There are just 50 properties available to rent through the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) scheme in June, according to the Simon Communities of Ireland.
Simon Communities of Ireland Executive Director Wayne Stanley told On the Record there were 29 HAP properties available in the previous report in March.
The report also found 934 properties were available to rent at any price within the 16 areas surveyed, an increase in 39%.
Mr Stanley said there is some improvement in housing availability according to this report, but a lot of the issues causing homelessness remain.
“People continue to be made homeless, and that is because landlords are selling up because of the tightening of the rental market,” he said.
“It's also the fact that when a person experiences homelessness, it's getting harder and harder to find a root out.
“For a long time, the private rental market was one of the major routes.”
Local authorities
Mr Stanley said the houses available through HAP are also largely available in Dublin (74%), while nine of 16 areas studied had no HAP properties available.
“We need to look at the role of local authorities in the provisions of public housing,” he said.
“We need to look at all of the facets of our housing system and really ramp up particularly in the in the public housing system.
“Critically, more of that housing allocation [needs to be] to people who are experiencing homelessness.”
'A realistic housing system'
Mr Stanley said we need to decide “what is the realistic housing system we want”.
“There seems to be this obsession with getting back to the late 90s when we had 80% home ownership, but that's not the that's not real-world thinking,” he said.
“We need to say what role we want the private rental market to play.”
He said Finland have been able to completely deregulate their private rental market because their public housing system “works”.
Home ownership is currently the best option in the Irish housing system and has been pursued by the state most.
“It’s the one the State has pursued in terms of selling off our public housing to people less than it cost to build it in order to bolster homeownership,” Mr Stanley said.
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