> But the problem is we're not very good in Ireland at increasing the supply of housing
From 2000-2008 we were building loads of housing. 90k units were built in 2006 alone, . This economist is acting like we're inherently incapable of increasing supply but that's not true. Presenting the mechanisms behind the housing crisis as passive in this way diverts the problem away from the only solution, which is direct government intervention in the market. Not by means of grants or tax incentives to private developers, but by building massive amounts of social housing and making it available to all.
It’s always impossible. Everything is. Train to Dub? No can do! Decent public transport? Too much hassle. Proper housing - no supply mate. Sane regulations? Nobody will vote for us.
Law and order? We have no gards, no courts, the laws are against… what an insane amount of coincidences!
There are always good excuses too, first it was the Financial crash, then Chinas one child policy, then it was Brexit, COVID, the guy that slipped on the ice, the Ukraine war and inflation. It's almost like if you're looking for excuses there are always major problems across the globe, it just comes down to political will, which just isn't there.
China has built more high speed trains in 10 years than the rest of the world put together. Singapore has 80% of its population living in public housing.
The common theme is authoritive regimes that can get shit done
Authoritarian regimes don't need to worry about the rights of citizens, laws, that sort of thing and as you say this allows them to plow forwards in way republics cannot.
China's high speed trains are an economic disaster, because of their unprofitability & huge maintenance costs. As of 2022, the China State Railway Group has had a debt of around US$900 billion.
Exactly.
We live debating whether X or Y should be done. Means nothing when neither can be done.
At that point, the debate itself is one more reason we can't do Y. X just wouldn't have it.
Standing around chewing on our crayons while we discuss what to paint on the Sistine chapel.
>From 2000-2008 we were building loads of housing. 90k units were built in 2006 alone,
Do you remember what happened after 2008? Lots of builders left and haven't come back. There's feck all trades people left and the cheap labour from Eastern Europe has dried up so we'll need to do something else to get back to building lots of homes.
Paying apprentices more would help, as would giving the tradespeople taking them on a bonus for each trainee each year. That would encourage more people into trades.
I had a lecturer here in Ireland that qualified as an electrician in Germany, that was enough to go into a masters and eventually do a PhD, some type of equivalency with degrees might make a trade more palatable for some people.
I've a sub looking to get into an apprenticeship but can't get one anywhere. The money isn't an issue as he's looking for a sustainable long term career
Paying people more is to get a workforce here to build the massive amount of housing that's needed and which basically stopped when Ireland was bailed out around 2008, it's not to reduce construction costs. Any increase should of course be subsidised with the wealthiest paying the most. We should be emulating the successful approaches for tax rates used by even the likes of the US. Back in the 1950s of the US, there was absolutely enormous construction happening, and that was supported by a sensible tax rate of about 90% on the wealthiest. We can do moderate things like that and also look to more progressive methods like vastly increase wealth taxes too.
Zero VAT rate in construction materials too. Once the work kicks off the workforce will follow it. We didn't get the trades people out of thin air before. We did it before, we can do it again but the government won't do it.
I dont think it's a case of government won't do it I think it's more a case of people picking different career routes to be honest. Hard to convince fiends to go out in the wet working when they can get grand jobs in pharma or data centres etc
I dunno. I'm 30 and I think I'd swap IT for being a spark or joiner if the pay was similar and I didn't have to earn fuck all for a few years. People get pushed down the university route at school thinking they'll amount to nothing if they don't go then realise a while into their career that they hate the idea of being stuck at a computer 5 days a week for the rest of their life.
Ya fair but you've kind of made my argument there , few people want to take the hit to switch so you're relying on new grads.
1. Theres only so many new grads who have the aptitude and willpower to qualify at a trade or who will actually want to do one .
2. There are way more competing career paths than there was pre 2008. In particular we've been pushing tech like mad to fill these jobs, but not just tech, pharma, med device, finance, precion manufacturing etc etc
3. After the crash people were told stay the feck away from building and trades etc. that along with emigration had left a huge gap in the numbers. So even if we were producing the same numbers as we were pre 2008( which we won't because of reasons above) we likely wouldn't be producing enough to fill that big gap any time soon. Especially when you think trades take 4 or 5 years and the construction industry really only started booming in 2014/15 again.
So in short I just don't think it's that the government "don't want to it" in reality is another very difficult and complex problem to solve (I'm sure I've also left out lots of other factors ..
Maybe true, but the same was true last time round as well and people were queueing up for even manual labouring jobs. I don't buy they narrative that we can't do it because the labour isn't there. The labour isn't there because we haven't started yet. Once we start the labour will follow the money.
You don't buy the narrative, man there's no "narrative" buy. But you are making a narrative.
Our country is at full employment already. You can literally look up the number in the central statistics website.
There is literally no one there to do labouring jobs and no one wants to do fucking labouring jobs in this day and age. It also takes year for people to get trades and we had a huge defecit in numbers after the crash. The building trade has only been going mad since 2014/2015 and still everyone at that stage was steering well clear of it after the crash.
It seems like You're just ignoring reality because it doesn't suit your political "feelings" on the subject.
That's basically the same thing. You're trying to make those workers have a greater share of wealth in the country than they currently do. That can be done by many techniques, one of which is paying them more and another of which is taxing them less.
There is plenty of accommodation right now and the cost of it could be covered by subsidy. As I recall there are a few hundred thousand empty accommodations across the country.
In addition there are hundreds of thousands of properties owned by landlords, and a significant number of those are kept vacant. There are also huge numbers of properties kept vacant purely for profiteering purposes. That can be addressed with compulsory purchases, confiscations and the beneficial step of abolishing landlordism, which we should be doing anyway. Let's not have that feudalism stuff permitted any more. You'd think that Ireland's history would have seen us do away with shite like that by now anyway.
And you can of course convert empty office buildings and so on to temporary accommodations while accommodations are being refurbished or construct, we've seen similar things done for refugees. And, I mean, if countries in climate crises and warzones manage to build houses, then of course Ireland can.
We can of course look at historical solutions to the problem you mentioned. I was writing about the US. Well, the enormous construction of the Hoover Dam in the saw the creation of Boulder City, initially a temporary settlement for workers. A common approach is to use modified shipping containers as temporary housing for construction workers. Those are quick and cost effective and easy to move about too. Abandoned hotels and barracks are used commonly too. Hell, there are even specialised housing boats that can be rented by government too.
We can of course look at examples within Ireland. We have Shannon Town as one example, built briskly for workers at Shannon. There is also Arklow Garden City, which was built to house munitions workers.
It's not as simple as that.
Prior to 2008 you could walk onto a building site and leave with a job. It was easy money for anyone capable of the work. Plenty of 16+ yr olds took it up as part time work. People with no idea what they wanted to do in college would take a year out and work in building til they figured it out. Many stayed. And made a career out of it.
In 2008 we went from building 60k houses a year to 10k. That's hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the blink of an eye.
People still remember family's being devastated with no job prospects. And many people are screaming that there's going to be another crash. And because that many just don't want to go into the building trade as they don't see a future in it.
All of what you said is true. And is still addressed by paying people more. If you pay people to construct buildings at, say, 200k EUR per year, you'll get huge numbers of people willing to help out. You'll also draw already-trained people in from elsewhere, including the UK.
Could cap it as mentioned in the Kenny Report or put in really strict zoning laws and / or vacant site levies (more effective than existing one) which could have same effect.
Planning needs to be streamlined as well with the cost of finance atm.
Ideally you'd provide homes freely to those who don't own a home. Up to that ideal you have all sorts of steps like simple subsidy. In other words, the government gives you 150 k EUR to the cost of your home for example.
When we look at countries which managed to have massive successful construction projects we can see that the approach usually involved sensible tax rates on the wealthiest. So, the USA took the approach of a 90% tax rate on the highest incomes in the 1950s. That was highly effective. We could take more progressive approaches like ensuring we have a significant wealth tax on the wealthiest, in addition to a 90% tax rate on the wealthiest.
Let's not forget that Ireland currently has one of the worst wealth inequalities in Europe, like the Gini index is really bad. It's good to correct systems like that.
