Ireland's Housing Problem is Insoluble
... Barring war, revolution or emigration, that is.
Here’s a video that popped up on my Timeline yesterday that got quite a lot of play in the media. It could have been from any time in the last decade.
Generally when something like this pops up the question asked is “what can we do to stop this from happening?” We tend not to ask “is this problem even solvable?” With apologies in advance for the blackpill, and acknowledging this isn’t my field, I don’t see it - at least in the medium term. The two issues are our inability to sustain the level of building required for multiple decades, and the unwillingness to acknowledge the demand side of the equation.
Government estimates are that we need 35,000 new dwellings a year to meet demand. (I’m going to just say houses from here on in.) One industry estimate is that we need to build 50,000 a year for the next 3 decades. We began construction on 31,000 last year. The specific figures vary depending on who you ask, key thing is - we need to build an enourmous number of houses every year for the forseeable future.
The first problem is keeping up that pace for that period of time, in spite of problems like (off the top of my head) recessions, competing government priorities, reliance on commercial entities that can go out of business. On top of that you have chronic lack of supporting infrastructure needed to make housing liveable – everyone wants to live in Dublin because that’s where the jobs and higher salaries are, but Dublin’s (for instance) transport links are terrible/ non-existent and will take multiple decades to improve, if that happens.
The figure of 35-50K a year assumes no international events interrupting supply of materials and labour, like, for instance the two (Urkaine and Covid) we’re living through right now. And finally, building that many houses over that period of time would presumably require us to bring in people to build them, and those people would obviously need to be housed, creating a circular problem.
That’s on the supply side, before you even get to the subject of demand, which no current or prospective party of government has plans to address in any way.
Ireland is officially planning for an increase in population by a million people in the next 20 years; that hasn’t been abandoned in the face of the housing crisis. This year we took on 1% of our population in Ukranian refugees in the space of a couple of months. That was shortly after we had declared an immigration amnesty of unknown size (though not less than 17,000 people).
These are just examples. All of these plans had cross-party support. To the extent that they were critiqued by politicians or the respectable press it was only that they didn’t go far enough. The only people to question the implication of these plans in the Dáil and Seanad have been independent, and have been implicitly smeared as extremist agitators by more mainstream politicians.
None of that is to dismiss the value of newcomers to the Irish economy or society, or the importance of humanitarian intervention - it’s only to say that one whole part of the supply and demand equation is off the table for any normal politican in Ireland to discuss, and the viability of any political plan is going to reflect that. That goes for SF as surely as it does for FF/FG.
So what we’re left with is supply we can’t meet and a demand that no one who matters wants to talk about. I liken the situation to a boat taking on much water. The people currently in charge are focused on using a single bucket to empty the boat while ignoring the water coming in. Their prospective replacements want to use two buckets instead, but that’s it. Both parties think that anyone asking about the hole in the hull is a mutineer that should be thrown overboard. You tell me - will this tale of the high seas end well?
On a personal note the reason this plays on my mind is that I was lucky enough to buy a place of my own last year and I feel like a piece of shit because I know so many people who deserve a home no less than me but who have essentially no prospect of owning one. I don’t hear anything in the plans from any party that will change that and it kills me. I would normally say that revolution is the only option but of course this is Ireland, which means allowing the tried and true pressure release valve of emigration to take effect. Though the fact that I hear the exact same complaints from my UK friends indicates that might not be a silver bullet that it’s been in the past. We’ll see: I’m a layperson and I could be wrong, and I hope so.
Interesting comparison, since Ireland's housing problems sound like Boston (US)'s housing problems, and Boston has some of the worst housing problems in the US. There are a couple of fundamental problems. One is that there are three desiderata: desirable location, affordability, low density. You can only get two of them.
As you say "everyone wants to live in Dublin because that’s where the jobs and higher salaries are". You can effectively expand "Dublin", but that requires improving transport, which is expensive, faces local opposition, and can only be done by the state.
You can increase density. The density of the entire island state of Singapore seems to be at least half again the density of Dublin city. And the photos at the top of the column show nothing taller than 3 stories. OTOH, increasing the density in an area reduces the niceness of every other unit in the area.
