Every August and September, the housing shortage shows up on campus. First year students move across the country without certainty about where they will sleep. Returning students juggle long commutes, term-time sublets, and rising rents. Parents bounce desperate messages into WhatsApp groups looking for leads. This is now a familiar seasonal pattern, yet it points to a wider system that is not working for students or for anyone relying on the private rental market.
The immediate story is straightforward. Demand for rooms near third level institutions exceeds the supply that the private market and purpose-built student accommodation can offer. On-campus accommodation costs are increasingly out of reach, with Dublin-based students paying on average €10,000 for the academic year. The scramble produces predictable risks, including scams and overcrowding, and less visible harms, such as isolation for those who cannot live near classmates, and educational strain for those who must combine study with long commutes.
One response has been that a slice of our national building capacity is directed towards purpose-built student accommodation which promises big rewards for investors but this reduces the flow of homes available for individual buyers. In this context, students are pushed into a tightening market where price and insecurity travel together. (The State is supporting direct builds from the universities themselves but their ability to develop is really quite limited.)
Catholic Social Teaching (CST) gives a language for assessing this situation that is neither fatalistic nor purely technical. Dwelling with Dignity is a new book from the Irish theologian, Suzanne Mulligan, who is based at Notre Dame. It situates housing within a coherent moral framework. Housing is not just shelter and not only an asset class. It is a basic support for education, family life, work, health, and participation in community. On this account, when student housing fails, the consequences are not incidental. A right that undergirds other social goods is being compromised.
Several principles from that tradition help to clarify what is at stake. Human dignity – “a radically inclusive concept” which “demands that we work toward positive social transformation” – is one of the foundations for any housing policy. Housing policy that expects young adults to accept unsafe or unstable arrangements, because there is no alternative, misses that basic standard.
The common good, as Mulligan unpacks it, is not a slogan. It describes the set of social conditions that enable people to flourish together. Homelessness makes “the common good less achievable because it denies individuals the chance to reside in a place long enough to integrate and forge an identity.” If thousands of students cannot find secure rooms at prices aligned with their realistic budgets, the conditions for shared flourishing are not present. Participation matters as well. Students can only contribute to the life of their colleges, to local civic life, and to the economy, when they have stable places to live. We can think about the goods that a stable home permits – permanence, community, rest – and recognise that house is part of a network of supports that, taken together, allow people to grow in freedom and responsibility. Or as we might say theologically, it is constitutive of “integral human development”.
Catholic Social Teaching is concerned for the social good but it is not opposed to markets. It does, however, insist that markets remain within limits set by the common good. Mulligan talks about the response to the Irish government after the end of the Celtic Tiger. Instead of charting a different path after our catastrophic property bubble, in a way we intensified the problem through commodification and financialisation.
The large scale purchase of new urban units by institutional investors has been defended as necessary to get projects built. That claim needs testing without fear or favour. In a housing system tilted in this direction, who is the housing for, how is price set, and how does the tenure mix affect education and family formation. If the only policy framework we can imagine locks in high rents and outsources stability to investors, maybe we need a new imagination? Catholic Social Teaching’s integration of respect for the individual, grounded in the common good, aimed at human dignity might spark better ideas.
Ultimately, what the student housing crunch reminds us every year is that being able to have a place to live is a justice issue, not only a consumer preference. Similarly, affordability is not a nice little pipe dream. It is the basis for a vibrant and competitive economy. When ordinary students are priced out of the chance of an education, it is a massive structural subsidy to those who are better off.
Church communities are present in this space already through charity and welcome. Mulligan cites numerous sources, including the Irish bishops, who frame the provision of housing as a central task of the Christian community. Her book achieves that rare combination of accessibility and profundity. It helped me to bridge the gap between the graphs and stats of the homelessness crisis and the real human effect that our commitment to profit-from-housing creates.
It also reminded me that the back to college crunch need not be a recurring feature of Irish life. If we treat student housing as a basic support for education rather than an annual emergency, policy will shift. Investor-driven approaches may have their place, but if they aren’t truly adding value, we need to change course. Simple measures can guide this effort: If a first-year student can find a safe room at a price she can actually pay, in a setting that supports her dignity, within reach of the campus by active or public transport, we are on the right track. Catholic Social Teaching does not supply a blueprint, but it helps set the aims. Secure and affordable housing supports education, care, work, and community. If policy turned to those meaningful measures, students would be more likely to find a place to live, and the wider housing system would become less fragile for everyone.
