IT opinion: "lack of housing supply is not the problem"
- Thread starter Brendan Burgess
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Have you got a link to that? It seems logical and actually self evident when one thinks about the clearances of overcrowded buildings into far less dense suburban dwellings.
Yes - its here
Not only did we have 40k-50k emigrating from the 1930s right into the early 1990s, we regard people under 30 as not actually being "in need" of housing. And then up to a period between 1985 and 2000 we institutionalised anybody "difficult" - we tore up lone parent families, handing the children into the care of orphanages where they became playthings for some awful lay or religious people running them, gave them over to middle class families for adoption, corralled lone mothers to prison like institutions & stuffed disabled & mentally ill people into antiquated asylums to be forgotten. There were 34k members of religious orders living in communities in 1967, and 412 priests in 1965. The practice of social housing lone parents that began around 1980 was accompanied by howls of rage. And right up to the 90s anybody moving out of the family home to rent their own place in their 20s was seen as "selfish" instead of "staying at home to help your Mam and Dad".Yes, a few "will somebody please think about the children!" emotive talking points really help these discussions.
Thankfully we don't do really stupid things like that anymore.
And those projects were in the 60's and 70's. Our housing and spending policies between the 30's and the 70's were a disaster and kept this country impoverished. The reason we didn't have homelessness back then was because 40,000 or so young people emigrated each year. In the early 80's most homes in this country didn't have central heating. Much of the social housing we were building was worse than the emergency accommodation we have now. That was because of the stupid policies of investing so much in housing and not in education and health. It is only since we stopped doing that, that we have become rich.
So that we don't repeat the moronic mistakes of the past. We want massive social transfers (the highest in Europe), massive healthcare spending (amongst the highest in the world), a good education system and all the other things that developed countries have. If we stopped doing all of that then we could build houses like we did in the 60's and 70's. Still think it's a good idea?
The result was an artificial dampening on housing demand, & heavy politicisation of housing allocation for the social housing that was there.
We were not in the business of, for example, housing single people other than the elderly & disabled, to this day nearly 2/3 of ALL waiting list households comprises of single person households.
We have very much changed how we live as a society and that requires much more housing than we had in the past, not just for a 1.5 million increase in population but very different standards.
As @Purple correctly points out, it was common to build a new build with no central heating. (My parents for example bought such a home). The new build standards we have now are so luxurious they would were regarded as "luxury homes" even 10 years ago when such homes started to creep into the market. One of our issues now is that the starting point for building a home requires far more effort & planning than it did even 17 years ago. Our homes are to be bigger and have efficiency standards only a luxury home would have had even 10 years ago.
Agreed - and that 40k generally disappeared out of each census so they and their needs couldn't be counted either! So it became "I'm alright jack,"
The reason we allow councils to snap up existing stock is because its become so difficult, even for, if not ever more so for, local authorities to build.
Even for AHBs, same, a colleague repeatedly complains about a plan to build apartments for the elderly beside Sean Moore Park in Tallaght because "they are not really going to be social housing, they are going to be sold off I bet" or they are "not suitable" whatever that means.
Up near me a plan to build 60 small apartments for "sheltered housing for the over 55s" met with hysterical screams of "its going to be housing sex offenders" for some truly bizarre reason.
What sort of luxuries?
NoRegretsCoyote
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No we didn’t.
Net migration was negative in the 50s and late 80s.
The 70s for example saw lots of inward migration and lots of associated housebuilding.
Three bathrooms in the average new semi-d, A BER rating which means triple glazed and air tight, ground source heat pumps, solar panels.
If you take an average figure for each decade it's accurate to say that there was significant net emigration right up to the end of the1980's with the exception of the 1970's during which time we were overheating the economy with massive injections of borrowed money in what was a period of remarkably stupid pro-cyclical economic policies, unrivalled until the latter Bertie years. Without that Banana Republic style borrowing we'd have had net emigration in the 70's as well.
It's worth noting that over the last 40 years periods of high house building here are usually followed by a massive recession.
It might have been a slightly net positive number but "lots" is stretching it. There was lots of house building though the dwellings per 1000 people in 1981 was 304, up from 265 in 1971. It's now over 410, an increase of more than one third. If there was no housing shortage in 1980 then there's certainly none now. The figure peaked in 2011, after the crash, with 435 dwellings per 1000 people but more than 15% of them (over 330,000 housing units) were vacant.
That data kind of backs up the title of the article that this thread quotes but not for the reasons the author gives.