Certainly, private builders will generate plenty of housing if you let them. They will go through ruinous boom-and-bust cycles, but it's their money they're losing. What is usually stopping them is planning permission -- in the photo above, can an arbitrary private developer buy up that neighborhood and rebuild it at twice the density? I doubt it. Of course, private developers tend to build housing for the upper part of the middle class, but that doesn't matter, each new unit drives down the price of all existing units.
And that last point is one of the problems. Once one owns a house, one has an economic interest in maintaining its market value. If one has a mortgage on the house, often the value of the house is well above one's net worth (in the US, often ten times), and so one is "highly leveraged", one's net worth rises and falls much faster than the value of the house. So there's a large slice of the more affluent who have an immense economic interest in keeping the price of housing high.
Hey, saw this on twitter. Commenting here vs there because twitter is twitter.
You should feel zero guilt about owning a home, everyone has a right to one and it should have been in our constitution from the start - why it's continually prevented from being inserted is suggested below. You feeling sorry/guilty about owning a dwelling helps nobody, least of all yourself.
You make some good points but a) none of their "20 years from now we predict a billion people living in dublin and it'll be a floating city" shit means anything at all, ever, and b) you're missing the fact that we have an enormous amount of vacant housing stock, a lot of it ready to walk into tomorrow. All derelict stock, all unused housing stock, all city centre apartments vacant for more than 12 months without a very good reason should be subject to CPO and at a rate that reflects the reality of the mess we're in (1.5 million? we'll give you 500 grand and a kick up the hole). No argument, no delay, no appeal process - sue the state if you want, meantime fuck off please. This Is An Emergency.
In the medium term what we need is council housing (LA), not social housing. This has been brought into the limelight again in the context of Britain by likes of Mick Lynch, RMT rep. We had a similar system here and it worked. Vacant dwellings (CPOd as above) or new housing stock should be put in Local Authority hands.
New builds are of course needed but the mania for throwing estates up via the private sector will lead to a repeat of the social problems that happened last time a bunch of drunks built estates in a rush (this time shit cocaine is the drug of choice for these Legitimate Businessmen). And in any case, nobody can afford them.
Herbert Simms was able to get 20,000+ families out of slums and into beautiful art deco public housing in the 30s when we were 'broke'. The well planned suburbs of Dublin - Fairview, Crumlin, etc - were built during this period also. Council housing was the model. It is the model that works. A strong legal system is required to implement changes needed to make that happen. Our legal system is weaker than a one legged puppy.
Another reason this has not and will never, ever happen here is because in a FIRE economy like ours one of the only metrics for 'growth' that anyone in power pays attention to is property prices. Thus they must remain artificially inflated, and fuck whoever wasn't smart enough to buy one in 1987 or to pick their parents more wisely. An impending problem now is that post -Covid the traditional safety valve of emigration is going to be less accessible for a lot of its target population. So we'll see. Hopefully there'll be something approaching genuine public disobedience when the shit kicks in over winter. Mass non -payment of energy bills will hopefully spread from Europe to here (why the hell are we paying for energy futures speculation after a global pandemic? and not a word about it from govt who are talking horseshit about immersions as usual) and a properly organized militant squatting campaign would be a good start.
Finally, on both of these issues, if the Shell Deal was ripped up tomorrow (as it should have been decades ago) we could solve all of these problems in 3-10 years. Again, let them sue. Who honestly could muster the beginnings of a fuck at this point what some lawyers do in ten years' time? This is not West Africa, Shell can't just go around killing whoever they disagree with, at least not without a modicum of discretion. We have the second worst energy deal in the world after Cameroon - and they're only worse because the French oil satraps killed anyone who opened their mouth. Not the kind of league table you want to finish as runner up. These issues are all linked. There is nothing in any party manifesto/plan/broadsheet advertorial - including SF - that says anything approaching anything sensible on the above. So the intractable problems will continue to grow, the contradictions will continue to grow, and the housing crisis will remain as 'insoluble' as a plutonium gobstopper until Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Portlaoise, Tullamore, and any other place within kicking distance of a commuter belt are utterly hollowed out shells with nothing happening. It can always Get Worse and it's about to get a whole lot worse. Keep your options open, folks.