Housing - a Crisis for Women
by Barbara Sharlott
I want to say something about the gendered aspect of this housing crisis, and in particular, what homelessness is like for women. Women now account for 42 per cent of the adult homeless population, and this rises to 44 per cent in the Dublin area.[1] The average life expectancy of a woman in Ireland today is 84, but the average age of death for a single homeless woman in Dublin is just 37.[2] Homeless women in Ireland are dying from chronic diseases like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, HIV, and epilepsy, as well as drug overdoses and infections from drug use.
Social exclusion negatively affects health, particularly for women. Women who are socially excluded have often had traumatic childhoods, which include experiences of physical and or sexual abuse, or have witnessed domestic abuse at home.[3] Because of their previous experiences and also because it is so dangerous to be a single homeless woman, homeless women are much more likely to find themselves in violent relationships. Homeless women are more likely to remain in a violent relationship as it is often safer than being single and on the streets.
A recent report found that 53% of homeless families in Ireland are headed by lone parents, most of whom are women.[4] These women are mostly young (in their 20s or 30s) and typically have one or two children and are parenting alone. A majority became homeless following the loss of private rental housing. An important point to note is that these figures do not include the many women and children living in domestic violence refuges or direct provision centres, nor do they include the hidden homeless - women staying with family or friends.
““53% of homeless families in Ireland are headed by lone parents, most of whom are women.””
Adequate funding is essential
Underfunding for women’s refuges is also a major crisis; they have to run fundraisers to keep their organisation and doors open. We need women’s refuge centres in every county and full funding, so they do not have t to turn any women away.
Women’s Aid reported a 43% increase in contacts with their services in 2020 compared to 2019.[5] It was also reported that 7 women a day were turned away from refuge centres because of a lack of places for them during 2020[6], so they have little choice except to stay with their abuser.
We also can’t forget the thousands of calls to Gardaí concerning domestic violence that were ignored; those women were pleading for help and there was none for them. It is downright offensive that the Irish government gives more money to the greyhound industry than they give to fund refuges for women. One essential step in tackling the epidemic of violence against women is to provide proper funding to our refuges and rape crisis centres and a right to a safe home.
Women, homelessness & children
Homeless women also frequently endure the trauma of being separated from their children. A lot of homeless women have lost custody and I think having your child taken away from you is an incredibly traumatic experience for a woman in particular to have. That is trauma at a level from which it is very difficult to recover psychologically. So there is a need for more supportive living arrangements for women who are at risk of losing their children, where they would have access to 24-hour mental health or addiction support to enable them to keep their children. Frequently, because of a lack of services, the state is setting women and parents up to fail. We know that people are at risk of losing their children but they don’t have the right sort of supports to help them keep their children and the outcomes for children in state care are extremely poor.
Article originally published in Issue 7 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue here:
In the longer term, obviously, more housing is desperately needed, as a lack of a home is always going to make vulnerable people even more vulnerable. But as I said, there needs to be other supports for them alongside that.
Inequality in society impacts most on women, and if we want gender equality, then we have to look at the needs of the women who are pushed to the margins. They are the ones who have the most unequal lives and they are the ones that are often forgotten about when we are looking at gender equality.
So when we call for housing, we need to also recognise who needs that housing, what kind of housing they need (near their children’s schools, for example, or near family for support) and what supports they need in terms of mental health and addiction. We must make this part of our programme to address women’s oppression within the overall housing crisis in Ireland.
Another major problem facing us is the danger of a huge increase in homelessness among our elderly in years to come. With the government making dodgy deals with private developers where they build the houses and local authorities lease them back and rent them on up to 25-year leases to families off the housing lists. So if a young family, a single mum or dad are leasing these properties, what happens when these leases are up? Do the properties go back to the builder? Do these families become homeless again in later life?!
But they will always fail to deal with this problem they are creating because of their reliance on the market to deliver housing - putting corporate greed above human needs. Clearly, they just don’t care. We know that these rich people believe that working-class people become homeless because they made bad choices in life - that they deserve their misery.
What do we need to do?
So, what can be done about it? For us, a key question is: what potential is there for a housing movement to actually develop and force the government to build social housing? We have seen housing protests burst onto the scene, with big protests, only to subside again. We had Apollo House back in 2016, then Take Back the City in 2018, which was largely youth-led. Then we saw housing groups popping up all over the country. The 2020 general election was clearly about housing. But Covid-19 cut across the momentum that we had.
At the same time though, the government showed their hand. The rent freeze and eviction ban during the pandemic showed that the government had lied when they said they couldn't do those things before. We shouldn’t let people forget that.
Another question for us is how do we build on the success of the Dáil protest and street meeting? How do we bring in more people to play a role as they did on water charges? What demands should we put forward? In Berlin, the housing movement has forced a vote on nationalising big landlords - could we use their example here? We are all making a lot of calls for affordable housing, but we also need much more emphasis on public housing - that is housing constructed and owned by local authorities for rent.
““The rent freeze and eviction ban during the pandemic showed that the government had lied when they said they couldn’t do those things before.””
Hundreds of thousands of tenants are being impoverished by rent. Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien has introduced rent pressure zones, rent increase limits and inflation caps - all measures that failed as they were intended to give the impression of action while having little if any negative impact on landlords.
What we should be demanding is: Proper rent controls that reduce rents; a ban on vulture and cuckoo funds; a ban on the sell-off of public land; commencement of a major programme of state-built, public and genuinely affordable homes on public land; a ‘use it or lose it’ policy for vacant sites and buildings to be taken into public ownership if left vacant for an extended period.
We also need to fight for a right to equal pay and liveable wage NOW. We are living to work instead of working to live and workers have had enough.
This is a Government of rotten landlords and we need to take to the streets in a massive united housing protest.
We should be driven by the fundamental belief that homelessness is wrong. It is a failure of society that victimises people and denies them the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Wrong because it can be prevented, it can be solved, but is allowed to continue and in doing so, it undermines our society.
There is so much wealth all around us, but the very basic right to shelter is denied to so many, and many others are in unstable situations, creating stress and mental health problems for the whole family.
Notes
1. National Women’s Council of Ireland, The Impact of Homelessnes on Women’s Health’ April 2018 .‘https://www.nwci.ie/images/uploads/NWCI_Womens_Health_and_Homelessness_-_6th_April_2018.pdf
2. Dr Jo-Hanna Ivers & Professor Joe Barry, ‘Mortality Amongst The Homeless Population in Dublin’, January 2018. http://drugs.ie/images/uploads/Mortality_amongst_the_homeless_population_in_Dublin_(3).pdf
3.Australian Institute of Family Studies, ‘Effects of child abuse and neglect for adult survivors’, January 2014.
https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/effects-child-abuse-and-neglect-adult-survivors
4. Marie O’Halloran, ‘Lone parents and children account for more than half of homeless families’ The Irish Times, 14 September 2021.
5. Women’s Aid, ‘29,717 Domestic Abuse Contacts Made With Women's Aid in 2020 are Just 'the Tip of the Iceberg.' ‘, 22 June 2021.
https://www.womensaid.ie/about/newsevents/news/2021/06/22/media-release-29717-domestic-abuse-contacts-made-w/
6. Ellen Coyne, ‘Government criticised for lack of domestic abuse refuge spaces’, The Irish Independent, 11 November 2020. https://www.independent.ie/news/government-criticised-for-lack-of-domestic-abuse-refuge-spaces-39729458.html