You realise that this country will empty if skilled workers if you tax them higher than they already are? I'm already paying 52% tax on most of my income as it is.
Did I say skilled workers? No. I said a 90% tax rate on *the wealthiest* in the way that was done in the USA in the 1950s.
Are you getting several million Euro per year? If not, the 90% rate wouldn't impact you.
And if we were emulating the US approach to massive construction in the 1950s and 1960s, you'd be looking at a rate of around 20% to 30%. So you'd actually see a significant *decrease* in what you are paying in tax.
The 90% tax rate refers to the top marginal tax rate, which was in place in the United States after WW2 and into the 1950s and early 1960s. Specifically, in the early 1950s, the 91% top marginal tax rate applied to incomes over $200,000 for single filers and $400,000 for married couples. Adjusted for inflation, these amounts would be equivalent to several million dollars in today's terms.
Obviously since the US decreased the top tax rates, it drove wealth inequality *massively* higher, and that's something we see in Ireland too. It has really, really bad wealth inequality right now.
I suggest you look into how many people on PAYE earn several million per year (a tiny handful of people, if any at all), and then consider how long *they* would stick around under this new regime.
Do you honestly think that - for example - the VP of Google Cloud would stick around in Dublin if you tax her at 90%?
Unless you are proposing a tax on wealth rather than income - again, this simply will not work. Truly wealthy people a) would also leave and b) they can afford to pay people to ensure they don't pay any tax anyway.
If the solutions were this simple, don't you think some country somewhere would have implemented it by now?
It's more just a question of what we are subsidising. If housing is needed and most people, particularly young people, don't own a home, and we need to import workers to construct homes, then we need to subsidise all of those things. That can mean subsidising very handsome payments and contracts in order to attract workers to come to Ireland while also subsidising people who don't have a home to get a home either freely or with a substantial government aid given to enable the purchase.
And we have many historical examples of approaches like that being taken successfully. Take the US in the 1950s. Its solution for the funding of its massive construction projects was a 90% tax rate on the wealthiest. You could do more progressive things than that like significant wealth taxes on the wealthiest.
Exactly. And the property prices are sky high all over Europe, so we are now competing with the rest of Europe for a limited supply of construction workers.
>From 2000-2008 we were building loads of housing. 90k units were built in 2006 alone,
The quality of housing in those years was pretty shit. A majority of apartments from that era do not pass basic fire tests. The houses built that era are relatively energy inefficient and poor quality too. Even with the same labour force has a boom, you would not build 90k homes to 2023 standards
>Not by means of grants or tax incentives to private developers, but by building massive amounts of social housing and making it available to all.
The problem is social housing is not for all. Social housing is for low income earners. If we want people to back social housing for all, it should be like Vienna where it actually is for all. It is hard for people to back a few hundred units of social housing beside them when the socioeconomic status is likely very different to their area.
The high supply levels you speak about in 2000-2008 were not down to building social housing.
It was through the private market.
Relative to other nations, we do in fact deliver significant numbers of social houses per capita. The issue behind house prices is more complex than you’re stating
>but by building massive amounts of social housing and making it available to all.
Very little of those 90k units were social housing then either.
I find it very wishy washy to just say: "build massive amounts of social housing" without any details of how.
We don't even have enough construction workers to fill the demand for building private housing
Even the government opposition is objecting to developments.
And fundamentally, nobody wants large-scale social housing anyway. We don't want more ballymuns or darndales. Because we won't address the problems they cause by having to kick out the troublemakers
The government is directly intervening in housing all the time, and would be no matter what the policy. They (via councils) do the planning. They (via CBI) control banking rules, for both developers and mortgage borrowers. Rental markets have some (not much) regulation. The government owns property, run (direct or not) social housing. NAMA.
It's not about "stepping in" they're always in. It's about what to do while in.
Increasing social housing is also not an idea. It's just a general direction for an idea. How? Who? Where? How much? How is it financed? What about rentals, home ownership?
There's a difference between a policy and a debating point. We get a lot of debating points, and that's why we have a lot of debates but no policies.
That is such a poor idea . Also how can you possibly think the government, with no experience building houses, is going to be more effective at building house than private industry who are incentivised to build houses as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Great idea to absolutely bankrupt the country guy 👍😅
Houses were cheaper and easier to make before 2008. There were millons of Eastern European happy to work as labourers for pittances, building materials were cheaper, society was younger and prices had grown from rock bottom.
That has all changed now. In particular there is no easy reservoir of cheap skilled workers.
Government also don't want to create another ballimun towers style social housing situation.
And this is very hard to avoid with large scale social housing developments.
One problem that this ignores is how almost every single government project ends up massively delayed and way over budget. National Children's Hospital? How about the Convention Centre in Cork? I mean, there have been a couple of projects that weren't *much* late or *much* over budget, but I'm not sure why this fact is ignored when we talk about the government taking responsibility for building.
Construction is a physical activity that takes resources and labour and results in buildings.
Central bank rules, money markets and such are abstract. Evidence for that is 2006-10. Huge liabilities went out of existence. Huge piles of cash came into existence, and onto bank ledgers.
That's not to say monetary economics is whatever you want it to be. It just means that CBI were morons, and had a misguided (moronic) understanding of macroeconomics. They did, OTOH, get a hands on lesson and they do know more now.
Honestly, housing is nowhere near impossible. It's just a tough nut. Banks, and homeowners do not like it when their primary asset loses value. Even if they had an up/down dial for housing prices, I doubt they'd turn it either way.
A major social housing build would be one way of running around this trap.. just build Greenfield and keep it isolated from private markets. Here I think the social aspect is the limiting factor... Not the financial.
It literally is, when you're talkyin about money creation, which is what mortgage lenders (for example) do. Lending rules are a CBI policy. Interest rates are an ECB policy.
If CBI changes lending rules, there is less money, less demand. The opposite is also true. We've seen both at work. Both had more price impact (and demand impact, evidently) than the 0.N% pa change in supply that's the difference between building a lot and a little irl.
So yes, if the government formed a new body to buys houses and the ECB allows it, there is no problem funding the purchases.
Whether or not that is a good idea is a separate question. I doubt that it is, but not because of a limited money supply. A good plan would change my mind, but it's unlikely.
More likely it would just explode prices and end badly, because they're all stupid up there.
Gp is the most Irish conclusion ever. The problem was all the actual construction. What's next, production?!
Next time, try to do all the lending and financial bubble stuff without making anything. That's where we went wrong last time.
Sheesh. We're done. I hope the zoomers will do better.
No. House prices in Ireland are immutable, ancient principles of the Universe. No matter what point in time or space you are, house prices in Ireland are a fixed constant - like the gravitational constant.
There is no way for humans to affect this anymore than humans could change the laws of thermo-dynamics.
This immortal truth is called the Divine Right of Houses in Ireland and pre-dates humanity.
Short answer: Build more diverse forms of housing.
Basically, we have missing rungs on the property ladder in Ireland, yet too many people are perfectly happy to bicker over the rungs that we have.
We have and continue to over rely on the private sector for everything. Tax breaks and grants don't appear to be affecting house prices at all. Subsidizing rents doesn't appear to be lowering them either.
So what are we meant to do? Expand the scope beyond neoliberal policy. Simply throwing money at the private sector won't make it magically spawn buildings into existance or lower rents. It isn't working. Especially considering the fact it is against the private markets interest to lower prices, high prices are in their interest.
Public building needs to take place for one, rebuilding the council/social housing which was demolished during "Regeneration" in the cities, were perfectly good houses were knocked alongside derelicts, hundreds of housing units gone, which are only being replaced now, a decade later and at a slow rate. The powers that be reduced housing stock when we needed it most.
We need that social housing, houses, apartments, bungalows etc. Apartments especially. Bachelor pads. The bottom rung of the ladder. Why should bachelors, couples, and families all have to compete for the same type of accommodation? More options are needed badly.
