The Housing shortage saga - the root cause(s) ?

[Aontroim]

The big housing shortage isn't only for social welfare recipients. I am looking at the private buyer as well. The model is broken when every development being built is solely for social housing. The unfortunate truth is that in 10 years time every bit of land within walking distance of a town or village will be a council estate. Every apartment within these towns will be homeless shelters. Wineos and druggies are not good for local business.

It was this that I was referring to (was a while back in the thread).

[crank_case]

Two sides me hole, bringing single mothers and welfare types into a discussion about the real, pure greed commoditization of housing, which often goes on above international boundaries is like contributing to a serious discussion on the climate effects of aviation by running around the room with your arms outstretched making neeeeowrnnn noises. 😋

The funny thing is a lot of people tend to make a decent start on sorting out their lives if you put a roof over their heads.

It's kinda weird how we focus on people who can barely control their own bladders as the root of the problem instead of people with the power to undemocratically exert control over the fiscal policy of entire countries.

[kdevitt]

Two sides me hole, bringing single mothers and welfare types into a discussion about the real, pure greed commoditization of housing.

The conversation is about root causes for housing shortages, no?

[foyler]

Fair enough Aontroim, Crank I've said in all of these threads that its extremely complicated , there are many, many contributing factors & bigger brains & better run countries across the globe have not really come up with any solutions that cover the bases.
What I was sort of getting at was it would be a shame for it to be polarized into Reits/Funds/Landlords V's druggies etc .

I don't think anybody said its the main contributing factor or even one of the bigger ones, but I guess for your average 'working man' living next door to this stuff , its the one that sticks in the craw most, but I am now kind of understanding why that cabal are referred to as the squeezed middle!

[crank_case]

The conversation is about root causes for housing shortages, no?

As I kinda said, why on earth would the people with the least power in society be the root ?

I'm not trying to be judgemental here lads, I'm trying to point out we're all being gaslight on this one. It's a complex issue, but it doesn't help a complex situation when irrelevancies are added, and that's the way the folks who are mostly the root of this would like to keep it. Confuse, conflate, divide, conquer, rinse, wash, repeat.

There are a number of country specific things like planning, but if you look at a macro global level, housing has been turned into a commodity to be traded rather than priced at something reflecting its intrinsic value and built primarily to house people.

A perfect way to illustrate this is if you go back to the times of single income blue collar families having their mortgages paid off by their 40s - in some many cases peoples car might have cost more than their house. Those rises can't be explained by inflation - something majorly flipped the script when housing could be turned into something as easily tradeable as commodities, rather than a not very liquid asset.

It's complicated, but not that complicated once you shift some of the smoke and mirrors, in fact, this lad sums how things flipped in 2 and a half minutes....

[blascae111]

I'm missing or struggling to see where anyone referred to folk mentioned in this thread as druggies, winos and / or vermin lads, but I may well have missed it so feel free to outline or point out how you made the jump?

What I was reading had little to do with any addictions other than being addicted to society/the govt picking up the tab, fixing all our problems, massive amounts of entitlement and zero personal responsibility.
Its absolutely worth debating and already the thoughts of shaggy, kdevitt give clear , 1st hand fact based insight to 2 sides of the discussion.

My druggy and wineo comment was a few posts back and was more focused on the Homeless accommodation thats being put in town center locations

[kdevitt]

As I kinda said, why on earth would the people with the least power in society be the root ?

I'm not trying to be judgemental here lads, I'm trying to point out we're all being gaslight on this one. It's a complex issue, but it doesn't help a complex situation when irrelevancies are added, and that's the way the folks who are mostly the root of this would like to keep it. Confuse, conflate, divide, conquer, rinse, wash, repeat.

Root causes NOT root cause - there is not one root cause, because its a complex issue as you said. You might think you're being gaslit, or maybe you just live in a nicer area, but I have enough real world knowledge on this one.

The fact that a single affadavit can put you on a priority list for a house is a major issue - its actually quite a powerful tool, which is being used all the time. And this isn't even cheating the system, it is the system. We can't build enough houses if the numbers required keep growing at the rate they are - and existing housing stock is being vacuumed up by the councils to make up for the lack of new builds. Is this the most significant problem we have - no - is it a contributing factor - yes.

[blascae111]

Land Prices, Changes in the building regulations, Finance costs have all driven up the price of building. Years ago there was no focus on the environment, no carbon levies and there was an abundance of free land to build on. Houses wer simple things, blocks, windows a back boiler etc. nothing fancy. Energy efficiency regs have driven the price up. Extra insulation, heat pumps, high spec windows. There is also more liability on designers with assigned certifiers looking for additional fees.

The root cause for a shortage is the increased demand and speed of delivery of units. In Ennis alone there are 1300 people on the housing list. Thats 1300 people that need accommodation, be it a new build or HAP rental. Developers are flipping private estates to councils and AHBs, landlords are sick of renting out their houses so are long term leasing to councils for 10+ years. There are less and less houses for a private buyer to bid on so its driving the second hand market mental. Same goes with places to rent.
When that 1300 are housed there will be another 1300 on the list soon after.

