A letter published in this newspaper yesterday reminded me of the decision, made by the then-housing department in 2009, to ban bedsits with effect from 2013.

The letter, from Enid O’Dowd, outlined a decision of a private landlord to sell a house he owns in Rathgar, south Dublin. This house has, up to now, been let in four units. The landlord is selling to avoid facing the expense of bringing the premises up to the standard required by statutory regulations.

Nobody knows exactly how many bedsits were eliminated in 2013. These were the first and cheapest rung on the housing ladder. They suited students, single people, separated people and many others. It appears that perhaps as many as 15,000 bedsits disappeared around that time.

Many bedsits formed part of substantial private houses which had been converted to bedsit use as the middle classes deserted city centres to live in suburbs in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The irony is that wealthy middle-class people have taken advantage of the abolition of bedsits to reconvert those substantial houses to trophy homes on leafy residential roads. Strangely, the initiative to abolish bedsits came from Threshold, the housing charity, which convinced the department that nobody should live in a dwelling unless it has separate bathroom and kitchen facilities.

Sharing such facilities was viewed by Threshold and the department as inherently undesirable and substandard. By further irony, the same department was to be found sponsoring what it described as “shared living accommodation” or “co-living” developments (involving the use of shared kitchen and other facilities) less than six years after it killed off bedsits.

Equally ironic was the emergence of house-share rentals among many young people who could not, or did not want to, own or rent a place by themselves. Those arrangements almost invariably involved sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities.

Many bedsits were very basic and a great number of them were in less than good repair. But the folly of abolishing bedsits as substandard in an era of house sharing demonstrates the futility involved and the harm done by ill-considered legislative intervention.

The landlord described in Enid O’Dowd’s letter is letting four dwellings in one house at below-market rents. The landlord’s hand has essentially been forced and he is now selling up. The house in Rathgar will become a single owner-occupied dwelling.

I am not arguing for the abandonment of basic standards in rented accommodation. On the contrary, we have seen some horrific examples of several bunk beds being crammed into rooms. These are obvious instances of ruthless exploitation of vulnerable and otherwise homeless single workers. But I strongly believe that the response of successive governments (albeit combinations of the same political parties in the main) to the housing crisis has been close to hopeless.

Limiting rents to existing levels and increases by reference to consumer price indices is futile. As the expense of being a regulation-compliant landlord increases, and as the freedom of landlords to realise the value of their original investment is curtailed by ever-increasing rights of tenure for tenants, the result is inevitable. The market becomes more and more dysfunctional. Landlords who preferred to charge below-market rents in exchange for trouble-free lettings to careful tenants are penalised in comparison to those who are in a position to let dwellings for the first time at today’s inflated rent levels.

This simply does not make sense. Nor is it sustainable. With a rapidly increasing population and a sclerotic system of planning and development control under the aegis of the same department that attempts to regulate housing costs and standards, it has become clear that State intervention should focus on increasing supply.

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All the indications are that departmental and governmental initiatives to increase housing supply are faltering. Our planning laws, including the activities of the Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR), act as an impediment to increasing the housing supply. Why, oh why, does any planning regulator need power to dezone housing development land in the present circumstances? What local authority has engaged in harmful over-zoning of housing development land in the last 10 years?

As early as the Housing Act 1966, local councils in their capacity as housing authorities were legally charged with ensuring that the demand for housing was met by their planning strategies, development plans and use of powers of compulsory purchase to provide sites for housing.

In the wake of tribunals investigating planning corruption, the housing department came up with the OPR to police the sector. But when you think of it, the whole planning and development process, including An Coimisún Pleanála, combined with the role of the courts in judicial review, is designed to be preventive rather than enabling.

We need a radical change of direction.