Bring back the cheap bedsit – it should never have gone away

• Published date: 15 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

I’ve been keeping track of “studio apartment” – the nouveau name for a bedsit – rents for a good few years now, have written about them before, and they’re still rising. I’ve focused mostly on bedsits on the North Circular Road in the capital, which runs from the Phoenix Park gates in Dublin 7, all the way to North Wall in Dublin 1. Much like the South Circular Road, the housing on this stretch is especially relevant because traditionally it’s been full of bedsits in large houses subdivided into flats

In 2023, some bedsits here rose to €1,500 a month. That record has been smashed. One North Circular Road studio, with a fold-out bed from a wall that doubles as a ledge-like “desk”, is for rent at €1,899 a month. This property (essentially a kitchen and fold-out bed), according to the ad, “enjoys a strategic location” while also “promising a rich and fulfilling living experience”. “Perks” include “a designated bicycle rack”. Spoilt, so we are.

The thing is, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with bedsits or studio flats when they’re priced logically. But they’re not. This is meant to be cheap stock, but in terms of size, facilities and quality, it offers far less value than other accommodation in the private rental market, which is nonsensical.

Co-living developments, one of Eoghan Murphy’s legacies from the menu of short-term-thinking failures he left, also benefit from the bedsit profit boom in Dublin. Try €1,895 per month for a studio in Dún Laoghaire, or €1,850 for a studio in a Rathmines co-living block, where renters are encouraged to “soak up the buzzing atmosphere and curate a new lifestyle”. Or how about €2,125 for a studio in the docklands, where the price of rent has about the same logic as a horoscope? Or €2,050 for a studio in Stillorgan? Maybe you’d prefer to pay €2,100 for a studio in Dublin 1, or €1,950 for one in Sandyford? Or would you rather the PowerCity-style pricing of €1,999 for a studio in Harold’s Cross?

That €1,899 studio on the North Circular? The same company has another studio for rent in a completely different part of the city, Rathmines, with the exact same fold-out bed, magically set at that price of €1,899.

I’m going to propose something wild here, and suggest that the price of rental accommodation be linked to the size of a property. The measurements of rental properties are rarely even listed in Ireland, which must leave our European friends scratching their heads. How big is the place? Sorry, that doesn’t matter in Ireland...