Is The Housing Crisis Being Treated as a Crisis?

At the government conference, the Leader of Douglas Council highlighted the housing crisis in the island’s capital.

Speaking to Manx.News, Devon Watson criticised the government’s lack of concrete actions and investment in housing, despite what he calls, a crisis.

Watson has proposed that government should be building more social housing, including hundreds of units on brownfield sites, and ensuring rents cover costs.

Housing Crisis

Councilor Watson said: “I think that the way one of the problems that government faces at the moment is it views things as costs rather than as an investment.

“So you build a home for someone, or you build a set of apartments for people, they’re still going to be lived in in 10 years from now, 20 years from now, hopefully 100 years from now, if they’re built right to correct standards, and no one is going to be complaining about that cost down the road, but we just have to have the bravery to invest.

“Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism to say, how are we going to fund this? And does the crisis sort of meet the ambitions that that are sort of on display.”

Concrete Actions

After listening to a talk on housing at the government conference, Watson said: “I think the ambitions are good, but one thing that I would like to see is more concrete direct actions. Because, I mean, we are in the middle of a housing crisis.

“This was a government elected to deal with a housing crisis, and the ambitions don’t seem to sort of directly line up with what has been with the scale of that crisis.

“When I talk to people who are homeless, when I talk to people who are leaving care, who don’t have anywhere to go, I talk to prisoners who don’t have anywhere to sort of wait to integrate back into the community, people who want to leave social housing but can’t, people who want to get into social housing, but there isn’t the social housing for them.

“And I really want to see a lot of the energy here at the government conference translated into direct, concrete, tangible, sort of key performance indicators that would actually give people hope to know that in five years from now, this crisis won’t be the core thing affecting them.”