my life time I have seen many examples of it,
Just one example back oround 1983/4 I seen many newspaper articles very close to no 1 post above arguing the point that cutting unemployment benefit would get the skivers into the workforce ,
The argument was made by out of touch right wing parties and there fellow travellers in the end the got there way ,

It was a great day for skivers and a bad day for workers,

The results was up until around 1985/6 if you were working and lost your job or let off for a short time you got 75% of your wage for around 6 months and tapered off from there until it reached the same rate as someone who never worked,

The out of touch people could not see the 75% unemployment Benefit got people back working as soon as possible to preserve there entitlement ,

If the right wing and there fellow travellers had not got there way in 1983/4 things would have being a lot better for the people who lost there jobs in 2008,

Between 1985/6 and 2008 all of the money taken in in prsi which by the way was close to 18% of payroll was spent supporting the skivers rather than building up a fund to support people who wanted to work and lost there job,
 


I would imagine this is refering to social housing. Not a hope would I share my own large home with a stranger. Like Leper, I worked too hard for my privacy and independence for some work shy individual to move in with me. Over my dead body...
 
Saavy99 said:
I would imagine this is refering to social housing. Not a hope would I share my own large home with a stranger. Like Leper, I worked too hard for my privacy and independence for some work shy individual to move in with me. Over my dead body...
Click to expand...
Rather than spend money build houses it will be squandered on people in a position to work the system by people in public and private sectors,
 
Saavy99 said:
I would imagine this is refering to social housing. Not a hope would I share my own large home with a stranger. Like Leper, I worked too hard for my privacy and independence for some work shy individual to move in with me. Over my dead body...
Click to expand...

Is yours a privately owned house ? If so, where is the suggestion that you might be obliged to share it with anyone?
There is the rent-a-room scheme as an incentive. Do you object to such incentives being available ? Do you experience it as a threat?
 
Watch out, Ireland is becoming a communist country!! Since when can the State tell people that they must share their privately owned dwelling with someone else?!! Or tell them they have to sell it to a younger family?

If I am rattling around my own mansion on my own in my 70's, that's my choice and the State have absolutely no authority to tell me I have to share it.

And what would be the process of making someone share a house? A series of interviews for suitable housemates? And what if no one is suitable?

Or if I have a 6 bedroom house, do I have to fill all 5 spare rooms with a gaggle of kids?
 
Early Riser said:
Is yours a privately owned house ? If so, where is the suggestion that you might be obliged to share it with anyone?
There is the rent-a-room scheme as an incentive. Do you object to such incentives being available ? Do you experience it as a threat?
Click to expand...
A long term threat to taxpayers money being squandered ,another loophole being built into the system for people to abuse,
 
Ah, before we lose the run of ourselves here can someone point me towards the comment where John Moran says anything about forcing people in private homes to downsize? As opposed to using 'carrots' versus 'sticks'?
 
odyssey06 said:
Ah, before we lose the run of ourselves here can someone point me towards the comment where John Moran says anything about forcing people in private homes to downsize? As opposed to using 'carrots' versus 'sticks'?
Click to expand...
The carrot is taxpayers money ,and the carrots will be in short supply in a few years,

John Moran needs to start sowing carrots himself then he can give them away if he wants to,
 
I happen to know quite a few seniors that are keen to downsize from large family homes to modern apartments. It can make a lot of economic sense.

The problem they typically run into is a lack of suitable apartments in their desired location.

BTW the idea of forcing seniors to live with strangers in their own homes is bizarre.
 

Is this a thread about an as yet unannounced proposal to increase options to people who may wish to move, or to provide them with incentives? Or is it about paranoid ramblings ? Maybe the space invaders are coming in their flying saucers to take your (private) houses away to Planet OM ?
 
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