Housing in Ireland: A broken system.

Indeed.
The point is well illustrated by someone who makes a large investment in forestry which generates an income tax-free annual income for themselves. This will dramatically pull down their effective tax rate without affecting their marginal tax rate.

Their big forestry investment shouldn't affect their calculation of the after-tax return on their letting of a property.
 
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T McGibney said:
Is it your argument that a corrupt construction industry has conspired to prevent itself from building houses and apartments for all of the last 15 years?

If not, what is your argument, as I'm baffled?
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The industry & its related vested partners have plenty of potential to reform efficiency - the housing system here is not world class by any metric.
Lots of piggies have their noses in the trough.

Baked in inflated costs from start to finish are such extraordinary levels to have choked demand , the product is out of reach except for the very fortunate..I mean 100k salary isnt enough, what a joke.

No need to be baffled, look elsewhere for solutions.
 
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There is limited potential to reform practices when a sector is almost entirely suffocated by Government edict.
 
Ajax123 said:
Along with it the neo liberal idea of selling all the social homes and not providing anymore.
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In Ireland the first sales of council houses were by the Fine Gael / Labour coalition of the 1970s. It was largely a Labour policy. There was nothing neoliberal about it. Working class people were simply unable to obtain mortgages in those days, so selling council housing was the only way for many workers to obtain the benefits of home ownership. In those days Ireland’s unemployment rate increased from 5% to 16%, and workers emigrated mainly to the UK.Labour Market - CSO - Central Statistics Office This reduced demand for council housing so there was no need to build any.

In 1984 a ‘surrender grant’ was introduced to encourage tenants to surrender their tenancy. Now while this was mainly to encourage better off tenants to buy a house in the private sector, it also had the effect of freeing up council houses. So again no need to build.
 
@PMU, I think neo-liberal is a horribly misused phrase in this country. I read the Irish Times' resident Shinner Spokesperson accuse Leo Varadkar of being neo-liberal a while ago. It actually made me laugh out loud while simultaneously being shocked that such drivel could be published in a newspaper.
We should be encouraging private home ownership. There's nothing neo-liberal about it.

There's something disturbingly totalitarian about people who think it's a good thing for the State to own and control more and more of the housing market.
 
I think you've some good points here - but I wanted to jump in and explain the rationale for mixed tenureship (or part V in itself). There's a perception that its been done in some way to promote a right wing ideology around housing, but for decades there was a particular issue with large social housing schemes degrading very quickly into considerable levels of social deprivation with anti social behaviour, crime and lack of opportunity. Ballymun is the classic example (the location and collapse in Dublin city councils maintenance exacerbated that) but the better example is the largest scheme which finished in the late 1970s in Limerick with over 1200 homes. In 1982 then tv presenter Mary McAleese said it was a bomb waiting to go off and by 1992 local rep Jim Kemmy was raising the issue of boarded up homes in the estate in the Dail:
Academic studies in the late 90s started to point at monoculture tenures as being significant factor in the degradation of such estates (as well as their considerable size and often poor locations). So there was an increasing unease about a continued policy, especially once the local loan fund was abolished in 1987 during that years new government round of cuts, about building new large council estates. And of course, by 1987, the lending scheme vanished making social build entirely dependent on central government largesse.
Also in the late 90s there was a legitimate complaint that the state was not capturing any value from land value increases as a result of planning being granted and something was needed to give the state a stake.
That something became Part V - it was not designed, as the false narrative driven by some commentators like to insinuate, by ideology but by a desire to give the state a piece of the additional value.
It was quite controversial at the time with even a suggestion that it might be unconstitutional
Of course, we do know that later in the tiger era, there were cases of councils allowing developers to "buy out" the council's part V commitment or relocating their part V obligations to a different development (as happened in Malahide where the part V obligations were delivered at the other end of the county in Balbriggan). The general purpose however, was NOT to displace council building, but to give social benefit back through the development process.

This is a good thing - but mixed tenureship was long prior to that pushed by research that suggested that the social and economic issues resulting from very large public builds could be avoided by mixing social builds into mixed tenure areas where there would be "eyes on the street" as such, and social pressure from better off residents to reduce anti social behaviour, and access to resources needed to get on in life.

So I think mixed tenure in general is good - from what I observe, how different councils do this can vary widely - some might randomly mix in the part V units with other units while others may pick a particular type of unit (for example 1 bed apartments, which are an area of particular shortage for social homes) and concentrate (eg have heard of apartment developments where the social was all in a particular block, for example).
But in general it gets away from the bad old days where students in schools in some areas applied for jobs using their teachers addresses so they wouldn't be ignored because they came from a particular area. (I kid you not, I worked with a teacher who used to do this for her students in Ballymun).

Because the celtic tiger building boom was so pervasive in the wake of part V, the unintended consequences was that councils, getting a bonanza of social homes built for them, reduced their own housing development. This was not, and never was the purpose of Part V!

