Rossa James Gallagher | Contributing Writer
“I am a student, homeless in Dublin. If anybody knows anything, anything at all about where I can find accommodation, please talk to me.”
This was what I saw when walking down Grafton Street last week, hanging around the neck of a young man. I’d seen this message a thousands times before, plastered all over Facebook. I’d seen it on Dublin rental websites and accommodation services, on online forums and in chatrooms. But to see it scrawled in permanent marker on a scrap of cardboard, hanging by a string around the neck of a young man no older than myself, is a stark reminder just how grim house-hunting has become for students in Dublin.
I’m no stranger to house-hunting myself, having lived in different areas of Dublin for each college year. While it’s never been easy to find a place and it’s always been stressful, persistent search generally churned forth a couple of feasible options. One month’s deposit and a landlord reference and you were grand. That is, ’til now. My experience of house-hunting this summer was a potent mixture of compromise, desperation and begging. I’d swear I’d never go back there and please god don’t make me go back there, but here I am, going back there.
House-hunting this summer was a potent mixture of compromise, desperation and begging
The plan was to find a three-bedroom, somewhere habitable and as close to the city center as we were last year, in Smithfield. We felt confident that we’d be able to get something within a month as we were able to start looking before the international students arrived and the CAO offers were in. We took the search seriously, signing up to alerts from daft (the day I downloaded the daft app on my phone is the day a small part of me died), contacting Trinity and joining every Facebook page with any relevance to the hunt. Those pages are a pretty good way of gauging the level of interest in properties and one thing became very clear, very quickly: You want housing in Dublin? Get in line.
Landlords were being inundated with texts, calls and emails. Every single property that went on the market had dozens of people throwing themselves at it, with some of the city center locations getting well over a hundred applicants. Dublin you see, and the country at large, is suffering from a chronic shortage of housing. Recent figures published by the TCDSU Accommodations Advisory service details a 40% reduction in nationwide housing availability. Throw in the rising rent prices (up 25% on average in the city center), slashes to maintenance grants and you get some very unhappy students. I was a very unhappy student.
So, rent prices were going up. Fine. we could deal with that. Housing was in short supply. Sure, we had the whole summer to search so we could manage that, too. What we weren’t prepared for and what stymied the hunt at every turn was the fact that we were students. We began to notice a trend. We’d find a place, contact the landlord and offer to move in immediately. Landlord would seem delighted, ask us about ourselves and if we were working. We’d reply that we were students, but also working. Then, landlord would a) cut off communication like a lover who’d become bored or b) inform us that unfortunately the place had just been rented, like some sort of lover that was also a potential landlord but reluctant to rent to students. Oh yeah, and there was the other landlady with a lovely 3-bed in Rathmines who, upon learning that we were students, said that we would need to provide four months rent up front, as opposed to the usual two. It was clear what we needed to do: Lie.
Students won’t cut it anymore. This city is made for yuppies, so yuppies we must become. It was time to re-write our cover letters, the ones we attached to every application, this time with our hyperbole pens. My part-time job became full-time, ‘working in a call center’ became ‘involved in market research’, and we avoided the word ‘student’ like the plague. We got employer references on top of multiple landlord references (my dad played the part of weirdly enthusiastic previous landlord for a while, under a fake name). We even got our respective banks to give us forms that expressly stated that we were not broke or in danger of becoming broke anytime soon. We were walking, talking references.
This city is made for yuppies, so yuppies we must become
On top of this, we’d been contacted with other friends who were looking for a place themselves and thought we might have a better chance looking together. Strength in numbers mentality. By the time we eventually found a place (this story has a happy ending, many don’t), the search had been expanded to include 3, 4, 5 or 6 bedroom places. In the end, it took us nearly 3 months and I now consider us the lucky ones. The TCDSU Accommodation Service has been working flat out; the number of people who have contacted them in recent months has passed over 2000, over twice the previous year’s. I met with Tom Duffy, an American student who has been staying in Isaac’s Hostel on the Quays for nearly a month now, to find out what the situation is like for international students trying to find accommodation.
He explained to me that he has been staying in the hostel whilst trying to find a place, but the search has been far from easy. He’s been to 15 viewings, emailed over 200 applications for various rental offers around Dublin and has been forced to rely on friends’ couches on the weekends that his hostel runs out of vacancies. Which is most weekends. Vacant Dublin hostel beds are like gold dust between Thursday and Sunday, booked clear through from September to November by newly arrived internationals desperate to find accommodation. Tom has met dozens of students like himself, all caught without a permanent place to live. The legendary hospitality of the Irish apparently does not extend as far as a readily available roof over your head.
I’ll take that cynicism as my cue to finish. To Tom, to anyone still searching for a home and especially to the young fella with the cardboard sign (on the off-chance that you’re reading this) don’t let the search beat you down.
Illustrator : Mary Corbally
