Housing in Ireland: A broken system.

Will disincentivizing second property ownership through a larger property tax not push more people to sell vacant or second properties helping the situation? It won't solve it obviously but could make some difference.
I'm not a fan of that approach I must say. It's private property afterall and not the responsibility of those who own a holiday home to provide housing.

Also, most holiday homes (by their nature) are nowhere near places of high employment, so not sure how effective it would be if they came on the market.
 
It's definitely not the responsibility of second home owners. But it is the responsibility of government and I think they should be incentivizing primary home ownership over the status quo.

If less effort went into building / maintaining second homes and more went into helping those looking to buy their first home I think that would be a better allocation of resources.

And I'm not for a second saying this will fix the issue but it may go some way to alleviate it.
 
It's definitely not the responsibility of second home owners. But it is the responsibility of government and I think they should be incentivizing primary home ownership over the status quo.
They've been doing this for the past 14 years and it has decimated the rental sector, causing significant hardship to those who either prefer to rent or alternatively have no option but to rent.
 
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The good news is that despite the massive increase in our population our house price growth is lower than many other developed countries and price to income ratios are lower here than in some of the countries that people are supposedly moving to because they can't afford a house here.
 
Whilst this may be true, I do have to agree this thread is starting to diverge into looking at a wide range of factors effecting house prices. However it's not really questioning policy issues on the current split provision of housing.

The main issue originally raised in my post is the disparity in the cost of housing between tenure types in the same developments. And how as a result people across a large range of income levels are better off on lower incomes in socially rented housing than larger incomes in other tenures.

Unless everyone is regarding the main solution to this to be the prices of housing being more affordable for purchase, relative to incomes.
 
They've been doing this for the past 14 years and it has decimated the rental sector, causing significant hardship to those who either prefer to rent or alternatively have no option but to rent.
So change the method. The goal stays the same.
 
Where in the world is the housing situation working well? A prosperous place with plenty of affordable housing. Or does such a place exist?
 
Is it not 25%?
 
One of the main factors is that very difficult to hire construction workers now, young people no longer want to do these and other physical jobs ,
This is an important point. Building new houses requires construction workers, but we currently subsidize retrofitting. Young people may not want to do these jobs, as we can always import such workers from abroad, but, assuming the number of construction workers who wish to work in Ireland is limited, such workers are currently directed at state-subsidized retrofitting projects.

Retrofitting does not increase the number of dwellings. It has a slight welfare effect, i.e. a property owner may over time benefit from lower heating costs, but it has no productivity effect. You are not increasing the number of dwellings for rent/purchase. Basically, you are standing still and not directing labour towards an increase in housing supply. Building a new dwelling has a productivity effect. You can buy it and get a positive return on rental or can live there and get a positive return when you sell. To increase productivity at the national level and to provide dwellings for those who wish to buy/invest, considering labour and related constraints, public policy should be directed towards new builds and not retrofitting.

The OP could consider the above for inclusion in his document.
 
couldn't have put it better myself, we are using scarce resources for retrofitting rather than building new houses and appartments. Obviously renovating unused buildings like over shops also falls into new builds rather than retrofitting as it is bringing more units onto the market. That is a political decision though as Eamon Ryan and the greens are heavily involved in the retrofitting program and alot of money has gone there to keep them on board. Maybe SF should be directing their ire against this rather than Daragh O Brien the housing minister
 
True to an extent, but lets not kid ourselves in thinking the irish construction process is a lean mean 6 sigma process driven industry.

In otherwords, you should be able to get higher speced housing, continuously improved , without always a need to slap on an increase in the "price" charged to the customer. Just consider the quality ,comfort and spec of your regular car compared to ones built twenty years ago.

The construction of houses brick by brick is a slow labour intensive method , employes many people - suits the state as it mops up lots of semi-skilled labour but has variable outcomes in terms of quality, air tighness etc etc.. Alternative "factory modular" approaches cut out this variation, construction is much faster and quality outcomes are predicatable vs construction regulations.

