Yes, to work in IT, Call Centres and deliver take away. Not to build houses.
It probably would but I agree that the State, both at a policy level and at an institutional level, will just act as the next choke point.
Agreed.
Housing issues - Budget 2024
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T McGibney
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Immigrants go where the jobs are. The Irish who slaved as navvies in the 50s didn't turn up at the sites looking for work because they fancied it was a handy number.
It has been such since 2009.
That's the point; there's jobs everywhere.
We don't need navvies, we need skilled people.
In so many areas of the economy and society.
T McGibney
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Not really, it's not brain surgery we're talking about. Work on a construction site for a while and you'll soon acquire marketable skills. Many of the navvies started with only the shirts on their backs and ended up very wealthy.
You need years of training and experience to be a proficient plumber, plasterer, carpenter or brick layer. Don't underestimate the skills of people who work with their hands.
It's not like just adding stuff up
T McGibney
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You need years of training and experience to be a proficient accountant. But spend 12-18 months working hard in an accounting practice and you'll pick up skills that will enable you become immediately employable elsewhere. Ditto with construction work.You need years of training and experience to be a proficient plumber, plasterer, carpenter or brick layer. Don't underestimate the skills of people who work with their hands.
It's not like just adding stuff up
I agree, but construction is dangerous and if done wrong can result in the construction of dangerous buildings. We need more structural engineers, wet trades and heavy equipment drivers, the latter being a particularly dangerous job in that it can cause injury or death to others. It takes a lot longer than 18 months to become an expert excavator driver.
T McGibney
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Every occupation is dangerous in terms of both personal safety and the consequences of mistakes. Yet all people can get trained on the job in almost all sectors.
No it's not. Building sites and fishing boats are particularly dangerous. Office work isn't dangerous at all.
You are tens of thousands of times more likely to be killed on a building site than in a hospital or healthcare setting. You are even less likely to be killed in an office.
If a teacher screws up a kid can't colour inside the lines or know how an oxbow lake is formed. If an accountant screws up money can be lost. If a heavy vehicle driver or someone working at a height screws up lives can be lost.
That's not true either. I'd never be an accountant or musician or language teacher, no matter how much training I did. I work with plenty of people who I wouldn't trust with my life, not matter what training they received. When you are working on foot beside an excavator you are literally trusting the driver with your life. When you are working a hundred feet in the air an a scaffolding platform you are trusting the scaffolders who erected it with your life.
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T McGibney
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I'm opting out of this rabbithole discussion.
Young Irish ‘failing to launch adult lives’: 68% of people in late 20s still living with parents
Young Irish ‘failing to launch adult lives’: 68% of people in late 20s still living with parents
Opposition parties say latest Eurostat data paints ‘bleak picture’ and shows for many ‘Ireland feels like no country for young people’
"According to Eurostat, the statistical body of the European Union, 68 per cent of people aged between 25-29 in Ireland still live at home. This figure is nearly 26 per cent higher than the EU average of 42.1."
I think you underestimate the problem........a healthy society at a basic reproduction, household formation, headship rate does not look like this...and a wealthy country with our GDP does not look like this....it is not normal to have 68% of people in there late 20's living with their parents.
Whoever talked about house prices......I couldnt care less about house prices........its housing supply...but more importantly the installed base of accommodation on the island of ireland relative to our population, GDP and demographics is wholly inadequate...the 68% above proves it but analysis done by Ronan Lyons has shown that relative to 1st world norms Ireland is 'short' significant aspects of housing infrastructure & types.....that shortage shows itself not in house prices (which are actually being kept in check by macro prudential rules x4 LTI) but in the part of the housing market that acts without any price caps and is a clearer indication of the problem and that are unconstrained by LTI rules and that's RPZ free rents.
This isnt QE - its chronic, undersupply - QE doesnt push up rents you see........your getting confused......house prices go up in ZIRP because the cashflows of underlying assets become more valuable to owners of that asset as the discount rate has fallen.......however QE/zirp have close to nothing to do with rents.....rents are the perfect interaction between supply/demand......and rents relative to incomes have exploded and thats with 68% of people in their late 20's living at home with their parents.