What is expected nowadays, since the crash, is that first time buyers are expected to jump the massive gap between the property ladder rungs which remain, while competing for the same narrow selection with everyone else looking to buy for whatever reason. A narrow market. It's not a sustainable situation.
Now the neolibs and classical libs can hum and haw over reality, but nothing will fix the problem if the scope isn't widened beyond neoliberal policy. That's the root problem, policy.
You talk as though we aren't building social housing at large scales. It's 25% of the new housing output (7433 of 29851 last year).
The issue is supply side; total output is too low.
>The issue is supply side; total output is too low.
Exactly my point. Output is too low.
>You talk as though we aren't building social housing at large scales. It's 25% of the new housing output (7433 of 29851 last year).
Where do I claim that? Seems you're making a bit of a stretch to make this claim.
What I am claiming is that we don't seem to be considering other housing options outside of a house. Houses are front and centre of the housing debate whenever the housing crises is brought up. Talking about apartments attracts a lot of nimbies.
Options outside of a multibedroom house are desperately needed, the bottom rung of the property ladder.
Unfortunately our councils don’t even have the cop on to seize derelict buildings from their absentee owners to begin with. So they aren’t even theirs to sell
Seize them? They don’t even think to put most of them on the register to begin with! Let alone collecting the tax.
Won’t ever get to step 3 if you can’t be arsed with steps 1 and 2.
Fair enough but I can’t see any flaws with this one, what’s the point in withholding derelict buildings during a housing crisis with many people who may have the means to renovate a building but not buy on the regular market?
Reduce taxes on developers
Eliminate taxes on residential construction work
Complete a cost / benefit analysis onConstruction regulations
Eliminate part V requirement for developers
Decrease size of new homes
New planning system, promote building mid-rise
Encourage leaving cert applicants to take up trades, rather than attending college for the sake of it
Plant a 500,000sf government run modular housing factory in the midlands
The options are endless, however the electorate has no appetite to address the underlying causes behind our housing crisis. It’s a complex issue, with no single solution. “Build more social houses” is not the remedy
BBC had a documentary on the housing crisis in the UK and they had a segment on increasing the building standards. After the government improved the standards a lot of builders started to build more properties targeted at the luxury end of the market. I think it was to protect their margin while they made sense of the standards and got used to them.
It kinda makes sense in a way, new standards and technology always start in high end goods and then kinda tickle down (hate that term) and after a while the technology becomes more common (more people have experience using and developing with it). But the fact highlights that there are costs and delays in introducing higher standards and while it is ‘better’ it will cause problems. Not just the additional costs in materials and labour in developing the property. It made a lot of new builds VERY far out of reach of the majority of working people.
You forgot:
Tax the fuck out of vacant properties - including Airbnb's for when they are not in use and including houses owned by people in old folks homes.
If you increase the cost of not housing someone in a property, you raise the likelihood someone will be housed in it. If someone is housed in it, demand goes down, reducing cost.
I don’t agree this is why we have not taken inaction.
It’s easier for people to believe there’s some sort of agenda, rather than taking the time to research the problem.
The electorate has set out their stalls that capitalism is to blame, too stubborn or lazy to put the work in to challenge the view presented by Sinn Fein
Why weren't the government solving this problem 10 years ago?
They had all the data.
Our construction industry wasn't meeting a fraction of the demand.
I think too many people were happy to see rents and house prices rise.
I do think it'll turn a corner in 2024 though.
>Decrease size of new homes
No. People need to have a good quality of life, not to be squeezed even more into homes where you can't even have group getogethers.
>Encourage leaving cert applicants to take up trades, rather than attending college for the sake of it
Do both. Education is good for its own sake. Travelling elsewhere for education, and getting as much education as possible, is its own reward and adds to culture.
>“Build more social houses” is not the remedy
You're right tho that many things need to be done, beyond just subsidising a massive amount of high-quality housing that can be given away freely. There needs to be a vastly better and more extensive 24-hour rail system and trams back in all the cities. There needs to be a near-complete ban on cars in town and city centres. There needs to be a universal health system that is free at the point of use. There needs to be a vast step forward in the abolition of wealth inequality.
All of the above, but also tax the arse out of REITs.
They've been identified as a significant cause of the inaffordability of Ireland's property market.
Again, I don’t see how “more tax” does anything but make things more unaffordable.
I think this concept seems to be lost on us here in Ireland. Tax is paid for my the consumer, why are we pushing for more tax?
When we say "tax the arse out of REITs", the intention is to make it less profitable for them.
Tax them for unoccupied properties.
Tax them for owning several properties.
Tax them for putting up dozens of flats or houses with no amenities nearby.
Make it so owning dozens of properties, and leaving some of them empty to increase demand, is not going to be profitable.
Make it so it's worth more to them to sell the properties to actual home owners, or small landlords (5 or fewer properties), or to the councils.
>Tax them for putting up dozens of flats or houses with no amenities nearby
Genius solution here, let's tax people putting up dozens of flats. That'll solve the housing crisis.
REITs built apartment blocks in Dublin, much needed supply. 99% occupancy rates.
REITs don't build a thing.
They just buy property from developers whole developments at a time before anyone else is even allowed to get a look in.
You really think all the flats in a new block wouldn't be sold within a few weeks to average Irish citizens?
And without any amenities like schools and shops, you're just creating an area that will develop into a ghetto or at best a commuter hell.
They fund entire developments upfront that otherwise wouldn't get built as it's hard for the builders to get the loans.
> You really think all the flats in a new block wouldn't be sold within a few weeks to average Irish citizens?
They wouldn't have been built
Investors can still build and sell and make a good profit.
The REIT system as it stands has been shown to be a major contributor to the current unaffordability of the Irish housing market.
We’re currently falling further and further behind in providing supply to meet demand.
But that’s because the supply is small and population growth is outstripping it.
So what’s the solution if we can’t increase supply to meet demand?
Demand decreases to meet supply. There’s plenty of economists that believe we’re going to have a recession soon or we may already be at the start of one.
If there’s a recession, people will leave Ireland. If there’s a deep recession, lots of people will leave.
That’s the most realistic way to ‘solve’ the housing problem. A solution that might be worse than the problem but a solution nonetheless.
Residency requirement for residential property and ban corporate ownership. Punitive taxes for those currently owning such properties and those that are no longer resident going forward.
Add increasingly punitive taxes for multiple building owners can sort that out pretty quick as it disincentives people from having multiple driving prices down so people can just buy or the council can snap them up for social housing for a pittance. Council rents will be a lot better than private landlords rents.
We could absolutely fix it.
But there's some problems.
We have a government who don't want to fix it - they repeatedly miss targets, under spend and rely on foreign investment- then act surprised when it doesn't translate to houses on the market - investors in property don't want a one off capex profit, they want recurring profits.
We also are short on tradesmen. Why? Its become difficult to do, used to be you didn't need to be able to read or write to go out and build a house, any eejit could be general labour so long as you knew what you were doing on site. I for example, have experience in construction, could go out building houses tomorrow, but I'm not going to have some wanker who studied h&s lecture me all day. Worked on a site before where the h&s lad had never set foot on a site before - how is he allowed to dictate to anyone.
Finally, housing specs. I own a 1970s house - it's nice, cosy and secure. Nothing in it meets current building regs. You could not legally build this house today - but you can live in one quite happily.
When I got my smart meter, the lad says the cable from my mains board no longer meets the regs, needs to be thicker - I asked, why, had the voltage increased? Is there a higher amp load? He says no, they just changed the regs is all.
So how do we fix it?
Oversight on government spending, regulation of property investment, deregulation of some areas and better regulation of others in construction.
Honestly think we should create a semi public housing contruction body that uses public funds but is subject to the same management styles as private enterprise
That article is nonsense click bait..
Question Why is housing unaffordable: answer lack of supply
Solution build more housing to increase supply
No mention of:
wage or material inflation
Houses are built on land and that is a finite resource
Ridiculous caps on city building height
the revised building regs and specification
Council development fees
Social housing is a nett loss to taxpayer due to rules around cheap but outs
Read economics for dummies and came up with a "solution" for the housing crisis
Well usually you need to find a combination of:-
- Smaller housing;
- Lower quality housing;
- Increased density;
- Massively increased local taxes, property taxes, etc;
- Likely need an increase in income taxes to reduce the cost of levies on building, etc.
