The Housing Crisis - What actions would you take to improve things?

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Purple said:
Great post, sums things up really well. If the State got its act together and planning and infrastructure didn't take so many years then the profit margin would probably double. At the moment it's 15% (or 8% as you pointed out) over 10 years. With a delivery time of 5 years that mezzanine finance isn't costing €30k-€50k per unit , or more, so the net margin would be 20% over 5 years, not 15% over 10 years.
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Right folks think that builder must be making I dunno €30-40k per house....sounds amazing till you realize that said builder started that project at least three if not four years prior........put money out to buy the land probably part equity, part financed....land just sits there costing him money......then they go through planning with architects and engineers and environmental assessments and all the others costs associated with securing planning for a development.......more money out and nothing coming back still.....then you get objections, planning knocks you back for XYZ reason and you've to re-apply.....maybe you get on site eventually....your a small builder so maybe you can only deliver X number of houses per anum...you've got to finance the working capital for the materials going into the build..finance the salaries being paid to the various workers, still no money coming......so now you've got money tied up in the land (for years) now you've got money tied up in bricks, mortar and labor for months and still no money coming in......now you've got to hire Sherry Fitz or whoever to sell it for you and deal with Joe Public (broker fees!!) then you yourself have got to hire your own lawyers to represent the sale (legal fees). Stil no money coming in yet!

Bit labored - but its quite the endeavor to deliver housing in the financial and regulatory environment of Ireland.....the total return amortized over the LIFE of the project (3-4yrs) when you account for the risk being taken is quite poor.

But we know that already. The evidence is in the housing figures. When the various parties of the left go on about greedy developers making outrageous profits I wonder how they square the circle in their minds with the actual reality of chronic undersupply in the market. Their world view is one of profiteers....what I'd say is that if its so profitable.....where all the houses then?
 
TomEdison said:
If those houses are served by roads, connected to sewage, have a public water supply, etc, yes, absolutely there was central planning involved.
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Very many rural houses have no public water or sewage, and even in the towns and cities sewage and water were an afterthought for a lot of the older ones. Including much of Dublin's core- according to the internet Stephen's Green (for example) predates Dublin's sewage system. Many towns around the country were essentially built by the local landlord to serve their estates, when piped water and sewage wasn't even a dream on this island.

The house that I grew up in had no public water supply, the septic tank was an afterthought many decades after construction and it was served by a literal donkey track when it was built. There's still people living there, and it's far from unique outside the pale. Houses of that vintage were built from the stones they cleared from the field, as were the walls of the local fields.

So unless your definition of "central planning" means whatever development the local landlord wanted to finance or permit his tenants to do then not so much, no.

(By that definition my back garden is planned centrally from within my skull...)
 
It's a very, very small fraction of Ireland's housing stock that is not served at all by roads, power, sewage or public water supply. There may be houses that lack one or more of these services; there are very few that lack them all — so few that they are basically irrelevant to the wider issue of the housing crisis in Ireland.

There is no housing market anywhere in the developed world that operates without a significant dependence on central planning.
 
Population is increasing rapidly.

Birth rate is declining steadily.

Immigration accounts for 12% of the population.
 
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ClubMan said:
"Immigrants" also includes Irish citizens returning from abroad to live back in Ireland.
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20% of the people who reside in this country were born in a foreign country. Many immigrants are Irish citizens.

80% of the usually resident population was born in Ireland. This represents a decrease of 3% since 2016.

  • The number of people who usually lived in Ireland but were born elsewhere stood at 20% of the population.
  • This represented 1,017,437 people, an increase of 207,031 from six years previously.

In my view that is a good thing.
 
Purple said:
n my view that is a good thing
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The problem is we Irish born are very slow in accepting there is a taxpayers cost involved in bedding them into our country,
For the most part they new Irish in our service and welfare industry are at a big disadvantage when it comes to owning there own homes because they do not have family chipping in to help them buy a house or apartment to get on the property ladder,
 
bkenn14 said:
The problem is we Irish born are very slow in accepting there is a taxpayers cost involved in bedding them into our country,
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The vast majority are working and paying tax. One in three jobs in the "Silicone Docks" is filled by an foreign born person. They are more likely to be working age than the Irish born population and so improve the dependency ratio.
At a macro level there is no economic argument against immigration. None.
 
Purple
I agree,
Just adding lots are not working in silicone dock they are spread around every county in the service and welfare industry lots of times in less secure employment ,
I know employment security is getting better all of the time but it is a factor if trying to get on the housing ladder,
 
bkenn14 said:
The problem is we Irish born are very slow in accepting there is a taxpayers cost involved in bedding them into our country,
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The real problem in my view is that we are awful at long term planning and implentation. Between censuses (censii??) 2006 and 2011 the population increase by 340k (from 4.24 million to 4.58 million), a period that covered the crash and an awful lot of outward migration. That's over 100k homes at average household sizes. A clear and obvious demand for 20k new homes a year when things were at their worst in terms of housing demand. And the government responded to this with...nothing....actually much worse than nothing: they started planning to demolish existing homes: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-euro... announced,property bust and financial crisis.
  • If government at all levels can't deduce the blindingly obvious implications of data points like this, the housing crisis is what you get. Could say the same about demographics and capacity for training new healthcare professionals I suppose. And teachers/schools. And public transport. Could go on all day really.
 
Purple said:
At a macro level there is no economic argument against immigration
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In a situation where significant areas of the country cannot accommodate new housing development because of creaking water infrastructure, inward migration to those areas (from within Ireland as well as from elsewhere) is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
 
T McGibney said:
In a situation where significant areas of the country cannot accommodate new housing development because of creaking water infrastructure, inward migration to those areas (from within Ireland as well as from elsewhere) is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
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Sure, but the solution there is to fix the infrastructure.
The problem is the State sector, not the immigrants.
 
Purple said:
immigrants are not making it worse
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Are they making it less of a problem, or are they making no difference?

If the answer to either question is no, please explain how, as a person who moves from rural Cavan to Galway is demonstrably adding to the spectacularly bad housing shortage in Galway, which is considerably worse than the situation pertaining in rural Cavan.
 
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T McGibney said:
Are they making it less or a problem, or are they making no difference?
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Many of them are working in construction and on infrastructure. Without them the modest improvements in infrastructure would be more modest.

While I don't think the data is available to answer your question accurately it is broadly accurate to say that immigrants are more likely to work than Irish people since they are more likely to be of working age (few pensioners immigrate to rich countries) and so they are increasing the amount of economic output per capita.
T McGibney said:
If the answer to either question is no, please explain how, as a person who moves from rural Cavan to Galway is demonstrably adding to the spectacularly bad housing shortage in Galway, which is considerably worse than the situation pertaining in rural Cavan.
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A working person who lived in Cavan and moved to Galway is already working in Ireland. They are not changing the overall national economic picture.
However if they were a newly qualified bricklayer and they moved to Galway to build houses then they would not be adding to Galway's housing shortage.
 
Purple said:
They are not changing the overall national economic picture.
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We're not talking about the overall national economic picture though. We're talking about a chronic housing shortage that is considerably worse in some areas than in others.

A guy who moves to Galway to build houses is of course adding to Galway's housing shortage. If he goes home to Ballygar or Ballinasloe in the evenings, he isn't.
 
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