This I agree with - but what are you gonna do force people to make bigger house sizes.....you have to deal with the way the world is.....and the reality is house sizes are falling so we need more and variant ie. smaller house types
Household size, as in, the number of people living in a house.
Young Irish ‘failing to launch adult lives’: 68% of people in late 20s still living with parents
Young Irish ‘failing to launch adult lives’: 68% of people in late 20s still living with parents
Opposition parties say latest Eurostat data paints ‘bleak picture’ and shows for many ‘Ireland feels like no country for young people’www.irishtimes.com
"According to Eurostat, the statistical body of the European Union, 68 per cent of people aged between 25-29 in Ireland still live at home. This figure is nearly 26 per cent higher than the EU average of 42.1."
I think you underestimate the problem........a healthy society at a basic reproduction, household formation, headship rate does not look like this...and a wealthy country with our GDP does not look like this....it is not normal to have 68% of people in there late 20's living with their parents.
It';s a big problem. No argument there. It's just not a crisis.
You are fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the housing market in Ireland. We are part of an international market in a way that we weren't in 2008. Prices are not set by domestic demand. They are set by the return on capital invested in the sector in that zero interest rate environment you mentioned. That and QE have devalued money, and therefore labour, relative to capital. The domestic buyer is competing with international investors who have oceans of QE money looking for a return in a low interest rate, low to negative bond rate, environment.
We, along with the rest of the developed world have seen a housing price boom for those reasons. We and the rest of the world are chasing the supply of labour and raw materials to build more housing. We have the disadvantage of being an island so labour flows are more difficult and transport is more expensive. We have a bad quality Public Sector who are failing the citizens they are paid to help. We have a large increase in our population and a reduction the average household size. Those factors exacerbate the problem and lead to that shortage of housing. That leads to high rents.
Increasing the LTI multiple to X8 won't build more housing, it will just make the housing we are building more expensive.
Yes, I've made that point here before. Cash looking for a return has flooded into the Irish and international housing sectors. That's what pushed up prices. A net yield of 2.5% on property is fantastic when Bonds returns are negative. QE just means there's far more of that cash chasing the same number of homes.
Our house prices are around the European average relative to income. Our rents are far higher that the European average.
As Leo said, the issue is the average household size has decreased, not the average house size.
That decrease has consumed around half of all the housing we have build in the last 20 years and is a far bigger contributory factor to our housing shortage than population increase. Higher property taxes which encourage people to down size or, even better, aa empty bedroom tax, would help.
ok its a problem then @Purple
.....but lets say its a problem which exhibits via stats one of the worse in the OECD..I guess your central feeling is that we have a kind of western world 'problem' and my point via crisis is that we have an idiosyncratic problem which seperates OUR problem from the standard inflation of assets problem in the rest of the western world.....sure homes have got expensive everywhere but there is enough types of homes as evidenced by headhsip rates, people moving out of their parents at normal its just that homes are consuming alot of more of peoples of salaries....what we have unequivocally in Ireland is much different......it is not expensive homes.......or homes via rent or purchaser that are consuming historically high proportions of peoples incomes......its that signficant proportion of demand is not getting to PARTICIPATE or put another way CONSUME normal housing products....like a person in their late 20's not living in the bedroom they were in when they were five.
See this isn't just a QE or price problem...like in much of the OECD......its an absence of the phyisical tenure types.....and its a much different problem.
See you just dead wrong here and I'm glad you brought it up........you have the same mental block that many seem to think that when a cuckoo fund or international asset manager buys an Irish apartment or home that somehow it disappears into the metaverse.......nope its still there, its still a part of the Irish housing market.....a renter is in there now.......and I'll point you back to my point above.......the issue in Irish housing.....isnt a cuckoo fund which in your mental model seems to somehow substract from the housing market.....its simply the product isnt there........and you get 68% of peeps in their late 20's at home in their teenage bedrooms....cuckoo funds and international capital has zero to do with it.....in fact we'd have LESS housing if it wasn't for their injection of outside capital which supported much of the marginal apartment construction in Dublin city over the last half decade which ADDED to our installed base of homes. It was good thing.
