# Housing used to be much simpler - what went wrong?



## bipped (27 Sep 2021)

As a layman it seems the whole housing system was more straightforward years ago. Developers sold 100% to private buyers, the majority to owner occupiers and some to buy to let investors. Councils built homes for people who couldn't afford to buy from private developers. 
People traded-up so releasing smaller or less expensive properties for FTB. Council tenants had a right to buy when their circumstances improved so releasing them from a lifetime of paying rent and councils from the maintenance costs.
There was plenty of places to rent privately at reasonable cost as well as higher spec for those with bigger budgets.
Where did it all go wrong? 
Is it because councils stopped building and that caused a domino effect?


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## kinnjohn (27 Sep 2021)

bipped said:


> As a layman it seems the whole housing system was more straightforward years ago. Developers sold 100% to private buyers, the majority to owner occupiers and some to buy to let investors. Councils built homes for people who couldn't afford to buy from private developers.
> People traded-up so releasing smaller or less expensive properties for FTB. Council tenants had a right to buy when their circumstances improved so releasing them from a lifetime of paying rent and councils from the maintenance costs.
> There was plenty of places to rent privately at reasonable cost as well as higher spec for those with bigger budgets.
> Where did it all go wrong?
> Is it because councils stopped building and that caused a domino effect?


we outlawed bedsits and flats driving people into renting above what they could afford to get a roof over there heads,


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## Brendan Burgess (27 Sep 2021)

While banning bedsits was wrong and made the problem worse, we would still have a serious problem today, even if they had not been banned.

There are many more fundamental causes. Here are just some of them.

Councils stopped building.
Councils sold housing stock to their tenants without replacing it.
Developers went bust and stopped building private houses. Don't forget we had ghost estates and some commentators said we would be knocking down more houses than we would be building. https://www.askaboutmoney.com/threads/morgan-kellys-hits-and-misses.185982/post-1377490
The returns on cash are so low that investors are buying property and pushing the price up.
I suspect that there has been an increase in highly paid people, such as IT staff, finance and legal, who can afford to pay more and so push up the prices beyond what the "ordinary" workers can afford.


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## Purple (27 Sep 2021)

Brendan Burgess said:


> The returns on cash are so low that investors are buying property and pushing the price up.


I suspect that this is the biggest issue.
There's no emigration. I think that's a big issue too.


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## Mocame (27 Sep 2021)

What went 'wrong' is the country went from being an economic failure with a shrinking or at best stagnating to a country with a rapidly growing economy and one of the strongest rates of population growth in Europe.

For most of the history of the state governments' main challenge was replacing existing slum housing with new council housing but not dealing with rapid population growth.  

That changed in the 1990s when the population started to rise.  For a while lax planning, urban sprawl and reckless lending to developers and home buyers took the hardest edges off the problem, but after that approach collapsed the banks and the economy we haven't yet identified a replacement approach to generating enough housing for our expanding population.


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## joe sod (28 Sep 2021)

Mocame said:


> For most of the history of the state governments' main challenge was replacing existing slum housing with new council housing but not dealing with rapid population growth.


Also because people coming out of slum housing were delighted by any improvement to their conditions, the council houses could be quite basic and functional and still be a million times better than what they had before.
Now the standards are so high that they take so long to build surely some of the standards could be lowered a bit to facilitate more rapid construction, I don't mean corners cut in building standards but that the houses should be more basic like the traditional council house, simple kitchen, bathroom etc with simpler designs for rapid construction


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## odyssey06 (28 Sep 2021)

joe sod said:


> Also because people coming out of slum housing were delighted by any improvement to their conditions, the council houses could be quite basic and functional and still be a million times better than what they had before.
> Now the standards are so high that they take so long to build surely some of the standards could be lowered a bit to facilitate more rapid construction, I don't mean corners cut in building standards but that the houses should be more basic like the traditional council house, simple kitchen, bathroom etc with simpler designs for rapid construction


Dublin City Council got out of providing houses not really because of the cost of building, but the cost of maintenance, dealing with tenants.
DCC are owed €33 million in rents they may never see, and this is a below market rent level they are trying to collect.
I don't know how much they have written off in bad debts.
If you don't collect the rents how are you supposed to maintain the properties?

They are now looking for higher spec houses so they will have lower maintenance costs in future, which is all very well for the long term, but not when there's supposed to be a 'housing crisis'.


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## blanketyblank (28 Sep 2021)

This non collection of rent coupled with the high cost of maintenance is to me the main reason they stopped building houses for the council. It seems ridiculous as that rent should have been taken at source. The law should have been changed to enable that to happen.  Take it from their bank account before it could be spent on anything else.
People in council houses, if they didn't want to live there, saved to move and buy a private house elsewhere.   Their council house was then given to someone else in need.    Now - you could spend a lot on a house and have a council house right beside you!   Personally I think this is wrong.     And council houses have been sold to tenants which I also think was a bad mistake.   If you want your own house go buy it !  Council stock should be kept as council stock.
I agree with the OP it was a lot simpler.


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## joe sod (28 Sep 2021)

odyssey06 said:


> They are now looking for higher spec houses so they will have lower maintenance costs in future, which is all very well for the long term, but not when there's supposed to be a 'housing crisis'


That doesn't make sense, if it is a higher spec house  there are more expensive things to go wrong, it's more complicated to repair, if you have simple kitchens and bathrooms there are less things to go wrong and most plumbers and electricians can fix them.


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## Blackrock1 (28 Sep 2021)

joe sod said:


> That doesn't make sense, if it is a higher spec house  there are more expensive things to go wrong, it's more complicated to repair, if you have simple kitchens and bathrooms there are less things to go wrong and most plumbers and electricians can fix them.


higher spec in terms of insulation and heat retention.


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## Purple (28 Sep 2021)

joe sod said:


> That doesn't make sense, if it is a higher spec house  there are more expensive things to go wrong, it's more complicated to repair, if you have simple kitchens and bathrooms there are less things to go wrong and most plumbers and electricians can fix them.


Higher build specs mean there is less to go wrong.


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