Election called for Saturday 8 February

Phoebas

NovemberWren wrote: »

And, are Title Deeds as property, valuable to attaining more further properties later?

I dunno. If you have title deeds on a property but the land is on a short leasehold from the state, then maybe not so much.

smurgen

Phoebas wrote: »

I think we're stuck in crisis mode regarding housing and no party is really addressing this long term.

The model where landlords are in the main individuals who own one or two properties only works where renters are renting short term, until they can afford to buy.
It breaks down when renting becomes something you do forever. It especially breaks down when you have pensioners renting from small time landlords who can decide to sell at the drop of a hat.

True. And if people went into long term renting it would guarantee rental income and reduce costs and risks associated with vacancy along with dysfunctional tenants on the landlords side.
If we were really successful in diversifying personal wealth away from property we could foster a culture of investment in other areas.what we'd start investing in I don't know but I'm thinking it could also be done to help out looming pension crises .That said a significant change in culture like this could take decades.

Yurt2

smurgen wrote: »

The latest David McWilliams podcast made for interesting listening. He talked of the housing situation in Singapore where nearly 80% of the countries housing is social. And before anyone screams socialism. Singapore is one of the most capitalist in the world and regularly tops the global competitiveness polls.

It would be a misnomer to call the Singapore HDB model 'social housing' as we know it. HDB residents own a 100 year lease on the property (they are working out extensions now) and they take out a mortgage on the property, albeit the unit costs lower than what it would have cost had it been an open market development.

It's a state directed affordable home ownership scheme, and people are proud of, and care for their properties. Aggressive land management, future proofing and planning(an anathema to Irish people) is a feature of the HDB model.

All in all, it is the most equitable, and successful scheme of its type in the world by far.

It's a model that definitely could be tinkered with to fit the Irish context, but the difficulty would be getting voters to wrap their head around it.

Another problem is the development of housing, and the economy generally is based on the speculative future value of property and maximizing the price the next generation of aspiring homeowners will pay.

That is almost completely removed in Singapore - the banking system, real estate agents, buy-to-let landlords etc would be incredibly hostile to such a policy.

Sir Oxman

FG are having a shocker on social media. And I mean a shocker.
I'm well aware of the pitfalls of elevating the likes of Twitter and Facebook to some kind of oracle determining the outcome of a general election ( just look at the UK in 2019) but the rapid succession of absolute duffers they have posted is quite astonishing including the Boris-Tory rip-off Varadkar did last week.
Here's the latest - Paschal Donohoe on a soapbox on Parkgate Street in Dublin. <cringe>
https://twitter.com/GeneKerrigan/status/1223615744132485120?s=20

Whoever they are paying to come up with these 'ideas' they need to sack them pronto - not one thought that the one below could be parodied to the nth degree. Instead of will you coalesce with SF, these are the videos now being reposted everywhere
Will you build more houses?
Have you ever used the public hospital system?
etc etc

https://twitter.com/MallowNews/status/1223544863922249729?s=20

Itssoeasy

Ruth Coppinger and RBB are on radio 1 if you want to avoid them or listen to them. I'll be doing the former not so much for RBB but for Ruth Coppinger who's voice goes through me.

Idbatterim

using property as a get rich scheme for their mates, pension funds and the many small time dell boy irish property investors, is a moral disgrace! For those of you with some time to spare, watch the below, on why government love rip off property prices and some of the massive knock on implications. the situation of moving taxes to workers and away from land and land hoarders, many with insane wealth, is total insanity!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL3n59wC8kk

http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/a-fall-in-house-prices-should-be-our-goal/

Housing should be the defining issue of the upcoming election, but for Fine Gael the most recent developments on housing policy might be too little, too late.

Latest figures show we are building more houses than at any time in the past 10 years. A favourite indicator of mine to assess house building is the ESB grid connections, which show new homes signing on to the electricity grid.

It shows an 81.1 per cent increase in apartments completed in the third quarter of 2019, compared with the same quarter in 2018, rising from 598 to 1,083. Apartments are now almost at the level of single dwelling completions.The number of scheme dwelling (estates and complexes) completions has risen 16.6 per cent annually to 3,311 in the third quarter of 2019, while single dwellings increased by 5.4 per cent to 1,273.

In terms of what is coming down the tracks, figures show 20,000 new commencements in the first nine months of 2019, up 22 per cent on an annual basis. This includes 6,474 in Dublin, up 18 per cent. While this is an improvement, it’s still way below the estimated 30,000 units needed annually to keep up with population dynamics.

Housing is not just an immediate accommodation issue. The obsession with home ownership has jaundiced so much of our economic and political discourse over the past five decades that it is now one of the single biggest impediments to social development.

This week’s Economist magazine includes a timely study outlining the burden that home ownership is putting on the English-speaking economies in particular. Ireland certainly suffers from this.

Mass home ownership is reasonably new in Ireland. My grandparents, like many other Dubliners up to the 1950s, rented their home. This was normal. In the 1960s, Ireland tentatively adopted the US and UK model of mass home ownership. The idea was that home ownership gave people a stake in the society and would thus make for more responsible, stable citizens and more stable politics.

