Financially, the obsession has paid off handsomely; the phenomenal growth in house prices has added substantially to our wealth as a nation. Even those who can't hope to own their own home (in the short term) have had a better time of it in recent years.

According to Brian Harvey, a social researcher who last week addressed the Respond! conference on housing in Dublin, the area of social housing has been a good news generator.

"Those good news stories included unprecedented construction rates in private, public and voluntary housing sectors, an improvement in the regulation of private rented accommodation which some of us thought would never happen, fresh resources into services for the homeless, the regeneration of problem estates such as Ballymun and Moyross, a reduction in the numbers of people sleeping rough, and institutional innovations such as the Homeless Agency, " he told the conference. "Anyone contesting these benign outcomes could only be seen to be either a churlish party-pooper or downright foolish."

I wouldn't want to contest those benign outcomes. But I would question how far we've got it right, when it comes to social housing.

We've changed the names. We no longer talk of someone living "in a council house". But there's still a stigma attached to living in a house provided by a local authority.

One remedy is the idea of placing a few "affordable" homes or state-provided residences in among a community of owner-purchased residences. Noel Dempsey gave this idea a major nudge in 2000 when he enabled local authorities to obtain up to 20% of housing developments for social and affordable housing. The pity is that, seven years on, the measure has being diluted and emasculated by vested interests. It's a pity because the thinking behind "affordable" homes is a laudable one. It seeks to reduce social tensions and remove the stigma associated with local authority housing. It came out of the realisation that lumping all the poor together does no favours for them or for society. Yes, in theory, you're providing shelter and putting a roof over the heads of families who would not be able to do it by themselves. But you may also be creating a context for long-term disaster. In the bad old days of ribbon development (the extensive building of houses along the side of a main road), estates were built where nobody went out to work in the morning, and nobody got out of bed before midday. The children in those houses would never see a parent going out to work or a parent coming home from work.

The bottom line is that housing is about a lot more than just shelter. How we house people decides the future. How we house people . . . with the best of intentions . . . can create a difficult future for them and for society at large. Once we physically segregate different income groups, we perpetuate inequality.

Take, for example, a cluster of homes provided by a voluntary housing association or a local authority. Imagine that eight out of 10 of those homes are lived in by a single mother.

She and her child have the dignity of a home of their own. They are surrounded by women and children who share the same experience.

A set of natural supports springs up: you mind my toddlers this Saturday night and I'll babysit for your little son next week.

Fast-forward 15 years, and what looked like a good option when the children were small now looks very different. In that cluster of homes now dwells a large number of teenagers. Why would that be a problem?

Because when you have a large number of adolescent boys without father figures, you have a large number of young men who may pose a problem to their single mothers.

Ghettoes can arise for several reasons.

Sometimes they are the result of thoughtless planning; sometimes they are caused by the simple desire on the part of people to congregate: in the late 19th century, for example, Philadelphia had a number of Gaeltachts, because Irish language speakers clung together in their new home. Historically, however, ghettoes have often been used to segregate and demean communities of a particular religious, racial or ethnic background.

We may agree that ghettoes are bad but few things are that simple. The policy of some local authorities to avoid housing Traveller families in clusters is born of the desire to avoid creating Traveller ghettoes. Except that if you house only two Traveller families in this estate, and two in the next, some Traveller advocates would maintain that you're diluting and possibly annihilating their ethnicity and collective culture.

The 'Respond!' conference asked a blunt question about housing: "Do We Know What We're Doing?" It could be suggested that what we're doing is a form of social engineering . . . unintended, but potent. When children are housed in such a way that they have no role models who go to third-level education or end up with a career, the housing . . . done with the best of intentions . . . may shape attitudes and behaviours so powerfully that generational unemployment is the result. Just as biology can be destiny for women, housing can be destiny for whole communities.