Or put another way......all the international capital has run away from building/greenlighting apartment assets yielding 3% in Dublin becuase interrest have risen.......as a result alot of these projects are now not going to get built......in your mental model it is now good that international capital isnt coming into Dublin apartment market competiting with domestic buyers?????.....and thats where your dead wrong........they werent competing they were additive....they were allowing things to get built such that they would add inventory into the rental market.......but I guess you might be one of those folks who thinks there's only one property market....where a buyer in a home is superior to a renter....which again is dead wrong......THE home is the important thing and I care very little wether its a renter or buyer sitting it in.
Thats a wonderful insight from Leo - welcome to the real world where things change and where a governments principal responsibility is to spot where the ball is going and change accordingly. It is in the nature of economies like Ireland where there is increasing wealth & increasing urbanization for the household sizes to decrease.
And to end on high note - you and I are in crushing crushing agreement on this one.....indeed a jacked up property tax that was meaningful enough to encourage the best and highest use of a property would be the way I fund the tax lost from scrapping the VAT on new homes. So glad we agree on one thing!
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Have you actually looked at the OECD data?Ah This post will be deleted if not edited immediately - ok its a problem then @Purple
That's the same problem that's faced by much of the OECD. We have disadvantages in terms of location, population growth, incompetent public administration, lack of economies of scale and a historically dysfunctional construction sector. That and we started from a low base in that we had just about the worst property crash in the history of the modern world.
Where did I say that international capital has reduced the housing stock? I've said the opposite many times on this forum. You are misunderstand my point completely. What I am pointing out is that housing prices are not being driven my demand over the last 10 years, they've been driven by an increase in capital supply. No matter how many houses we built it wouldn't have outpaced the increase in available capital and so would not have reduced prices. Young buyers were not just competing with domestic buyers, they were competing with international capital. An increase in the returns on Bonds will have a bigger impact on house prices than an increase in supply as once that capital can get a better return in other safe assets it will move to those assets. Increased interest rates have a similar impact as once the net yield on property internationally goes below central bank interest rates then the same thing happens.
Yep, we need to understand that there is a difference between wealth and income, wealth being the ownership of capital, in this country that's mainly housing, and we need to start taxing wealth.
In my opinion we should strive for a society which strives for equality of opportunity.
That means we should reduce the taxation on the acquisition of wealth (work) and increase taxation on the retention of wealth. I also think that there's something fundamentally wrong when we tax the acquisition of wealth through work at a rate of over 50% but in most cases don't tax the acquisition of wealth through capital appreciation (house price inflation) at all.
I think a lot of this is down to the way in which self employed are treated by both state (historically at least) & secondarily by society.
For a long time, self employed workers were treated as pariahs - accused of being "tax dodgers" (in reality self employment is associated with lower earnings which in turn leads to lower taxation), unable to qualify for many social benefits. To be fair, the governments since 2011 have greatly improved qualifications for basic benefits for self employed, despite huge efforts from the left/trade union movement to block this - I recall hearing horror stories about bust self employed people circa 2010 having to wait for up to a year for means tested unemployment only to be told "no".
I also spent 6 years working as a self employed contractor in IT and came across many people who were actually paying their own employers PRSI to retain benefits, meaning that they had an effective PRSI rate of 15%.
Secondly, banking in this country since the near collapse of the domestic banking sector (& actual collapse of foreign owned domestic banking sector) have been close to excluding sole traders - they are shut out of credit, cannot get mortgages, struggle to get simple forms of credit readily advanced to PAYE workers such as overdrafts, car loans and credit cards.
And then we wonder why people don't want to work in self employed trades.
I took a close to 20k pay cut in 2016 to go back to working as an employee, because I didn't own my own home, and realised I might never do so if I remained self employed, despite much higher earnings. We disincentivise self employment here, and its no surprise that trades that on the large involve self employment have become unattractive to young people to enter.
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