Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 October 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

General Scheme of the Land Development Agency Bill 2019: Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and Land Development Agency

Mr. John Coleman:

In some location. On local authority lands or perhaps some of the Housing Agency lands, however, the proportion of social and affordable housing will be much higher. In Shanganagh, for instance, it is 100%. It will not be the same everywhere.

The question of what is affordable is a key one, as I mentioned to Deputy Barry. We are taking an evidence-based approach to it. One one level, we face the constraint of delivering a product that ultimately covers its cost and, on the other, we must provide housing that is genuinely affordable. It is no good if the housing covers its cost but is not affordable to the target market. That is why we are doing a lot of work to understand what our target market is. It is associated with those middle deciles of household income. It is a matter of trying more to understand the percentage of that income that should be available to those concerned to meet accommodation costs while allowing them to live an enjoyable life and cover the costs of living beyond housing costs. We are doing a lot of work on that. The perceived wisdom is that around one third of a person's net disposable income should be available to meet housing costs. That is in and around what we are targeting for the middle deciles of income.

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