Of course, the main beneficiaries of this were developers, builders and land owners – all of whom saw their balance sheets enhanced by the commercialisation of the suburbs. The other big beneficiaries were banks, because home ownership means mortgages.

From the 1950s to 1980s, Ireland operated a twin housing policy of building both private and public housing. Since the 1990s we have seen a clear bias away from public housing towards the private market as the preferred growth area in housing. Such a move has amplified the “unintended consequences” of private housing.

First, overreliance on home ownership splits the population between those who own houses (and want prices to go up to enhance their wealth) and those who don’t (who want prices to fall to minimise their future debt). The very same people who are in the latter camp today will migrate to the former after they buy property.

Obstruct development
Obviously as house prices rise and housing wealth rises, the desire to protect that wealth rises too. So we see home owners moving against further development in their area to preserve their area’s exclusivity, leading to “nimbyism” (Not in My Back Yard) and “bananaism” (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). As wealth rises, so does organised obstructionism.

Based on Central Bank figures, net household wealth in Ireland rose to €780 billion in the second quarter of 2019, equating to €158,574 per capita. Residential housing wealth amounts to €537 billion worth of this.

Homeowners will move to protect their wealth. They obstruct development and hoard development land, which means that as housing demand goes up in cities, supply doesn’t go up in response – prices rise instead.

In short, the laws of economics are turned on their heads.

Since 2012 house/apartment prices in Dublin have risen by 90 per cent and 80 per cent respectively (a little less in the country at large), while wages have only increased by 18 per cent. If you own a house you are laughing; if not, you are locked out.

It doesn’t have to be like this. For example, Tokyo-Yokohama (the world’s largest metropolitan area, with a population of 38 million) has managed to keep house price inflation below 10 per cent for the past three decades because its planning laws respond to demand.

Singapore releases land when demand increases, because the State owns most of the land in the country and, as demand rises, the State sells.

Switzerland encourages local development and its house price increases are among the lowest in Europe, despite that country’s vast wealth. In all cases, supply of land is flexible. In Ireland it is completely inflexible and because of the wealth/residents lobby, supply dries up when demand shows up.

This is driving young people – and political parties – to desperation. Elsewhere, the inequality that home ownership embeds is driving populism. It’s only a matter of time before this political contagion infects Ireland.

The rule is simple: fix supply and you fix housing. Reverse the split in the society between those who own and those who don’t, build public housing immediately and, finally, make house price deflation – not inflation – the goal of public policy. This demands a sea change in our attitude towards home ownership.

In the 1960s, home ownership was introduced to give more people a stake in society; today nothing is locking out and alienating our citizens more. It’s time to change.

is_that_so

Sir Oxman wrote: »

Have you ever used the public hospital system?
etc etc

https://twitter.com/MallowNews/status/1223544863922249729?s=20

That health question is dumb as 45% or over 2m people have private health insurance.

Idbatterim

The FG videos are comedy! seriously though, seriously, would it not be easier for those bloody fools to do their jobs and deliver results and they wouldn't need all this propaganda, and if you are going to engage in propaganda, at least do a good job of it! Joseph Goebbels certainly isnt pulling the strings in FG HQ!

Sir Oxman

is_that_so wrote: »

That health question is dumb as 45% or over 2m people have private health insurance.

Not really the point though, is it?

is_that_so

Sir Oxman wrote: »

Not really the point though, is it?

The aim of that video is to push a specific agenda with a view to getting it widely shared. It's a stupid question because the care in a hospital is all public. How many ordinary people have never been through the public system?

Jinglejangle69

Idbatterim wrote: »

The FG videos are comedy! seriously though, seriously, would it not be easier for those bloody fools to do their jobs and deliver results and they wouldn't need all this propaganda, and if you are going to engage in propaganda, at least do a good job of it! Joseph Goebbels certainly isnt pulling the strings in FG HQ!

Are you back not voting FG again?

Sir Oxman

is_that_so wrote: »

The aim of that video is to push a specific agenda with a view to getting it widely shared. It's a stupid question because the care in a hospital is all public. How many ordinary people have never been through the public system?

The point (of me posting it) was an example of how open FG's PR machine has left itself in *every* single piece they have authored for their social media campaign.

Idbatterim

Jinglejangle69 wrote: »

Are you back not voting FG again?

its absolutely not clear cut on what to do. Many posters here arguing for keeping FG and ditching them, make very valid points. My issue is , as a non dublin homeowner, FG will give me nothing back and I understand why that has transpired, but I am massively financially targeted by their lust for high property prices. Say SF get in and did something on housing, made it even a bit cheaper, its worth a hell of a lot more to me financially, nearly infinitely, than whatever crumbs FG will throw at workers. Budget 2019, a worker on 34k got back a euro a week in usc reduction I believe!!!!

James Brown

Phoebas wrote: »

I dunno. If you have title deeds on a property but the land is on a short leasehold from the state, then maybe not so much.