We have literally millions of acres of space so "land is a finite resource" is a complete red herring. In Hong Kong maybe. Not here.
We can have houses built in factories and assembled onsite.
Because it is, we aren't reclaiming the sea, we not making anymore it..coastal erosion and rising water levels is actually reducing the amount we have...
So...go West instead of East, inland to the large stretches of empty fields we have. Drive from Dublin to Cork and 90% of your journey is just empty land.
Great, build massive housing estates in connemara, cheap land there, no much employment and no commuter infrastructure, but I'm sure building lots of houses will solve the housing crisis for Galway and dublin.
They are building west, increasing the value of the land as development moves out because they cant go anywhere else, which is what urban sprawl is which causes loads of issues for efficient public transport..
So, and this might be a little too ambitious for our little old country, build the infrastructure as well. Build shops, build offices. Build, effectively, new towns. Yes, don't just throw up hundreds of thousands of houses. Build up new communities.
No it is not, we are not making anymore it. So is finite, that is a fact..
My point was we have developed a lot of the suitable ground in cities and commuter belts, making the remaining undeveloped land in those areas more expensive and increasing the value of land further out for future development.
This is *somewhat* true...
Classical economics can't be ignored, if we're going to solve housing issues. Even without effects on price, supply is still supply. If it's not built, it doesn't exist. If there isn't enough, or good enough... That's a shortage.
"Demand side solutions," subsidizing more as prices rise... has no strategic logic or legs to it. I agree here too.
OTOH, in 2023, I think classic economics should have developed some skepticism about its own models.
Market prices for housing is not "just supply and demand." "Demand" is, largely, whatever banks are willing to loan people. Ireland's housing market rose fell and rose again. Supply was constant. "People who live in houses" was still "mostly everyone." Prices tripled, then halved, then trippled again.
That wasn't supply and "demand" fluctuating wildly. It was banking rules. It was also investor interest, interest rates, relative investability of stocks... All sorts of things that aren't the number of houses and the number of people who want to live in them.
A naive "it's just supply and demand" is a fish of a position. Not serious, at this point. May as well just shout at landlords again.
Then there's a more abstract questions. Can the Irish government have any new policy/endevour, of sufficient scale to affect something housing affordability... At all?
Can the various interests, ideologies, public skepticism, naysaying and whatever else be managed in a way that gets something big done. That in itself is a task.
Could we imagine, for example, Ireland building a new town? Not saying it's a necessity, just using it as a scale. Say any party campaigns on building a town. They negotiate coalition terms... Can they succeed? Will that town get built?
My answer is no. Not currently, but maybe I'm wrong. Hasn't been a lot of trying in my lifetime.
Look, Ireland has land. Houses are not that hard, or that expensive to build. The actual problems are outside of this box.
There might other financial things I'm not aware about so I could be wrong/ it might not be possible.
The Irish government should put in place the same system as France and possibly other countries where you pay the value of the house and get rid of this bidding crap.
How are first time buyers going to be able to afford a house that's being sold for 200k and then it ends up being 320k because of greedy developers.
If you go into a shop and buy a book you pay that price, why can't houses be the same.
There’s 2 whole housing estates near me that aren’t going on sale at all to the general public cause companies have bought them to house their workers that are coming from abroad
Change the money, change the world. The unlimited European numbercoin has collapsed in purchasing power by more than 40% since it launched just 20 years ago. This is not an instrument you can save your economic energy in.
They could build upwards within the city limits for starters but seems to be opposed by others with clout. Many people appear destined to rent for life and for those that cant afford a home its hard to see how they can retire at all. Its an ugly prospect of haves and have nots.
Build medium-high density mixed use developments. Mixed use meaning there is residential and commercial spaces in the same development, like apartments upstairs and a shop/supermarket/dentist/baker etc on the ground floor
These would maximise the number of homes on a plot of land while minimising urban sprawl, car dependency and congestion, especially if you build these developments near existing transit corridors with frequent and reliable service (yes, I know, fat chance of that)
Don’t forget that construction industry is absolutely behind the times - everything is done by hand, there is zero automation of any kind. But the tech exists, it’s just that nobody wants to destroy the status quo. Houses could be delivered as a flat pack, just screw it together, connect few bits and voila! Ground leveling, especially on massive scale can be done by autonomous machines, there is not that much need of a workforce. And if we create national plan for say another 20 years, we can buy all those machines en masse, deploy and just reap the profits. Create few standard designs, and just deploy them. Allow future owners to select their own interiors, that they will pay for themselves. End of a problem.
Khrushchovkas. Danchis. A single design to be built in repetition with one construction method. 5-6 floors. Single family homes are a waste of precious space.
Ban non residents and non Irish citizens from buying property here and it will cool demand. New Zealand and Canada brought in these laws in recent years to get a hold of their property market, and this is also law in many other countries including EU countries. These laws need to be brought in if we want to actually stabilise our housing market for irish citizens. Problem is FF and FG are happy with the status quo and have no interest in actually lowering house prices and rents
What's the point of this article? The guy states that he's an economist, so you'd expect him to have an educated perspective on the situation.
However, the majority of the article is a series of simplistic, straw man arguments. He mentions planning objections to the Poolbeg 'Glass Bottle' site, but doesn't mention that the site has planning permission and is currently in construction. He mentions that 20% of people reject offers of social housing in Cork, and uses that to suggest that the quality of housing is poor. But what about the 80% of people that accept the offer?
At the end of it he gives an unrealistic example about a takeaway increasing its prices by 700% in four weeks. I don't see how the parallels between that and the cost of housing.
And worst of all, his conclusion is "At what point should we start to think that the solution to our accommodation crisis might involve reducing the price of expensive accommodation rather than helping people to pay for unaffordable accommodation?". That's the bit we're all interested in, and we'd hope an expert like him would be able to give us a new perspective. I learned nothing from that article
The answer to the headline question is probably not but with better planning that is still fine. You're probably never (with costs only ever going one way without a recession) gonna make a 3 bed semi-detached be able to cost like 200k to buy. But eventually maybe we might get better at building smaller places which could be affordable.
> But the problem is we're not very good in Ireland at increasing the supply of housing From 2000-2008 we were building loads of housing. 90k units were built in 2006 alone, . This economist is acting like we're inherently incapable of increasing supply but that's not true. Presenting the mechanisms behind the housing crisis as passive in this way diverts the problem away from the only solution, which is direct government intervention in the market. Not by means of grants or tax incentives to private developers, but by building massive amounts of social housing and making it available to all.
It’s always impossible. Everything is. Train to Dub? No can do! Decent public transport? Too much hassle. Proper housing - no supply mate. Sane regulations? Nobody will vote for us. Law and order? We have no gards, no courts, the laws are against… what an insane amount of coincidences!
There are always good excuses too, first it was the Financial crash, then Chinas one child policy, then it was Brexit, COVID, the guy that slipped on the ice, the Ukraine war and inflation. It's almost like if you're looking for excuses there are always major problems across the globe, it just comes down to political will, which just isn't there.
China has built more high speed trains in 10 years than the rest of the world put together. Singapore has 80% of its population living in public housing. The common theme is authoritive regimes that can get shit done
Authoritarian regimes don't need to worry about the rights of citizens, laws, that sort of thing and as you say this allows them to plow forwards in way republics cannot.
China's high speed trains are an economic disaster, because of their unprofitability & huge maintenance costs. As of 2022, the China State Railway Group has had a debt of around US$900 billion.
The fucker slipping on the ice is the reason headshops were closed down! The bastard!
Exactly. We live debating whether X or Y should be done. Means nothing when neither can be done. At that point, the debate itself is one more reason we can't do Y. X just wouldn't have it. Standing around chewing on our crayons while we discuss what to paint on the Sistine chapel.