The real issue is household size. More than half of all the housing we have built over the last 20 years has been consumed without housing any extra people and that's down to a reduction in average household size. If we had the same average household size now (2.74) as we did in 1971 (4.1) we'd need around 650,000 to 700,000 fewer homes. Source. It was normal to have three generations living in the same household 30 years ago. It was normal for children to share a bedroom. Now it's some sort of gross violation of their human rights. Maybe people aren't homeless, maybe they just don't want to live with their Mammy anymore.
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Bathrooms were part of the banning of Bedsits. Indirectly had to influence things.
We also had population growth, and the traditional "family" blurred with societal change.
T McGibney
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This wasn't going on to any great extent post-1985. The Haughey government that came to power in February 1987 made the dismantling of the old institutions one of their top health priorities, "care in the community" becoming a new buzzword.
Correct but that really didn't come to pass for about another 15 years. I visited St Ita's in Portrane in 1999-2000, and was horrified to see that they still had long term residents there in the "red brick." The last "Magdalene Laundry" closed in 1996.
‘Brain drain’ fuelled by accommodation crisis as young professionals seek lower living costs abroad
An accommodation crisis is fuelling a brain drain in some sectors as an exodus of young professionals depart for the UK and beyond, according to a major recruiter.
m.independent.ie
Interesting article about young professionals leaving due to lack of accommodation. The obvious destinations like Australia, Canada and Dubai crop up but also brexit Britain. Apparently London is proving attractive for legal professionals due to availability of accommodation and higher salaries. It also says that working from home not widely available for these roles in London but that is not a big factor for these professionals. Is ireland in danger of losing all the young talent for oldies left behind working at home.
The report isn't published on their website yet, but drawing such a conclusion on a comparison of numbers of new professionals looking for employment between April and September seems a bit of a stretch to me.
No, because a very high percentage of these workers come home within a short period of time. An awful lot of migration is temporary migration to high wage, (relatively) low tax economies like Australia, but only on temporary visas. I suspect many of those workers are both building savings AND work experience they might not get here. Like big fuss recently about 500 or so teaching jobs being unfilled, but when I looked at the teach.ie vacancies only about 20 or so of those jobs were permanent full time roles. Entry level roles for healthcare here are clearly unable to match the equivalent in other countries hence the huge outflow.‘Brain drain’ fuelled by accommodation crisis as young professionals seek lower living costs abroad
An accommodation crisis is fuelling a brain drain in some sectors as an exodus of young professionals depart for the UK and beyond, according to a major recruiter.
Interesting article about young professionals leaving due to lack of accommodation. The obvious destinations like Australia, Canada and Dubai crop up but also brexit Britain. Apparently London is proving attractive for legal professionals due to availability of accommodation and higher salaries. It also says that working from home not widely available for these roles in London but that is not a big factor for these professionals. Is ireland in danger of losing all the young talent for oldies left behind working at home.
I'm bewildered as to where these "lower living costs" are in London and Australia, as I lived in London myself and found it FAR more expensive than even Dublin with almost zero regulation of the rented sector. Have been to Australia a few times too, and was also shocked at how expensive it is - though typical Irish skill sets will mostly get well paid jobs there. Still saw a lot of Irish living in backpackers hostels who were pretty much slumming it though.‘Brain drain’ fuelled by accommodation crisis as young professionals seek lower living costs abroad
An accommodation crisis is fuelling a brain drain in some sectors as an exodus of young professionals depart for the UK and beyond, according to a major recruiter.
Interesting article about young professionals leaving due to lack of accommodation. The obvious destinations like Australia, Canada and Dubai crop up but also brexit Britain. Apparently London is proving attractive for legal professionals due to availability of accommodation and higher salaries. It also says that working from home not widely available for these roles in London but that is not a big factor for these professionals. Is ireland in danger of losing all the young talent for oldies left behind working at home.
There's a growing crisis with housing almost everywhere in the developed world - similar causes, just that Ireland's collapse in lending after 2009 saw us get hit earlier. One of the reasons Jacinta Arden lost the election in NZ was because she promised 100,000 homes in 2017, and by 2022 "KiwiBuild" had delivered just 1300.
Zoning, planning, change of use & disputes over how much of a shortage exists is nearly everywhere now. Countries with greatest levels of inward and outbound migration & restrictive zoning are all worst hit. Nearly every western country is underestimating real housing demand.
Yep, a massive increase in money supply over the last 15 years has led to a corresponding increase in capital prices and therefore a reduction in the value of labour relative to capital.
Low interest rates meant a disproportionate flow of capital into property instead of bonds.
Anyone who thinks our housing price problems were caused by our government is an idiot.
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