I always feel that way with apartments with fees attached and houses with land tax. You 'own' the property but never stop paying for it.

SafeSurfer

Of course there is the theory that Fine Gael actively do not want to be in government after the election because they know what is coming down the tracks.

Weakening economy due to Brexit etc

Difficult decisions over climate change

Huge fall in corporation tax receipts


Who would want to be in government?

elperello

is_that_so wrote: »

That health question is dumb as 45% or over 2m people have private health insurance.

is_that_so wrote: »

The aim of that video is to push a specific agenda with a view to getting it widely shared. It's a stupid question because the care in a hospital is all public. How many ordinary people have never been through the public system?

It's not a stupid question.
The Ministers will all be on the top private health insurance plans.
They will use private hospitals in all cases excepting emergencies.

James Brown

Two points on the Pascal effort.
It would have worked if there were people standing listening.
They had it early with no people because the public would have ripped him a new one.
Unintentionally, it's a great example of Fine Gael in 2020. Happy to tell you how great they are, while ducking the people they are supposed to represent.
These silly little ads are insulting.

James Brown

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Of course there is the theory that Fine Gael actively do not want to be in government after the election because they know what is coming down the tracks.

Weakening economy due to Brexit etc

Difficult decisions over climate change

Huge fall in corporation tax receipts


Who would want to be in government?

Public representatives who don't see people's lives as a game and care about the country and the people in it.
So yeah, you might be right about FG.

Actually FG have thought us that even when the country is broke there's money enough for a quango and a sweet deal for their own.

elperello

Seriously, the Minister for Finance standing on a box on a street corner.
The last time I saw fellows doing that was on speakers corner Hyde Park.
They were good entertainment but I never saw a Minister.

_Kaiser_

is_that_so wrote: »

That health question is dumb as 45% or over 2m people have private health insurance.

And why do you think that is?

Here's a follow up for you. Why is that a good thing?

SafeSurfer

Matt Barrett wrote: »

Public representatives who don't see people's lives as a game and care about the country and the people in it.
So yeah, you might be right about FG.

Actually FG have thought us that even when the country is broke there's money enough for a quango and a sweet deal for their own.

Like Sinn Fein in 2016 or Sinn Fein north of the border 2017-2020.

James Brown

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Like Sinn Fein in 2016 or Sinn Fein north of the border 2017-2020.

I don't understand. FG do treat it like a game and aren't interested if theres no money or SF something?
You posted it in relation to FG why are you doing whatabout? If you wanted to, why not post about SF in the first place?

Idbatterim

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Of course there is the theory that Fine Gael actively do not want to be in government after the election because they know what is coming down the tracks.

Weakening economy due to Brexit etc

Difficult decisions over climate change

Huge fall in corporation tax receipts


Who would want to be in government?

Extremely unlikely. They all want power desperately.

FrancieBrady

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Of course there is the theory that Fine Gael actively do not want to be in government after the election because they know what is coming down the tracks.

Weakening economy due to Brexit etc

Difficult decisions over climate change

Huge fall in corporation tax receipts


Who would want to be in government?

The political equivalent of 'I didn't want to play your auld stinking game anyway, I'm taking the ball home'.

Idbatterim

elperello wrote: »

Seriously, the Minister for Finance standing on a box on a street corner.
The last time I saw fellows doing that was on speakers corner Hyde Park.
They were good entertainment but I never saw a Minister.

He should have done that a few days before. When people were being crushed trying to get onto the luas

NovemberWren

is Europe in the next 20 yrs. so, about to fall apart? and, with this in mind, this country must now allow some sort of (I dunno), maybe 'trade leases'? to the very, very, poor, and even uninitiated; in the business environment?
Kinda' concentrate the minds away from welfare, to business. (as even the very youngest seem extremly surly at not being "given" public/civic housing.
Take away, to at least some extent, the power of estate agents, who assess (who 'they' prefer?); and give work-space-leases to the very poor? [Dunno if I am getting this across properly.] in towns so many central properties empty.
[btw irl.begins 1922;- and ends? 2022] - i.e., depending on this election.

imfml

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Of course there is the theory that Fine Gael actively do not want to be in government after the election because they know what is coming down the tracks.

Weakening economy due to Brexit etc

Difficult decisions over climate change

Huge fall in corporation tax receipts


Who would want to be in government?

Taoiseach Mary Lou

SafeSurfer

FrancieBrady wrote: »

The political equivalent of 'I didn't want to play your auld stinking game anyway, I'm taking the ball home'.

Walking off the Stormont pitch for 3 years would be a better example.

FrancieBrady

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Walking off the Stormont pitch for 3 years would be a better example.

Stop blaming SF and everybody and everything else SS. FG and their enablers in FF, have only themselves and their motley crew of independents to blame.

SafeSurfer

FrancieBrady wrote: »

Stop blaming SF and everybody and everything else SS. FG and their enablers in FF, have only themselves and their motley crew of independents to blame.

For what? Three years of non functioning government in Stormont. Right, yeah...