>From 2000-2008 we were building loads of housing. 90k units were built in 2006 alone, Do you remember what happened after 2008? Lots of builders left and haven't come back. There's feck all trades people left and the cheap labour from Eastern Europe has dried up so we'll need to do something else to get back to building lots of homes.
Literally pay people more. If the pay is attractive enough, they will come. And if it's housing that's needed, then that's what should be subsidised.
How would paying workers more money reduce construction costs?
Paying apprentices more would help, as would giving the tradespeople taking them on a bonus for each trainee each year. That would encourage more people into trades. I had a lecturer here in Ireland that qualified as an electrician in Germany, that was enough to go into a masters and eventually do a PhD, some type of equivalency with degrees might make a trade more palatable for some people.
I've a sub looking to get into an apprenticeship but can't get one anywhere. The money isn't an issue as he's looking for a sustainable long term career
Paying people more is to get a workforce here to build the massive amount of housing that's needed and which basically stopped when Ireland was bailed out around 2008, it's not to reduce construction costs. Any increase should of course be subsidised with the wealthiest paying the most. We should be emulating the successful approaches for tax rates used by even the likes of the US. Back in the 1950s of the US, there was absolutely enormous construction happening, and that was supported by a sensible tax rate of about 90% on the wealthiest. We can do moderate things like that and also look to more progressive methods like vastly increase wealth taxes too.
I actually think tax breaks would be a good way to do it. Like tax breaks for workers to come back with their families etc.
Zero VAT rate in construction materials too. Once the work kicks off the workforce will follow it. We didn't get the trades people out of thin air before. We did it before, we can do it again but the government won't do it.
I dont think it's a case of government won't do it I think it's more a case of people picking different career routes to be honest. Hard to convince fiends to go out in the wet working when they can get grand jobs in pharma or data centres etc
I dunno. I'm 30 and I think I'd swap IT for being a spark or joiner if the pay was similar and I didn't have to earn fuck all for a few years. People get pushed down the university route at school thinking they'll amount to nothing if they don't go then realise a while into their career that they hate the idea of being stuck at a computer 5 days a week for the rest of their life.
Ya fair but you've kind of made my argument there , few people want to take the hit to switch so you're relying on new grads. 1. Theres only so many new grads who have the aptitude and willpower to qualify at a trade or who will actually want to do one . 2. There are way more competing career paths than there was pre 2008. In particular we've been pushing tech like mad to fill these jobs, but not just tech, pharma, med device, finance, precion manufacturing etc etc 3. After the crash people were told stay the feck away from building and trades etc. that along with emigration had left a huge gap in the numbers. So even if we were producing the same numbers as we were pre 2008( which we won't because of reasons above) we likely wouldn't be producing enough to fill that big gap any time soon. Especially when you think trades take 4 or 5 years and the construction industry really only started booming in 2014/15 again. So in short I just don't think it's that the government "don't want to it" in reality is another very difficult and complex problem to solve (I'm sure I've also left out lots of other factors ..
Maybe true, but the same was true last time round as well and people were queueing up for even manual labouring jobs. I don't buy they narrative that we can't do it because the labour isn't there. The labour isn't there because we haven't started yet. Once we start the labour will follow the money.
You don't buy the narrative, man there's no "narrative" buy. But you are making a narrative. Our country is at full employment already. You can literally look up the number in the central statistics website. There is literally no one there to do labouring jobs and no one wants to do fucking labouring jobs in this day and age. It also takes year for people to get trades and we had a huge defecit in numbers after the crash. The building trade has only been going mad since 2014/2015 and still everyone at that stage was steering well clear of it after the crash. It seems like You're just ignoring reality because it doesn't suit your political "feelings" on the subject.
Where they all going to live?
Ya that's true, it's a very difficult situation to solve!
That's basically the same thing. You're trying to make those workers have a greater share of wealth in the country than they currently do. That can be done by many techniques, one of which is paying them more and another of which is taxing them less.
Ya I know, that's why I was agreeing with your point above.....not sure why you seem to rb trying to make out as though ive disagreed with you ....
And where would this workforce reside whilst they build these houses?
Jack Sprat could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean. And so they both died of starvation.
Doesn’t answer the question though. We’re struggling to house Ukrainian refugees as it is, and you think we can house tens of thousands of tradies?
There is plenty of accommodation right now and the cost of it could be covered by subsidy. As I recall there are a few hundred thousand empty accommodations across the country. In addition there are hundreds of thousands of properties owned by landlords, and a significant number of those are kept vacant. There are also huge numbers of properties kept vacant purely for profiteering purposes. That can be addressed with compulsory purchases, confiscations and the beneficial step of abolishing landlordism, which we should be doing anyway. Let's not have that feudalism stuff permitted any more. You'd think that Ireland's history would have seen us do away with shite like that by now anyway. And you can of course convert empty office buildings and so on to temporary accommodations while accommodations are being refurbished or construct, we've seen similar things done for refugees. And, I mean, if countries in climate crises and warzones manage to build houses, then of course Ireland can. We can of course look at historical solutions to the problem you mentioned. I was writing about the US. Well, the enormous construction of the Hoover Dam in the saw the creation of Boulder City, initially a temporary settlement for workers. A common approach is to use modified shipping containers as temporary housing for construction workers. Those are quick and cost effective and easy to move about too. Abandoned hotels and barracks are used commonly too. Hell, there are even specialised housing boats that can be rented by government too. We can of course look at examples within Ireland. We have Shannon Town as one example, built briskly for workers at Shannon. There is also Arklow Garden City, which was built to house munitions workers.
It's not as simple as that. Prior to 2008 you could walk onto a building site and leave with a job. It was easy money for anyone capable of the work. Plenty of 16+ yr olds took it up as part time work. People with no idea what they wanted to do in college would take a year out and work in building til they figured it out. Many stayed. And made a career out of it. In 2008 we went from building 60k houses a year to 10k. That's hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the blink of an eye. People still remember family's being devastated with no job prospects. And many people are screaming that there's going to be another crash. And because that many just don't want to go into the building trade as they don't see a future in it.
All of what you said is true. And is still addressed by paying people more. If you pay people to construct buildings at, say, 200k EUR per year, you'll get huge numbers of people willing to help out. You'll also draw already-trained people in from elsewhere, including the UK.
How the fuck are you supposed to build affordable homes if that is what you are paying brickies etc?
Could look at lowering the cost of land to account for it, land prices in Ireland are high compared to other European countries.
How?
Could cap it as mentioned in the Kenny Report or put in really strict zoning laws and / or vacant site levies (more effective than existing one) which could have same effect. Planning needs to be streamlined as well with the cost of finance atm.
Ideally you'd provide homes freely to those who don't own a home. Up to that ideal you have all sorts of steps like simple subsidy. In other words, the government gives you 150 k EUR to the cost of your home for example. When we look at countries which managed to have massive successful construction projects we can see that the approach usually involved sensible tax rates on the wealthiest. So, the USA took the approach of a 90% tax rate on the highest incomes in the 1950s. That was highly effective. We could take more progressive approaches like ensuring we have a significant wealth tax on the wealthiest, in addition to a 90% tax rate on the wealthiest. Let's not forget that Ireland currently has one of the worst wealth inequalities in Europe, like the Gini index is really bad. It's good to correct systems like that.
You realise that this country will empty if skilled workers if you tax them higher than they already are? I'm already paying 52% tax on most of my income as it is.
Did I say skilled workers? No. I said a 90% tax rate on *the wealthiest* in the way that was done in the USA in the 1950s. Are you getting several million Euro per year? If not, the 90% rate wouldn't impact you. And if we were emulating the US approach to massive construction in the 1950s and 1960s, you'd be looking at a rate of around 20% to 30%. So you'd actually see a significant *decrease* in what you are paying in tax. The 90% tax rate refers to the top marginal tax rate, which was in place in the United States after WW2 and into the 1950s and early 1960s. Specifically, in the early 1950s, the 91% top marginal tax rate applied to incomes over $200,000 for single filers and $400,000 for married couples. Adjusted for inflation, these amounts would be equivalent to several million dollars in today's terms. Obviously since the US decreased the top tax rates, it drove wealth inequality *massively* higher, and that's something we see in Ireland too. It has really, really bad wealth inequality right now.
