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.
> 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'.
I've some suspicion (comparing with things in the US) that in the 30s, the majority were renters, so the politics favored building all that beautiful art deco public housing. (The very phrase gives me joy!) The web tells me that the homeownership rate in Ireland is 70%, which is good in a way, but gives the most affluent 70% of the population an incentive to see that housing prices never decline.
No need to feel guilty for owning a house yourself. Revolution is out of the question. One important factor over the next 5-10 years will be elderly demographic. Rising cost of elderly care, equity release loans, dividing up inheritances, etc, it may get ugly. However it will be interesting as there are many 3 or 4 bedroom houses throughout the country with currently only one or two geriatric residents.
I can think of few things more soul-destroying than having to ,first queue up, then bid, then pay a (doubtless) exorbitant amount for a terrace house… in Drumcondra. All that before I’d have to pay for the inevitable refurb. 😱😱😱😱😱😱
Wow. There’s more there than I really have the time to respond to. Thanks so much for the thoughtful response. I’d love to see it kick off in the winter too, but previous events have left me jaded on that front. We’ll see.
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.
> 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'.
I've some suspicion (comparing with things in the US) that in the 30s, the majority were renters, so the politics favored building all that beautiful art deco public housing. (The very phrase gives me joy!) The web tells me that the homeownership rate in Ireland is 70%, which is good in a way, but gives the most affluent 70% of the population an incentive to see that housing prices never decline.
70% of who? It's not 70% of the people living on the land-mass.
My source says the Republic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate which gives 70.0 for 2021. Its reference is Eurostat https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ILC_LVHO02__custom_3359192/default/table?lang=en "Distribution of population by tenure status, type of household and income group - EU-SILC survey" which lists for "TENURE = Owner", "TIME = 2022", and "GEO = Ireland" a value of 70.4.
No need to feel guilty for owning a house yourself. Revolution is out of the question. One important factor over the next 5-10 years will be elderly demographic. Rising cost of elderly care, equity release loans, dividing up inheritances, etc, it may get ugly. However it will be interesting as there are many 3 or 4 bedroom houses throughout the country with currently only one or two geriatric residents.
I can think of few things more soul-destroying than having to ,first queue up, then bid, then pay a (doubtless) exorbitant amount for a terrace house… in Drumcondra. All that before I’d have to pay for the inevitable refurb. 😱😱😱😱😱😱
Haha my mums from round there but I agree! Plus I think they were queuing to rent rather than buy so they probably don’t even get to do the refurb
My D4 prejudice coming out. What can I say?
That you're a cunt.
Wild altogether.
Wow. There’s more there than I really have the time to respond to. Thanks so much for the thoughtful response. I’d love to see it kick off in the winter too, but previous events have left me jaded on that front. We’ll see.