"average Dublin house prices should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark" according to Many Lou McD.

do you have a problem with people living in sub standard conditions, which potentially could be unsafe both physically and mentally?

for example, if the area has a high level of crime, anti social behavior etc? noting, living under such conditions can cause a significant amount of destress for habitants, which commonly results in criminal outcomes, and other dysfunctional outcomes including addiction etc etc

I had a look at some of these houses that @downthemiddle shared. Some below 50sqm. Some boarded up. Some have tenants in situ.

From my experience of looking at the lower end of the market the value isn't really there. I've seen several cases where if you start to investigate the house there's some problem not listed by the estate agent so the banks won't lend.

Also a lot of these houses look to be more than 30 years old. So straight away you have to factor rewire and possibly re-roofing. Both very expensive at today's prices.

No one is arguing that certain types of homes in certain areas could/should be cheaper, the "argument" is how SF are going to achieve this, because they have given zero detail on how they are going to do it.

The idea that the average Dublin house price will be 300K is just farcical though. You would need 10s of thousands of houses for 150-200K to achieve that average number, it just isnt going to happen.

A better idea to campaign under would be something like "We will build social housing units for under 300K"

It is likely they mean "median" when they say "average". So I wouldn't be getting too hung up on that if I were you. People (incorrectly) often use them interchangeably anyway. They can coincide, but not where a distribution is skewed.

i.e. the price of an average house, vs the average price of a house.

Of course there will be some properties at below the threshold, but if SF have a target average of 300k, and the lowest price properties are at let's say 150k, then the top quartile house prices would need to be 430k or less based on a relatively normal distribution. Is that realistic for Dublin in 2028? I would not like to witness the conditions needed to bring this about.

Some of them are in fairness, however some of them are tiny 1 bed terraces, which might be great for a young first time buyer, but they would be hard pressed to start raising a family in them.

Now if the people who are in this market segment can accept that if this is what you get for a 300K budget rather than a 100sqm 3 bed semi with a front and rear garden, then you can start to cater for this demographic, but I dont believe thats the case.

Erm, are we going to have to explain what an average is?

What is it that you like about the government policy?

What have they done that has increased the supply of housing in Ireland?

Is there anything you'd change or improve about their policies? Any area you think they are weak on?

And where did SF say they're going to create a national housing company, I may have missed that?

I'm not backtracking at all, where are you getting that from?

Of course Covid impacted housing, as I've always acknowledged, just not to the degree that it can be used as an excuse for how far behind we are.

The government can't force people into IT and pharma either, but it does heavily incentivize training and conversion courses. Why hasn't it done the same for construction? Why are apprentices on 8euro an hour and getting charged college fees on top?

I appreciate costs have risen, as they have for many other industries but this itself isn't making housing unaffordable. I'm not up on the latest figures but I believe up to just a few years ago, construction costs, namely materials and labor, only made up about 1/3 of a house price.