Factory designed and built housing is common on the continent....looking to the UK for answers isnt always the best place. Vested interests here are opposed to any critical thinking and modular trials here to date are poor.
But Heinz and Hilda are happy in Germany with their modular homes so what is the catch ?
 
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That disparity is driven by the inflation of Capital (wealth) relative to wages. Those who own Capital can buy more capital (houses), those who don't can't. There's a reason we've seen a massive increase in tax receipts from capital intensive industries (Corporation tax) relative to income taxes, despite having very high marginal income taxes. The State then uses those tax receipts to bridge the gap between earned income and capital values, or rents on capital. Those who rely on wages only are disadvantaged. That leads to a bigger State that needs to intervene more and more to provide people with what they used to be able to provide for themselves. That leads to a kind of poverty trap.
It's not just houses that have inflated, it's all capital items. Look at the stock market gains over the last 2 decades. You now have to earn way more to buy a house, but the same can be said for most Stocks. That's the reason for the issue you are highlighting. The only solution is to close the gap between wages and Capital values.
 
Those who rely on wages only are disadvantaged. That leads to a bigger State that needs to intervene more and more to provide people with what they used to be able to provide for themselves. That leads to a kind of poverty trap.
I think you are getting to the very knub of the issue here. The huge corporation tax receipts have facilitated the creation of a large state sector in Ireland. We all know that the state is highly inefficient in delivering services and infrastructure. Thus government is by far the worst in that regard, it has built virtually nothing. Even the infamous ff government of bertie and Brian cowen built a huge amount of infrastructure and housing. That big state is interfering in the private market by buying up housing , renting hotels and giving out cash for hap payments. The middle income workers are competing against all this and only lately belatedly they have begun to lift them a bit out of the high income tax bracket
 
Yes, but it's an international problem. That's why so many countries are facing housing affordability issues, many worse than ours.
What makes it bad here is a fast growing population, a booming economy which further inflates capital relative to earned income, very high income taxes, very low property taxes, low levels of labour mobility due to bad infrastructure and the fact that we are an island, a very inefficient construction sector and an inefficient State sector. There are probably more but they are exacerbating factors, not the root cause.
 
Right on the point. The government is not building or creating. It's is simply purchasing in the private market. Therefore it's the biggest competitor to individuals in the private market. It's flooding public tax money into private markets.

It doesn't have to be like this. The government can build. It can compete amongst the private market. Take private health insurance for example. VHI is still a non profit semi state which effectively competes amongst for profit companies.

As for an example of a city where this works relatively well is Vienna. Public housing competes with private. Vast amounts of people live in public housing out of choice and pay 20-25% of income on rent as affordable. Like most of the world they are having some issues keeping up with the required demand at the moment and what they consider a long waiting list is one to two years.

Of course many people are averse to this solution as it is seen as too socialist. However what we have isn't free market at all. It's arguably still socialist as the government are using taxes to lease/buy homes to rent out, only for those on a select income range, competing directly against tax payers who don't benefit from these schemes. It's socialist for only some of the population.
 
The government can't even build a children's hospital.
The government isn't building the new children's hospital. BAM is after a tender. Same as with public housing the government is simply purchasing it from the private market. In fact it's actually a great example of how relying on the private market for everything isn't a panacea.

The difference being most people aren't in the market for a children's hospital themselves. They are however in the market for the houses the government is competing against them to buy/lease.

I think when people say the government should be building something, they mean a state or semi state company should be building it.
 
BAM also building the intel fab34 facility, a 17billion investment, it dwarfs the national children's hospital, biggest private investment in history of state Therefore blaming everything on private contractors which varadker tried to do and then backed off when bam threatened to pull out doesn't wash. Alot of delays in intel construction and housing were caused by government shutting down the whole construction industry during covid, which nobody else did to that extent. The problems with children's hospital can be layer at state own tendering and procurement policies