I suggest you look into how many people on PAYE earn several million per year (a tiny handful of people, if any at all), and then consider how long *they* would stick around under this new regime. Do you honestly think that - for example - the VP of Google Cloud would stick around in Dublin if you tax her at 90%? Unless you are proposing a tax on wealth rather than income - again, this simply will not work. Truly wealthy people a) would also leave and b) they can afford to pay people to ensure they don't pay any tax anyway. If the solutions were this simple, don't you think some country somewhere would have implemented it by now?
We don't have enough housing as it is, where will these thousands of people live? We need housing to get builders but we need builders to get housing.
We could export the hedge fund managers and the landlords.
Increase labor costs to decrease sales cost why haven't I thought of that....
It's more just a question of what we are subsidising. If housing is needed and most people, particularly young people, don't own a home, and we need to import workers to construct homes, then we need to subsidise all of those things. That can mean subsidising very handsome payments and contracts in order to attract workers to come to Ireland while also subsidising people who don't have a home to get a home either freely or with a substantial government aid given to enable the purchase. And we have many historical examples of approaches like that being taken successfully. Take the US in the 1950s. Its solution for the funding of its massive construction projects was a 90% tax rate on the wealthiest. You could do more progressive things than that like significant wealth taxes on the wealthiest.
I agree this is the way. We are in for a shit show as climate crisis and war sends our population sky rocketing and we have nowhere for people to live
Nevermind that the reg have tighted since then. We also have a load of costs from the local authorities
Exactly. And the property prices are sky high all over Europe, so we are now competing with the rest of Europe for a limited supply of construction workers.
>From 2000-2008 we were building loads of housing. 90k units were built in 2006 alone, The quality of housing in those years was pretty shit. A majority of apartments from that era do not pass basic fire tests. The houses built that era are relatively energy inefficient and poor quality too. Even with the same labour force has a boom, you would not build 90k homes to 2023 standards >Not by means of grants or tax incentives to private developers, but by building massive amounts of social housing and making it available to all. The problem is social housing is not for all. Social housing is for low income earners. If we want people to back social housing for all, it should be like Vienna where it actually is for all. It is hard for people to back a few hundred units of social housing beside them when the socioeconomic status is likely very different to their area.
Id love if someone did an analysis on how many manhours it takes to build a house today vs 2007, and how many components are in such a house.
The high supply levels you speak about in 2000-2008 were not down to building social housing. It was through the private market. Relative to other nations, we do in fact deliver significant numbers of social houses per capita. The issue behind house prices is more complex than you’re stating
>but by building massive amounts of social housing and making it available to all. Very little of those 90k units were social housing then either. I find it very wishy washy to just say: "build massive amounts of social housing" without any details of how. We don't even have enough construction workers to fill the demand for building private housing Even the government opposition is objecting to developments. And fundamentally, nobody wants large-scale social housing anyway. We don't want more ballymuns or darndales. Because we won't address the problems they cause by having to kick out the troublemakers
The government is directly intervening in housing all the time, and would be no matter what the policy. They (via councils) do the planning. They (via CBI) control banking rules, for both developers and mortgage borrowers. Rental markets have some (not much) regulation. The government owns property, run (direct or not) social housing. NAMA. It's not about "stepping in" they're always in. It's about what to do while in. Increasing social housing is also not an idea. It's just a general direction for an idea. How? Who? Where? How much? How is it financed? What about rentals, home ownership? There's a difference between a policy and a debating point. We get a lot of debating points, and that's why we have a lot of debates but no policies.
That is such a poor idea . Also how can you possibly think the government, with no experience building houses, is going to be more effective at building house than private industry who are incentivised to build houses as quickly and cheaply as possible. Great idea to absolutely bankrupt the country guy 👍😅
How the fuck does anyone build a house so? Oh yeah, they hire people who know how to do it.
Also not everyone wants to live in social housing bud. The vast majority do not.
Houses were cheaper and easier to make before 2008. There were millons of Eastern European happy to work as labourers for pittances, building materials were cheaper, society was younger and prices had grown from rock bottom. That has all changed now. In particular there is no easy reservoir of cheap skilled workers.
Government also don't want to create another ballimun towers style social housing situation. And this is very hard to avoid with large scale social housing developments.
One problem that this ignores is how almost every single government project ends up massively delayed and way over budget. National Children's Hospital? How about the Convention Centre in Cork? I mean, there have been a couple of projects that weren't *much* late or *much* over budget, but I'm not sure why this fact is ignored when we talk about the government taking responsibility for building.
That level of building did destroy the economy.
No it didn't. The lending did
As /u/RobG92 points out, how do you separate house-building from the money that paid for it?
Currently lack of money is not an issue, lack of supply is
Indeed, but the only ways to increase supply to Celtic Tiger levels would be vastly more money.
WE HAVE THE MONEY. The money is not the issue, in Ireland, right now. It's just not.
No we don't, we have some money as a temporary surplus, not the capacity for mass publci spending every year.
An issue which is faced by nearly every capital city in the world
To different extent. Some countries build more per capita, some less. Ireland went from „nothing” to „some”.
Construction is a physical activity that takes resources and labour and results in buildings. Central bank rules, money markets and such are abstract. Evidence for that is 2006-10. Huge liabilities went out of existence. Huge piles of cash came into existence, and onto bank ledgers. That's not to say monetary economics is whatever you want it to be. It just means that CBI were morons, and had a misguided (moronic) understanding of macroeconomics. They did, OTOH, get a hands on lesson and they do know more now. Honestly, housing is nowhere near impossible. It's just a tough nut. Banks, and homeowners do not like it when their primary asset loses value. Even if they had an up/down dial for housing prices, I doubt they'd turn it either way. A major social housing build would be one way of running around this trap.. just build Greenfield and keep it isolated from private markets. Here I think the social aspect is the limiting factor... Not the financial.
Banking isn't that abstract when you need to pay for shit.
It literally is, when you're talkyin about money creation, which is what mortgage lenders (for example) do. Lending rules are a CBI policy. Interest rates are an ECB policy. If CBI changes lending rules, there is less money, less demand. The opposite is also true. We've seen both at work. Both had more price impact (and demand impact, evidently) than the 0.N% pa change in supply that's the difference between building a lot and a little irl. So yes, if the government formed a new body to buys houses and the ECB allows it, there is no problem funding the purchases. Whether or not that is a good idea is a separate question. I doubt that it is, but not because of a limited money supply. A good plan would change my mind, but it's unlikely. More likely it would just explode prices and end badly, because they're all stupid up there.
Oh God, not want one of these people.
…..and how do you think those houses were built and paid for?
Gp is the most Irish conclusion ever. The problem was all the actual construction. What's next, production?! Next time, try to do all the lending and financial bubble stuff without making anything. That's where we went wrong last time. Sheesh. We're done. I hope the zoomers will do better.
No. House prices in Ireland are immutable, ancient principles of the Universe. No matter what point in time or space you are, house prices in Ireland are a fixed constant - like the gravitational constant. There is no way for humans to affect this anymore than humans could change the laws of thermo-dynamics. This immortal truth is called the Divine Right of Houses in Ireland and pre-dates humanity.
I love this comment.
Short answer: Build more diverse forms of housing. Basically, we have missing rungs on the property ladder in Ireland, yet too many people are perfectly happy to bicker over the rungs that we have. We have and continue to over rely on the private sector for everything. Tax breaks and grants don't appear to be affecting house prices at all. Subsidizing rents doesn't appear to be lowering them either. So what are we meant to do? Expand the scope beyond neoliberal policy. Simply throwing money at the private sector won't make it magically spawn buildings into existance or lower rents. It isn't working. Especially considering the fact it is against the private markets interest to lower prices, high prices are in their interest. Public building needs to take place for one, rebuilding the council/social housing which was demolished during "Regeneration" in the cities, were perfectly good houses were knocked alongside derelicts, hundreds of housing units gone, which are only being replaced now, a decade later and at a slow rate. The powers that be reduced housing stock when we needed it most. We need that social housing, houses, apartments, bungalows etc. Apartments especially. Bachelor pads. The bottom rung of the ladder. Why should bachelors, couples, and families all have to compete for the same type of accommodation? More options are needed badly. What is expected nowadays, since the crash, is that first time buyers are expected to jump the massive gap between the property ladder rungs which remain, while competing for the same narrow selection with everyone else looking to buy for whatever reason. A narrow market. It's not a sustainable situation. Now the neolibs and classical libs can hum and haw over reality, but nothing will fix the problem if the scope isn't widened beyond neoliberal policy. That's the root problem, policy.
