State representatives or their media outlets have not, to my knowledge, openly said as much yet, but an idea that is being gradually nurtured in the public psyche is that homeowners are partly responsible for — or at least should be expected to make sacrifices to mitigate — the housing crisis.

This was essentially the sentiment conveyed to me by a woman I met in Waterford city recently. She expressed her misgivings about couples, widows or widowers living alone in three-bedroom houses — where only one of the rooms was being used; the implication being that, during a housing crisis, this was unacceptable and that the state should do something about it.

I suggested that such people (e.g. homeowners whose children had ‘flown the nest’) were not really ‘the problem’, and that encouraging the state to intervene in such cases was ‘heavy-handed’.

The lady, in turn, effectively said: even if the state does commandeer the property and evict the homeowner it’s not all that bad; they will, after all, relocate them — just in a ‘smaller house’.

So …​ These are the sentiments that are being cultivated in the minds of average people. Homeowners, who might have spent decades of their lives securing a three-bedroom house, are potentially ‘selfish’ — unless amenable to being ‘rehoused’ and allowing their home to be subsumed in to the national ‘housing stock’.

In the meantime …​ Thanks to anti-human land-use policies and the public’s (largely blind and thoughtless) acceptance of the same, much of the nation’s land has been effectively confiscated. Predatory landlords, also, continue to buy multiple apartments and all other manners of accommodation purely as ‘investments’ and ‘money-making instruments’. Large landowners and land speculators, also, sit on hundreds of acres of land waiting for them to increase in value. The Government and NGOs, also, continue to embrace and promote dangerous immigration policies that foment ethnic and religious tensions and place natives and immigrants in direct competition for the small amount of social housing that exists.

In the midst of all this, some people, somehow, have developed the notion that regular ‘homeowners’ are the problem. One might laugh if the situation wasn’t so serious. They, homeowners, are not the problem. Look elsewhere.

The only scenario where homeowners might be a problem — where they might be contributing to the housing crisis — is where they embrace ‘NIMBYism’. Aside from that, expecting homeowners to ‘make sacrifices’ to mitigate the housing crisis — to offer up their small and hard-earned comforts — is to completely misdiagnose the problem.