A more significant development in this period was the growing reliance on rent subsidies for welfare dependent households in the private rented sector as a form of quasi-social housing support. Starting from a low base in the late 1980s, when the state spent less than €10 million on rent supplements, spending on this form of support rose to almost €70 million by the mid-1990s and ballooned to €440 million by 2008. In the latter year, 74,000 households received rent supplements, which was the equivalent of about two-thirds the population of households in social housing proper. In 2005, government announced that in future most rent supplement claimants of 18 months or more duration would be accommodated in dwellings leased by local authorities from private landlords; and in 2008, it announced that all new social housing will be procured by leasing dwellings from the private sector (Norris and Coates, 2010) This means that the private rental sector now makes a key contribution to accommodating less well-off households that were formerly housed mainly by social landlords. This approach is to the fore in housing some new disadvantaged categories such as immigrants and in the future, is likely to play an even greater role in this regard (Fahey and Fanning, 2009). Future studies of disadvantaged housing areas in Irish towns and cities will need to take account of this fact and extend their scope beyond the traditional social housing sector. In addition, lessons about housing for the poor learned from the study of social housing will need to be adapted to apply to disadvantaged housing in the private sector.
2.2
Area-based interventions: origins and policies
Area based social inclusion measures entail the application of resources, both public and private, to specific geographical areas, as opposed to particular sectors of society, in order to alleviate disadvantage. Such measures first emerged in Europe the 1960s and were initially inspired by the example of American efforts to tackle the ghettoisation of racial minorities in deprived and marginalised neighbourhoods in US cities. Similarly, the first UK intervention – the Urban Programme – was developed in England in the late 1960s in response to the growing evidence of urban decay in inner cities and fears of social unrest and ethnic tension (Parkinson, 1996). In both Europe and America these programmes have expanded significantly since then, driven by concerns about urban problems and, in Europe, by the availability of EU funding for area based interventions.
Measures of this kind first emerged in Ireland in the 1980s when unemployment was high, especially long-term unemployment, and means of tackling ‘unemployment blackspots’ were sought. The Third EU Poverty Programme (1989-94) set up pilot schemes with a 23