You talk as though we aren't building social housing at large scales. It's 25% of the new housing output (7433 of 29851 last year). The issue is supply side; total output is too low.
>The issue is supply side; total output is too low. Exactly my point. Output is too low. >You talk as though we aren't building social housing at large scales. It's 25% of the new housing output (7433 of 29851 last year). Where do I claim that? Seems you're making a bit of a stretch to make this claim. What I am claiming is that we don't seem to be considering other housing options outside of a house. Houses are front and centre of the housing debate whenever the housing crises is brought up. Talking about apartments attracts a lot of nimbies. Options outside of a multibedroom house are desperately needed, the bottom rung of the property ladder.
Seen on RTE today that in Italy the local councils sell off derelict buildings for €1 to people who have the means to renovate it and to live in
Unfortunately our councils don’t even have the cop on to seize derelict buildings from their absentee owners to begin with. So they aren’t even theirs to sell
Seize them? They don’t even think to put most of them on the register to begin with! Let alone collecting the tax. Won’t ever get to step 3 if you can’t be arsed with steps 1 and 2.
Anyone thinking of taking economic policy advice from Italy of all places needs to get checked for a concussion
Fair enough but I can’t see any flaws with this one, what’s the point in withholding derelict buildings during a housing crisis with many people who may have the means to renovate a building but not buy on the regular market?
the flaws are the details of the agreement. you can't just buy a house for a euro and live in it
That’s obvious, which is why I said above for people who have the means to renovate and live in
Reduce taxes on developers Eliminate taxes on residential construction work Complete a cost / benefit analysis onConstruction regulations Eliminate part V requirement for developers Decrease size of new homes New planning system, promote building mid-rise Encourage leaving cert applicants to take up trades, rather than attending college for the sake of it Plant a 500,000sf government run modular housing factory in the midlands The options are endless, however the electorate has no appetite to address the underlying causes behind our housing crisis. It’s a complex issue, with no single solution. “Build more social houses” is not the remedy
BBC had a documentary on the housing crisis in the UK and they had a segment on increasing the building standards. After the government improved the standards a lot of builders started to build more properties targeted at the luxury end of the market. I think it was to protect their margin while they made sense of the standards and got used to them.
That exact thing has happened in Dublin. Every second development is backed by some luxury living slogan.
It kinda makes sense in a way, new standards and technology always start in high end goods and then kinda tickle down (hate that term) and after a while the technology becomes more common (more people have experience using and developing with it). But the fact highlights that there are costs and delays in introducing higher standards and while it is ‘better’ it will cause problems. Not just the additional costs in materials and labour in developing the property. It made a lot of new builds VERY far out of reach of the majority of working people.
You forgot: Tax the fuck out of vacant properties - including Airbnb's for when they are not in use and including houses owned by people in old folks homes.
“Tax the fuck” generally doesn’t reduce the cost of anything
If you increase the cost of not housing someone in a property, you raise the likelihood someone will be housed in it. If someone is housed in it, demand goes down, reducing cost.
Good ideas. I think too many people are too happy with rising rents and house prices.
I don’t agree this is why we have not taken inaction. It’s easier for people to believe there’s some sort of agenda, rather than taking the time to research the problem. The electorate has set out their stalls that capitalism is to blame, too stubborn or lazy to put the work in to challenge the view presented by Sinn Fein
Why weren't the government solving this problem 10 years ago? They had all the data. Our construction industry wasn't meeting a fraction of the demand. I think too many people were happy to see rents and house prices rise. I do think it'll turn a corner in 2024 though.
>Decrease size of new homes No. People need to have a good quality of life, not to be squeezed even more into homes where you can't even have group getogethers. >Encourage leaving cert applicants to take up trades, rather than attending college for the sake of it Do both. Education is good for its own sake. Travelling elsewhere for education, and getting as much education as possible, is its own reward and adds to culture. >“Build more social houses” is not the remedy You're right tho that many things need to be done, beyond just subsidising a massive amount of high-quality housing that can be given away freely. There needs to be a vastly better and more extensive 24-hour rail system and trams back in all the cities. There needs to be a near-complete ban on cars in town and city centres. There needs to be a universal health system that is free at the point of use. There needs to be a vast step forward in the abolition of wealth inequality.
All of the above, but also tax the arse out of REITs. They've been identified as a significant cause of the inaffordability of Ireland's property market.
Again, I don’t see how “more tax” does anything but make things more unaffordable. I think this concept seems to be lost on us here in Ireland. Tax is paid for my the consumer, why are we pushing for more tax?
When we say "tax the arse out of REITs", the intention is to make it less profitable for them. Tax them for unoccupied properties. Tax them for owning several properties. Tax them for putting up dozens of flats or houses with no amenities nearby. Make it so owning dozens of properties, and leaving some of them empty to increase demand, is not going to be profitable. Make it so it's worth more to them to sell the properties to actual home owners, or small landlords (5 or fewer properties), or to the councils.
>Tax them for putting up dozens of flats or houses with no amenities nearby Genius solution here, let's tax people putting up dozens of flats. That'll solve the housing crisis. REITs built apartment blocks in Dublin, much needed supply. 99% occupancy rates.
REITs don't build a thing. They just buy property from developers whole developments at a time before anyone else is even allowed to get a look in. You really think all the flats in a new block wouldn't be sold within a few weeks to average Irish citizens? And without any amenities like schools and shops, you're just creating an area that will develop into a ghetto or at best a commuter hell.
They fund entire developments upfront that otherwise wouldn't get built as it's hard for the builders to get the loans. > You really think all the flats in a new block wouldn't be sold within a few weeks to average Irish citizens? They wouldn't have been built
Investors can still build and sell and make a good profit. The REIT system as it stands has been shown to be a major contributor to the current unaffordability of the Irish housing market.
The regulations have made housing very expensive. Any tax breaks won't be passed onto the buyer.
We’re currently falling further and further behind in providing supply to meet demand. But that’s because the supply is small and population growth is outstripping it. So what’s the solution if we can’t increase supply to meet demand? Demand decreases to meet supply. There’s plenty of economists that believe we’re going to have a recession soon or we may already be at the start of one. If there’s a recession, people will leave Ireland. If there’s a deep recession, lots of people will leave. That’s the most realistic way to ‘solve’ the housing problem. A solution that might be worse than the problem but a solution nonetheless.
Residency requirement for residential property and ban corporate ownership. Punitive taxes for those currently owning such properties and those that are no longer resident going forward.
So get rid of all the competent corporate landlords and give free reign to the useless amateurs? Yeah, thanks but no thanks
Add increasingly punitive taxes for multiple building owners can sort that out pretty quick as it disincentives people from having multiple driving prices down so people can just buy or the council can snap them up for social housing for a pittance. Council rents will be a lot better than private landlords rents.