And the prospect of zoning agricultural land outside of settlements has its own issues aswell. No mains sewer services being the big one, Water supply, esb, telecoms. As well as no support services, shops or transport.

So to say that the social system has nothing to do with the topic of this thread is wrong. Existing housing stock should be inspected and tenancy issues enforced. Free up houses for genuine cases. Use existing housing stock more efficiently

[crank_case]

Root causes NOT root cause

I understand - but it's still not a root cause, because it's not what kicked things off, because these folks simply don't have that sort of agency and if they did, they wouldn't be dirt poor.

They are, at best, an aggravating factor in the resulting crisis.

[SJ]

It's kind of interesting that this thread has gone four pages without really mentioning any root causes.

1. because of the Euro, Ireland had low interest rates at a time when this was not good for our economy - rapid growth led to (welcome, very productive) immigration and generally massively increased demand for everything including housing
2. There was so much money to be made in housing because of (1) that everyone and their brother jumped in building shite houses/apartments as fast as possible.
3. The music stopped and we were left with ghost estates etc. The pressure was mitigated because a lot of people either left the country or moved back in with family as they lost jobs/lost income. BUT...
4. The economy, driven by multinationals, recovered much faster than the fundamentals suggested; so massive growth returned at a time when building was still massively constrained by the legacy of the crash.
5. Because of 4, we again need a huge volume of housing, but have very few people (including the Government) with the capital to deliver this. So we rely on REITs and the like. They certainly have a place, but in an environment of huge demand, they're way bigger players than is desirable.
6. There's now a huge volume of construction and continued huge economic and population growth, but the construction is running to stand still as we're not able to meet the backlog from the years where there was basically zero construction going on.

Honestly, neither Sinn Fein nor forced sterilisations will solve this problem. Government intervention can move the deckchairs in some ways that might help (prioitising the right kind of construction in the right places) but basically we're at the mercy of international forces. A resolution to the Ukraine crisis will help at the margins, but basically unless ther's a slowdown in demand or a massive increase in supply, this problem is going to take several years to fix. I don't really want a slowdown in demand as that'll probably come as a result of recession or other similar horribleness. We can do some things to increase supply but none of them are magic bullets.

[SJ]

Also, just to note that I live in an ex-council house and the original tenants of the estate, my neighbours, moved out of Pearse St in the 1980s. They were able to buy their houses and their children are now mostly middle income types who have bought their own homes.
The sell off of social housing should have been accompanied by more construction, but it was a wealth transfer to the lowest income families, and it has transformed that generation for the better. It's the kind of social mobility to which we should continue to aspire. Like Crank says, if you give people security; they can do great things.

[Flet]

The State has to find a way of stepping up and not expecting the markets to sort this out. When you look at post-war Germany (which lost 50% of all housing in some urban areas and had to deal with millions of demobbed soldiers plus somewhere between 12-14 million displaced persons from the east and then later considerable immigration and a baby boom as the post-war economy grew very quickly), they did it through massive social housing projects alongside supports for home builders and buyers (via a state bank) and tax credits as well as renter protections. Granted, it took them 40 years but by the early 1960s the acute problem was largely contained and the rest followed the usual economic cycles. I think something like 2/3rds of Germanys housing stock was built in the 1960s and 1970s.

These days they have similar problems (construction of social housing was largely stopped post-reunification, building costs are way up, there's big demand in cities and not in the sticks, speculative money flows into housing as a result of low interest, the wrong sort of housing is being built, Airbnb etc.) but the solutions to acute housing problems are there and they involve State intervention.

[crank_case]

1. because of the Euro, Ireland had low interest rates at a time

Well you have had low interest rates everywhere, which is why the various investment funds everywhere have moved massively into investing in property globally and then trading securities in them easily via REITs.

I would put that as one of the root causes simply because while some countries like Sweden do ok on housing people because they have better deck chair movers, the housing crisis is global, from San Francisco to London to Beijing. Housing and land have risen globally at a rate well beyond what they should have really. Even places like Germany - sure they don't have a crisis to the same extent as we do but you have seen a big rise.

It used to be that anyone who wanted to live a bohemian artist lifestyle where you could do your thing and live in some fantastic shambolic decadence could just truck over to Berlin and slum it out for very little. That's why you get a washed up David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno goofing round in Berlin and creating some fantastic albums, or even the Irish/Canadian My Bloody Valentine being able to muck around for years without success until they recorded the masterpiece that was Loveless. Now you have estate agents selling Berlin on that same Weimar-esque decadent cool and of course the property keeps going up and killing that same thing in the process.

[SJ]

I agree with Crank. I think it's not as simple as "the State can fix it" , just as it's not as simple as "the market can fix it" - like, the constuction sector is flat out; so the best the State can do is undercut existing building and build other stuff *instead*. I'm not saying that shouldn't happen in some cases and it will help the mix but ultimately it doesn't result in any more properties for sale.

[Johnny_Limerick]

Maybe the state will step in. If there isn't enough profit margin for the private builders. There is a strong chance of a slow down in construction due to profit margins getting tighter.
Developers are here to make large profits not house people.