IT opinion: "lack of housing supply is not the problem"

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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.
You're contradicting yourself there.

The massive increase in money supply didn't happen by accident. (Nor did the increasing scarcity of new housing over the past 15 years.)
 
You're contradicting yourself there.

The massive increase in money supply didn't happen by accident. (Nor did the increasing scarcity of new housing over the past 15 years.)
I didn’t say it happened by accident.
It was a deliberate policy to bail ourselves out of the last crash and then to avoid a Covid lockdown recession when we closed down the global economy for two years.
 
I didn’t say it happened by accident.
It was a deliberate policy to bail ourselves out of the last crash and then to avoid a Covid lockdown recession when we closed down the global economy for two year

It was caused by government though.
 
It was caused by the Fed, the ECB and every other central bank in the developed world.
Yes, Governments and their institutions.

Meanwhile our government brought in laws to constructively outlaw housebuilding and residential property investment just as the population was rising. Genius move.
 
It was caused by the Fed, the ECB and every other central bank in the developed world.
I fully agree, and greatly worsened by extreme measures here such as insisting on a 20% deposit for all buyers, thus shutting about 80% of all FTBs out of the housing market for years. They only reversed that measure under political pressure once home prices had been going upwards. A lot of populists spout the conspiracy theory that "they" want everyone to not own anything - and this is exactly where that comes from. An untrained eye would assume that "they" (aka "the banks") engineered this scenario deliberately to prevent people from owning their own homes, rather than the "saving you from yourself" position that CBs typically epouse.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that the 20% deposit rate has remained for upgraders or that finance for development is far more limited and conditional than it was 20 years ago.
 
They most certainly did.

As I've noted here on perhaps dozens of occasions previously.
"They" didn't - what they tried to do was bring up standards in both finance and construction because of a well founded perception (thanks to pyrite, Priory Hall etc) that what was in place was inadequate, and of course a longer running concern about politics being interfered with by developers intent on sponsoring a party that was deeply favourable to their conditions. All 3 together alongside a deep recession crushed the sector, though you could also argue that overreach by the construction sector & their financiers in the banking sector brought much of it on themselves.
 
"They" didn't - what they tried to do was bring up standards in both finance and construction because of a well founded perception (thanks to pyrite, Priory Hall etc) that what was in place was inadequate, and of course a longer running concern about politics being interfered with by developers intent on sponsoring a party that was deeply favourable to their conditions. All 3 together alongside a deep recession crushed the sector, though you could also argue that overreach by the construction sector & their financiers in the banking sector brought much of it on themselves.
No, they made the warm, cosy, efficient and inexpensive home that I built in 1999/2000, along with tens of thousands of similar others, before and after, actually illegal to replicate.

Within less than 2 years, we were experiencing the first signs of housing shortages, which have now morphed into full-scale crisis.
 
I read the this morning. It would appear that even if we can build enough houses the average person won't be able to afford them in the Dublin area.

"The average cost of delivering a new three-bed semidetached home in Dublin has risen by €90,000 to €461,000 in just three and a half years, according to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI). The group also calculated that first-time buyers, individuals or couples, purchasing a new three-bed unit in Dublin with a mortgage now needed a minimum total salary of €127,000. Eoin Burke-Kennedy reports."
 
I read the this morning. It would appear that even if we can build enough houses the average person won't be able to afford them in the Dublin area.

"The average cost of delivering a new three-bed semidetached home in Dublin has risen by €90,000 to €461,000 in just three and a half years, according to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI). The group also calculated that first-time buyers, individuals or couples, purchasing a new three-bed unit in Dublin with a mortgage now needed a minimum total salary of €127,000. Eoin Burke-Kennedy reports."
Perhaps we should view this as other cities in Europe do. Dublin is the most expensive city in Ireland. Does everyone have to live there? Or is it a want? If we invested more money into our rail/transport links it might be more productive. London and Paris come to mind.
 
Perhaps we should view this as other cities in Europe do. Dublin is the most expensive city in Ireland. Does everyone have to live there? Or is it a want? If we invested more money into our rail/transport links it might be more productive. London and Paris come to mind.
There was a thread on reddit a couple of weeks ago of JUST couples on 200k+ talking about the difficulty of finding sufficient properties to buy in the 600-900k range. It was just astonishing how many individual posters contributed to the conversation.

There is quite a large group of FTBs and upgraders who have very large incomes and expected to be able to live in South Dublin or leafier north Dublin suburbs. They are largely chasing the upper end of new builds and fighting it out over the dwindling sale stock of 2nd hand homes.

The next cohort below them are on maybe 120k or so combined incomes and have decent savings. They are content to buy second hand homes they then repair and upgrade (SEAI grants are common) or else buy new and put up with living in the outer suburbs, North county Dublin or Kildare/Louth. What's different about the Celtic tiger era is that places with terrible transport are no longer considered (goodbye to Rathcormac, although it may yet take off again) and petrol is 1.80 a litre instead of 1.20 and everyone just HAS to have a huge car (still a lot of people "don't believe" in hybrid never mind electric cars), so the days of having a 50km each way commute isn't tolerable as it was for my generation 20 years ago.

Look where jobs are - while a good few of the "new" jobs created in the past 10 years are back in the city or close to the city there's still an enormous amount of tiger-era industrial estates built on the edge of Dublin, Limerick and Cork which are transport hostile, and difficult to access without a car, and even then only if driving from the right place at the right time and not the other side of the city. There's a massive problem with underdevelopment of jobs outside of transport, retail and logistics further north than Ballycoolin and that's why there's a 2hr tailback on the M50 going south but not north every morning. Remember Gateway 2000? They closed around 2000, but the huge campus they had in Clonshaugh took about 20 years to re-let.

If we cannot create adequate job opportunities in north county Dublin let alone rural Ireland, then we are not going to reverse the trend of moving to Dublin.
 
@lff12, I live on the South of the city and work on the North of the city. It's striking that the traffic is heavier going south in the morning and north in the evening. It's also very noticeable that there are so many empty of very under utilised large industrial units around Ballycoolin.
 
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