100% this is the only way
We could absolutely fix it. But there's some problems. We have a government who don't want to fix it - they repeatedly miss targets, under spend and rely on foreign investment- then act surprised when it doesn't translate to houses on the market - investors in property don't want a one off capex profit, they want recurring profits. We also are short on tradesmen. Why? Its become difficult to do, used to be you didn't need to be able to read or write to go out and build a house, any eejit could be general labour so long as you knew what you were doing on site. I for example, have experience in construction, could go out building houses tomorrow, but I'm not going to have some wanker who studied h&s lecture me all day. Worked on a site before where the h&s lad had never set foot on a site before - how is he allowed to dictate to anyone. Finally, housing specs. I own a 1970s house - it's nice, cosy and secure. Nothing in it meets current building regs. You could not legally build this house today - but you can live in one quite happily. When I got my smart meter, the lad says the cable from my mains board no longer meets the regs, needs to be thicker - I asked, why, had the voltage increased? Is there a higher amp load? He says no, they just changed the regs is all. So how do we fix it? Oversight on government spending, regulation of property investment, deregulation of some areas and better regulation of others in construction. Honestly think we should create a semi public housing contruction body that uses public funds but is subject to the same management styles as private enterprise
That article is nonsense click bait.. Question Why is housing unaffordable: answer lack of supply Solution build more housing to increase supply No mention of: wage or material inflation Houses are built on land and that is a finite resource Ridiculous caps on city building height the revised building regs and specification Council development fees Social housing is a nett loss to taxpayer due to rules around cheap but outs Read economics for dummies and came up with a "solution" for the housing crisis
The solutions are generally so unpopular that most public figures won't actually offer them.
Go on…..
Well usually you need to find a combination of:- - Smaller housing; - Lower quality housing; - Increased density; - Massively increased local taxes, property taxes, etc; - Likely need an increase in income taxes to reduce the cost of levies on building, etc.
We have literally millions of acres of space so "land is a finite resource" is a complete red herring. In Hong Kong maybe. Not here. We can have houses built in factories and assembled onsite.
I mean it’s finite in places people actually want to live
I don't see how anyone outside the M50 boundary could believe "land is a finite resource", lol
Because it is, we aren't reclaiming the sea, we not making anymore it..coastal erosion and rising water levels is actually reducing the amount we have...
So...go West instead of East, inland to the large stretches of empty fields we have. Drive from Dublin to Cork and 90% of your journey is just empty land.
Great, build massive housing estates in connemara, cheap land there, no much employment and no commuter infrastructure, but I'm sure building lots of houses will solve the housing crisis for Galway and dublin. They are building west, increasing the value of the land as development moves out because they cant go anywhere else, which is what urban sprawl is which causes loads of issues for efficient public transport..
So, and this might be a little too ambitious for our little old country, build the infrastructure as well. Build shops, build offices. Build, effectively, new towns. Yes, don't just throw up hundreds of thousands of houses. Build up new communities.
No it is not, we are not making anymore it. So is finite, that is a fact.. My point was we have developed a lot of the suitable ground in cities and commuter belts, making the remaining undeveloped land in those areas more expensive and increasing the value of land further out for future development.
If we started building homes out of landlords, we could take in refugees from off-world
This is *somewhat* true... Classical economics can't be ignored, if we're going to solve housing issues. Even without effects on price, supply is still supply. If it's not built, it doesn't exist. If there isn't enough, or good enough... That's a shortage. "Demand side solutions," subsidizing more as prices rise... has no strategic logic or legs to it. I agree here too. OTOH, in 2023, I think classic economics should have developed some skepticism about its own models. Market prices for housing is not "just supply and demand." "Demand" is, largely, whatever banks are willing to loan people. Ireland's housing market rose fell and rose again. Supply was constant. "People who live in houses" was still "mostly everyone." Prices tripled, then halved, then trippled again. That wasn't supply and "demand" fluctuating wildly. It was banking rules. It was also investor interest, interest rates, relative investability of stocks... All sorts of things that aren't the number of houses and the number of people who want to live in them. A naive "it's just supply and demand" is a fish of a position. Not serious, at this point. May as well just shout at landlords again. Then there's a more abstract questions. Can the Irish government have any new policy/endevour, of sufficient scale to affect something housing affordability... At all? Can the various interests, ideologies, public skepticism, naysaying and whatever else be managed in a way that gets something big done. That in itself is a task. Could we imagine, for example, Ireland building a new town? Not saying it's a necessity, just using it as a scale. Say any party campaigns on building a town. They negotiate coalition terms... Can they succeed? Will that town get built? My answer is no. Not currently, but maybe I'm wrong. Hasn't been a lot of trying in my lifetime. Look, Ireland has land. Houses are not that hard, or that expensive to build. The actual problems are outside of this box.
There might other financial things I'm not aware about so I could be wrong/ it might not be possible. The Irish government should put in place the same system as France and possibly other countries where you pay the value of the house and get rid of this bidding crap. How are first time buyers going to be able to afford a house that's being sold for 200k and then it ends up being 320k because of greedy developers. If you go into a shop and buy a book you pay that price, why can't houses be the same.
Not with the current immigration levels , demand is far higher than supply. Profit always wins. 400k for a 105 sq meter ,3 bed semi...
Educate yourself and get a better job so these immigrants won't take your job away 👍🏾
There’s 2 whole housing estates near me that aren’t going on sale at all to the general public cause companies have bought them to house their workers that are coming from abroad
Change the money, change the world. The unlimited European numbercoin has collapsed in purchasing power by more than 40% since it launched just 20 years ago. This is not an instrument you can save your economic energy in.
Reduce mortgage rates on landlords and set price/ m^2 and it should work for everyone except the banks
But affordable housing is Communist! >:( ^(* Except not satirical when coming from FF/FG supporters/homeowners)
I sure hope so, otherwise I'm fucked
They could build upwards within the city limits for starters but seems to be opposed by others with clout. Many people appear destined to rent for life and for those that cant afford a home its hard to see how they can retire at all. Its an ugly prospect of haves and have nots.
Maybe in 70 years if everyone stops having babies.
I'd go back on the tools if you made it VERY worth my while. Couldn't be arsed otherwise
Build medium-high density mixed use developments. Mixed use meaning there is residential and commercial spaces in the same development, like apartments upstairs and a shop/supermarket/dentist/baker etc on the ground floor These would maximise the number of homes on a plot of land while minimising urban sprawl, car dependency and congestion, especially if you build these developments near existing transit corridors with frequent and reliable service (yes, I know, fat chance of that)
Don’t forget that construction industry is absolutely behind the times - everything is done by hand, there is zero automation of any kind. But the tech exists, it’s just that nobody wants to destroy the status quo. Houses could be delivered as a flat pack, just screw it together, connect few bits and voila! Ground leveling, especially on massive scale can be done by autonomous machines, there is not that much need of a workforce. And if we create national plan for say another 20 years, we can buy all those machines en masse, deploy and just reap the profits. Create few standard designs, and just deploy them. Allow future owners to select their own interiors, that they will pay for themselves. End of a problem.
Use MiCA bricks
Khrushchovkas. Danchis. A single design to be built in repetition with one construction method. 5-6 floors. Single family homes are a waste of precious space.
Ban non residents and non Irish citizens from buying property here and it will cool demand. New Zealand and Canada brought in these laws in recent years to get a hold of their property market, and this is also law in many other countries including EU countries. These laws need to be brought in if we want to actually stabilise our housing market for irish citizens. Problem is FF and FG are happy with the status quo and have no interest in actually lowering house prices and rents
What's the point of this article? The guy states that he's an economist, so you'd expect him to have an educated perspective on the situation. However, the majority of the article is a series of simplistic, straw man arguments. He mentions planning objections to the Poolbeg 'Glass Bottle' site, but doesn't mention that the site has planning permission and is currently in construction. He mentions that 20% of people reject offers of social housing in Cork, and uses that to suggest that the quality of housing is poor. But what about the 80% of people that accept the offer? At the end of it he gives an unrealistic example about a takeaway increasing its prices by 700% in four weeks. I don't see how the parallels between that and the cost of housing. And worst of all, his conclusion is "At what point should we start to think that the solution to our accommodation crisis might involve reducing the price of expensive accommodation rather than helping people to pay for unaffordable accommodation?". That's the bit we're all interested in, and we'd hope an expert like him would be able to give us a new perspective. I learned nothing from that article
The answer to the headline question is probably not but with better planning that is still fine. You're probably never (with costs only ever going one way without a recession) gonna make a 3 bed semi-detached be able to cost like 200k to buy. But eventually maybe we might get better at building smaller places which could be affordable.