Just one person came off the Tipperary Council’s general housing list in Clonmel in 2020 due to a shortage of houses to rent.
The housing shortage in Tipperary is being compounded by the number of property owners selling up and exiting the rental market.
Tipperary County Council must provide accommodation to the tenants who were on a rental accommodation scheme and this is accounting for most of the housing.
Administrative officer for housing, Sean Lonergan told Tipp FM that this means that while houses are being allocated, it is having very little impact on reducing the housing list.
“There was a lot of landlords who would really be termed as accidental landlords, had joined what was called the rental accommodation scheme and also the long term leasing scheme and given the increase in prices that houses were getting on the private market, that we had received an awful lot of notices to quit.
“Under the rental accommodation scheme, the council is responsible for the housing of the tenant, a large percentage of our housing was actually given to those tenants and only person came off our general housing list in the Clonmel area.”
In order to combat homelessness, Sean added that they have put a number of things in place.
These include the Housing First model, which he explained as dealing with the “most chaotic of their clients.”
“We have 12 people who would normally be either on the streets or in emergency accommodation are now actually in standard accommodation being supported by an approved housing body.
“We’re also in the process of introducing Our Own Front Door – we’ll be using properties that we’ll set aside for people who present as homeless and rather than put them in emergency accommodation through B&B, we’ll actually put them into our own accommodation units, whereby they will be key worked by our Homeless Prevention Officers, to enable them to have an exit strategy from homeless accommodation.”
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