Affordable Housing in Westport

I attended the sod turning of the Tubber Hill project on Friday. The scheme comprises of over 90 townhouses and appartments and will be a mix of affordable housing and social housing. The scheme will be built in two parts by Westport Town Council.

Westport has suffered in recent years from exceptionally high houses prices which have meant a lot of young and not so young Westport people cannot afford to live here. In the 1990s there was a mass emigration to nearby Castlebar, so intense was the house buying in Castlebar by people from Westport that there is an estate in Castlebar nicknamed 'Little Westport'.

The Tubber Hill scheme will make a good dent in our town's housing lists and I expect that a lot of those on the list for the last couple of years will be allocated housing. However with no sign of prices dropping Affordable housing will continue to be a priority for the next decade.

In my opinion the Tubber Hill Affordable housing development will be one of the most important projects undertaken during the lifetime of the current council. But now is not the time to rest but to start planning the next scheme.

• Of the 40,000 affordable houses promised by the Government only 3,000 have been delivered.
• One in six houses in Ireland are empty compared with one in twenty in the UK. It goes to show that we have our priorities all wrong. We should be encouraging people to free up these extra homes.
• The waiting lists in Ireland for council housing are twice what they were 10 years ago.
• The government should be buying up potential residential land at agricultural value plus a reasonable percentage extra to the landowner/speculator and using that land for housing.
• Housing is too important at the moment to leave to market forces i.e. Developers, landowners and the like.
• The Labour Minister for the Environment Jim Tully built over 100,000 houses in one year in the 1970s when the country was broke. Why can't we do the same today?
  

There is a good article on Affordable Housing here from the EBS (the EBS was founded by Mayo's Labour TD and Party Leader Thomas J. O'Connell).

For more information on Affordable housing or Social housing in Westport or Co. Mayo read this Mayo County Council Housing. For more information on Labour's National Housing Plan click here.