Inside Dublin’s Housing Crisis

There is an irony in vilifying home owners while championing buying a home.

No they didn't the default rate was very low and some of those defaults or distressed sales were forced by the banks. The while pumping up of prices was to protect the banks balance sheets. How on earth do you think it benefits people who bought between 2008 and 2015 to have prices inflated. They had to borrow more and pay back more!

Not really. The irony is the stupid who over-borrowed in the naughies got bailed out by people who were school children at the time. Let them pay their own debts, including the 200 billion Enda borrowed to bail them out.

300,000 were in arrears in 2009. That is off the charts. More serious defaulters were more than 3 times higher than you would expect in a normal crisis. People who pay higher prices are paying the inflation caused by the borrowed 200 billion and they are funnelling more of that 200 billion into house prices. So they are both causing and benefitting from house inflation. All the more reason to tax the hell out of them.

Which children where giving out 200 billion loans. That's a new one.

If they are that good they shouldn't need any help getting housing in 2023.

300K that's just pure bull **** Q3 2009 18K, Q2 2011 40K

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ireland-business-blog-with-lisa-ocarroll/2011/aug/29/ireland-mortgage-arrears-rise-sharply

No. It actually really developed just post 2nd world war. The last thing government wanted local authorities to do was to keep hold of liabilities such as properties. Get them sold off to the tenants and divest themselves of any further responsibility for them, promoting home ownership as the goal, the norm. Housing academics such as Michelle Norris and Lorcan Sirr have written considerably on this.

1973 came up when I looked it up. I took that to mean that's when national purchase schemes were created Vs local arrangements with individual councils.

"...Tenants of council houses have been able to buy their homes from individual local authorities since the 1930s, and a scheme for the sale of council houses was introduced in 1973...."

."...Between 1990 and 2016, some 43 per cent of the 82,869 council houses built during that period were sold to tenants, often with a discount of up to 60 per cent on the market value, writes the report.

Two-thirds of all council housing is now privately owned after being bought through the tenant-purchase scheme, which has been in place since the 1930s..."

In itself nothing wrong with it. Just when they stopped building replacement stock it becomes an issue.

I bought a house a single man (36). I originally got mortgage approval back in 2017 for about 150k when I had about 70k in savings. I could (and SHOULD) have bought an apartment there an then, but bad advice from my family and my own inhibitions about taking on debt stayed my hand. Five years of rampant money printing, lockdowns, dancing nurses and general societal insanity later, I finally bought a 300k house that I don’t really like. The worst thing about it all was that I had no one to help me, and I’m not talking about finance. Simply having a partner to bounce ideas off would, I assume, have been an enormous help. 

I know exactly how you feel regarding getting outbid constantly.  I looked for a place through the lockdowns, and I saw many properties shoot way, way over the asking. The process is, put simply, maddening. It saddens me to say it, but I have a considerably lower opinion of humanity now than I had at the beginning of the process. If I ever sell a house, I have promised myself that I will not engage in the disgusting behaviour that I saw. I don’t like to say it, and it is a terrible generalisation, but I feel a genuine sense of resentment towards older generations at times as it would seem that they utterly failed to watch the shop for their children and grand-children. 

I agree that younger people coming up are looking at a bleak situation.  The West in general is in terminal decline. From mass immigration, lunatic politicians to insane ideology, we have it all in spades. I really don’t know what will happen, but I don’t see things improving without a major black swan event. 

I hope things work out for you.  

Seems to me like you don't pay attention or anything else.. Children got the 200 billion euro bill. Property owners got the 200 billion.

I think reality is their problems they can't quite get the hang of it.

I would disagree (respectfully) that buying a house today is the same as it was in the 1950s. As has been shown many times before, the average house price relative to the average wage is not the same as it was in the past. Beyond that, it was possible to raise a family on a single income from a very average job back then. That simply isn't the case today.

Were things a cake-walk in the mid-20th century? Absolutely not, but it's my opinion that it was easier to settle and start a family.

"It seems most young people are so caught up with indulgences and instant gratification, that they cannot see the wood for the trees. Perhaps it is the lack of a greater purpose in the end. 🤔"

It's not just young people....

True, not just young people caught up in such endeavours.

Socially it was the more accepted route to settle down and start a family, which in itself made it easier to find a wife / husband with similar values etc in Ireland. I know conservative men sometimes need to look abroad to often find a spouse with more traditional/ family values for example (passport bros.), so yes much tougher on that front.

In terms of finances, I would say it is still easier now. Like in the example I gave, it all comes down to the financial decisions you make in life, even before one meets his spouse and ultimately the willingness to perceiver and take the challenge with both hands.

Raising a family with one modest income is clearly possible, but one needs to be very careful with debt. In Dublin, probably not, but again choosing to live in the big cheese is a decision ultimately.

Lest we not forget, back in our grandparents time, it was tremendously difficult to get a loan/ mortgage if you worked with farmers who were amongst the biggest employers. No first time buyer grants and very little social welfare.

They worked very long hard hours, and often you weren't sure what day you might get paid. A 'good job' was in a factory, but that came at a personal cost too. Bicycles needed to be bought on a HP basis or similar to get to and from work, of which the journey could be quite long. Cottages usually needed to be fixed up when a young couple finally bought.

The budget wasn't there for much recreational expense or gadgetry.

I just don't see our generation making the sacrifices. I don't see the majority of men stepping up to the plate to lead their families. I see men hiding behind feminist ideology to dodge responsibility for the most part.

A good example of a couple dedicated to male things work and fair play to them. But they are perhaps an outlier in their approach.

A reasonable barometer of housing accessibility would be to compare the average house price as a multiple of the average income.

If the average full time income today is 45k and the average house price is 360k, we have a multiple of 8.

I dont know what the multiple was in the 1950s?