The Fuggerei Solution to Ireland's Social Housing Crisis

Nothing else has worked.

The Fuggerei in Augsburg, Bavaria, is the world’s oldest continuously operating public housing complex. It’s a reminder of a kind of baroque humiliation ritual, a penitential religious labyrinth constructed 500 years ago for Augsburg’s most financially wretched and circumspect Catholics (people I can relate to). Built by “Jakob Fugger the Rich”, who is considered to be the richest man of all time, in 1520, he decided the needy deserved walls, not just words.

Qualifying for residency today is the same as it was in 1520, not much different from joining an exclusive club—one must be indigent (sans debt), Catholic, and have lived at least two years in Augsburg, also, you must preform devotional duties involving daily recitations of the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, and Nicene Creed, not out of faith but as a form of debt owed to people who mainly appear in the business section of newspapaers. The Fuggerei is a housing project situated within a medieval enclave, located within the city of Augsburg. The city itself looms distantly outside, curdled in the night, while inside the walls—actual walls, thick and old and bored—human history lurks, held together by the trembling fingers of municipal charity and the lingering scent of Jakob Fugger’s chilly obsession with the poor man’s soul.

Each unit is the token of an unredeemed promise. The rent is one Rhenish gulden per annum, never adjusted for inflation either, not even one euro in today’s money, not even one cappuccino, not even one coin strong enough to erase the memory of your financial wretchedness, all paid by devotional labour: prayers morning, noon, and night, as if to keep the world spinning out of obligation. At the risk of drawing on national stereotypes, I can’t help but suspect, like much of Germany, the real point here is not the housing but the rules—the joy of making entry contingent upon being broken, devout, local and poor. A ticket to tour the area costs eight times more than a year’s rent (€8), because nothing ever dies except dignity, and the price of admission is always paid by the curious, not the damned. If you do the tour, be sure and leave before the little gates clamp shut at 10 pm, always, locking out the world and locking in the meagre flotilla of lives who repeat prayers for their unseen betters. The world’s first gated social housing, if you will. Augsburg got me thinking about Ireland’s housing crisis.

Ireland’s housing crisis can be best described not so much as a shortage as it is a grand ongoing horror theatrical performance—half farce, half self-harm—a nation crumbling under its own bureaucratic debris. The amusingly named ‘Downtown’ James Browne, the Minister for Housing, and his courtly enuchs will, of course, send you bullet points about something called progress. No one who’s worked in the Department of Housing for the past ten years knows what progress is. They talk about progress in the same manner as conspiracy theorists talk about the moon landings or who shot JFK. In reality, the only thing being constructed with any urgency is a monument to our own numb exhaustion. The housing crisis hangs over everything like a damp fog, the kind that seeps into your lungs until breathing feels like a kind of betrayal. We talk about housing in the same hushed, fearful tones that Irish grandparents once used when they watched their children vanish onto emigrant ships, waving goodbye across a sea that swallowed whole generations. Only now there are no ships, no songs, no grand narrative of exile—just the dull ache of a people trapped in their own country, yearning for a place to live as if it were permission to exist.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for Ireland’s current housing malaise. But it is always the government, its advisers and civil servants at fault; that’s the nature of the beast—you’re in charge. Ultimately, everything wrong in society right now can be traced right back to the crash. The current housing crisis, rampant racism, alt-right wierdos, permanent onlineism, left-wing preforamative rage, your lack of sex-life, everything can be traced back to the crash.

I digress slightly.

The Irish government, in its sci-fi genius, has managed to create a housing crisis that lurches from malformation to parody—a market so fantastically distorted, it bounces all over the place like one of those trampolines that make an appearance on the weather forecast when it gets more windy than a politician claiming to be able to fix the housing crisis. The Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. In Ireland, it's easier to imagine living on Mars—humble, content amongst the Martian soil—than to imagine buying a home in Cork or Dublin. Auld sod of the Martian soil has a nice sound to it.

All of this was meant to be solved, of course, with proper legislation—Help-to-Buy, Shared Equity, Cost Rental, Affordable Purchase. Schemes layered atop each other until the very notion of a “scheme” has begun to mutate far from what was envisioned. The Help-to-Buy scheme gives you a handful of magic beans (redeemable against the beanstalk of future property values). Shared Equity: the government buys the bit of the home you can’t, which you then get to borrow forever and pay interest on, as if you are renting your own hard-won debt. Cost Rental, too, the beautiful idea that rents should be reasonable, cooked in the sunny, low-cost kitchens of the Housing Agency, except there are no reasonable rents anymore, they’ve gone the way of the Irish Elk and Grey Wolf, extinct. There’s something called Affordable Purchase, also, at which point the word “affordable” has now become a sneering byword for everything unaffordable. A grande latte in Starbucks is more expensive than a pint of Guinness in some areas. Truly, the measure of a first-world country.

And so the housing dream mutates further. “If you can’t afford a home, have you tried a garden shed?” Otherwise called modular homes—the latest in a series of occult innovations, a proposal so visionary it borders on necromancy. Timber shanties blooming behind the semi-D in suburban Dublin. The government, ever attuned to the higher metaphysics of property, insists these experiments are not to be confused with actual houses, but they might as well be called home, until the next scheme of unintended consequences emerges from the foamy mouth of the river Liffey.

The most insidious state intervention in the housing market has come in the form of the state buying anything it can lay its hand on. The economist David McWilliams goes into some detail in a recent Irish Times article, and Developer Rick Larkin, over at The Build, who knows his way around the Irish property market, also has plenty to say about government housing failures. The state, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to wade into the housing market not as benefactor or architect, but as a kind of gloved hand in the night—vacuuming up every available property, swooping upon new builds with the acquisitive enthusiasm of a lottery winner. How can ordinary people compete with the might of the state? There’s something charming—if by charming you mean monstrous—about a government intent on buying up its own country, home by ever-more-unattainable home, and then wondering why mere mortals can’t get a look-in. 16,000 people are now homeless and rising every day, proving the schemes are not working.

One way to build up our social housing stock would be to do what the Fuggerei in Augsburg did: if you fall on hard times, the house the state purchased for you is yours for life once the rent is settled on, but it stays in the state’s hands for perpetuity; you don’t get to be able to buy and then sell it. No more of these weird schemes that are just making everything worse.

Every attempt to remedy the housing chaos morphs into another “solution” with a cheerful, empty name: Help-to-Buy, Shared Equity, Cost Rental, Affordable Purchase, Rent Caps. Each certifies the collective insanity. The schemes stack atop one another, not like bricks in a house but like tombstones, testifying to a market haunted by the state’s best intentions.