Similarly, as @Ajax123 has correctly pointed out, this results in new build developments having very considerable differences in housing costs between social/purchase/affordable/cost-rental.

I think part of our problem at the moment is that targeted measures such as cost rental are "targetted" at a vague segment of the population and so the overall design has unintended consequences of considering inappropriate methods of calculating "affordability" designed for mortgage applications, not rents.
No landlord is going to ask you "can you afford it" when they put up your rent.
Bear in mind also that these are new builds, in areas of considerable demand, and are almost certainly considerably higher standard - think A1 ratings, heat pumps and solar panels.
But crucially, "cost rental" is designed as an alternative to open market rentals for a large segment of people who generally cannot buy because their ability to save has been drained clean through years of market rents. It is priced on the basis of a 40 year term and bear in mind also that these are usually high end market homes that would otherwise sell at higher prices because they are a premium product.

Again - the disappearance of the so-called "starter home" is itself the unintended consequence of a housing policy that wants to mitigate against climate change AND the impact of "cowboy building" leading to defects at the same time - there is no such thing as a free lunch there - if you want defect free, carbon neutral homes, then making it as standard effectively makes the building of "starter homes" unviable. My parents were able to buy a brand new build with no central heating system whatsoever and no fixed heating methods in any room other than the sitting and living rooms which had open fires in 1968 - you cannot do that now! In 1994 the house I bought decades later was built with storage heaters downstairs - even then highly unusual for a new build which at that time usually had oil fired central heating unless you were one of the lucky few in an area already piped with gas.

We are trying to do too much and at the same time live with the consequences of a significant downturn which eviscerated out banking sector and reduced lending to individual home buyers to a fraction of what was even normal in the 1980s. (For example, bridging loans, common at the time, have vanished).

With regard to cost rental - I would say that the oversubscription of every single scheme would suggest that there is considerable demand, but I would agree that eligibility should be based on what applicants currently pay on rent and household needs rather than a mortgage application like system which excludes many.
That said - you have to compare apples with apples and if you look at the same areas, you'll see similar rents for what frankly, are often poorly maintained older properties, which is why these schemes are being oversubscribed. And in the long term, the cost rental system will prove itself - as long as we don't fall into the trap of offering intergenerational tenancies to the adult children of current tenants in 20 or 30 years.
 
But do we really want more substandard homes? I mean, the debate on bedsits often missed out on the point that it was a very desirable form of housing for young people because it offered independence for young renters at the time they couldn't afford to buy or rent something nicer, but the UK has a horrendous problem with substandard social homes that there seems to be some evidence of it going to the point that tenants are dying from diseases caused by failures of their social landlords to maintain the properties to an adequate level.
You can sure build lots of terrible homes - but end up paying for it through the health service or worse still, compensation claims for illness and death caused by same.
 
You are talking about A1 or A2 rated new builds tho - a lot of the same tenure mixes occur organically over time as tenants rent privately owned properties, and now we have tenant-in-situ schemes where effectively these are purchased to become social homes.
There's also a big question over the role of the state in buying out of the private sector to try to boolster its own stock rather than building - and that perhaps, is the bigger policy question. Should the state be buying private homes, new or otherwise, at all?
I read earlier this week, and its probably correct even going on part V alone, that the state buys - directly or indirectly - 40 times the proportion of housing that institutions, commonly labelled "vulture funds" whether they are or not, buy.
 
Church of Ireland still actually provide cheap or free housing for some non clergy staff.
Also look where that estate is relative to the proposed Metro line - its probably one of only about 4 housing estates in the town that the Metro line is that close to on the same side of the road. It was a risky buy for a private buyer. I was very surprised to see these built at all.
 
Well yes, but unless you got one of these in the past ten years, they are not always great homes
 
Again, I go back to the intended purpose of Part V - its the state to "capture value" in planning, rather than letting all the benefit go to the developer.
I agree that its clumsy and ends up with unintended consequences.
 
They were not "moved" - a segment got social housing. Some emigrated and some, like my paternal grandparents, bought their own home from private developers. (My grandfather was a plumber who spent the war moving around the UK repairing bomb damaged drainage systems).
There was still people living in appalling conditions in tenements as late as the 1960s. Those who got lucky and got council homes earlier on did a lot better than those at the tail end of tenement living, who ended up in the very worst estates in outer suburbs with few opportunities.
 
That's a trap tho - if you spend all your time and money at a time of vast population growth on older homes needing very considerable investment, or chasing the tails of owners who don't want to use their properties in the way the state or society wants, you are going to consume more effort than simply building and incentivising building new homes.
 
The objective of retrofitting is to help the country meet its climate control commitments - it may have the effect of helping to prevent older homes falling into disrepair but that's not the primary goal.
And again - unintended consequences.
 
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