A stayed in at least two different hotels in UK and there were no 24h receptionists there. There was self check-in/out machine in the lobby. Hotels were about 50-80 rooms in size.
Sure, but a ton of people I know who stay in AirBnB do so because they prefer the experience, not because it’s cheaper. Perhaps that segment I see is biased but I’m not sure more hotels -> lower cost and more diverse locations will fix the problem
It is cute and a brilliant business when someone rents out their place for a weekend. It becomes a serious problem when vultures abuse the rules and convert homes into hotels.
Hotels bundle the living space with all kinds of premium services. For example, for comparable prices for a short stay some people might see a great benefit from an included kitchen, and other people might see a great benefit from an attached restaurant; and both of these groups would prefer if their rent doesn't include the costs of that other service - there is demand both for staying in "hotel-style" and in "home-style" lodgings.
Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent. Owners will stop renting if they fear to lose their property if a tenant remains for more than say a year. You need to regulate the amount of time you can AirBnB a place before facing a fine. Ideally you would earn 300$ for putting your place on AirBnB for two months or 700$ for renting it a year. (Simple numbers just an example). And we would still have the stagnant salaries and sky high property values that no one can afford problems.
>but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent
Maybe i wasn't clear, but my point was that when renting is the most common way of living, it is not healthy for society.
Ownership promotes community and responsibility. Renting is parasitic and enables social stratification in to elites and tenants.
Prices are inflated and are used as investments rather than housing. This is where the government needs to add regulation to prevent exploitation of the market.
Ownership also promotes capitalism. If the "owners" of these flats weren't so gung ho about making money and AirBnb'in out to tourists this problem wouldn't arise in the first place.
Housing is scarce, always has been. The prices are not "inflated", they are merely a symptom of the underlying reality which is that there's only so much housing to go around and given the option of making money (renting) and making a lot more money (airbnb), landlords will obviously choose the latter. My guess is a majority of these so called landlords are of modest means and would be harmed significantly by overbearing rent control programs. The only sensible solution to this problem is to enact policies that encourage developers to build (increased supply will lower rent costs) or enact policies that somehow limit the number of tourists coming to Dublin (doesn't seem reasonable or desirable). Any attempt to artifically manipulate the price of housing up or down via regulation will at worst, end in disaster or exacerbate the current crisis.
I doubt your Airbnb will be used 100% of the time. 80% would be more realistic. Renting on Airbnb has a one major advantage over traditional renting. If someone loses a job and stops paying rent it's quite hard to evict him.
Can hotels start converting their rooms into apartments and start renting out to families? If Airbnb is taking business away from hotels shouldn't this work?
The problem is that those laws are politically unpopular. We have rent control that transfers to the next tenant, so any landlord (like mine) who gave a good deal in 2016 is kicking themselves now. Stories abound of nightmare tenants living rent free for over a year, and even after trashing the place. If I owned a place in Dublin I'd try really hard to avoid becoming a landlord. All of this means there's less supply instead of more.
We also have a lot of voters for whom rising house prices are a good thing. Homeownership rates in Ireland are high compared to the rest of Europe and plenty of people were underwater from the mid-2000's until recently.
Dublin needs to get rid of height maximums in the core of the city, build a transport network not suited to the 1950's (it's shockingly car-dependent and sprawling for Europe), and maybe not trap every project in planning hell. It suffers more generally from a labrynthine complex web of agencies and politicians - how can a city this small have sixty-freakin-three councilors? We're only 1.2 million people. And yet we wind up with things like the city council drawing up plans for a bus lane without realizing someone's already got permission to put an apartment building on the same land.
https://www.dublininquirer.com/2015/06/30/for-favoured-liffe...
Those reading this - keep in mind that yeah, it's cheaper than SF, but wages are substantially lower too.
I actually really like Dublin, and I am grateful to the Dubs for making me feel welcome (I'm from California) but I got INCREDIBLY lucky moving here in 2013 and walking in to a flat (the economy was on its knees then). I am aware that as a tech worker who lives in a prime spot in Dublin with rent control I am part of the problem. However, I'm also moving to the midlands in a few months, so that should free up at least one flat.
"stories abound" of homeless beggars who actually have "a lot of money" .. too .. it is a psychological fascination.. real-world needs measurements of factual conditions, not urban folktales
When an exceptionally esteemed mathematician like Atiyah proposes a proof for the Riemann hypothesis, it can still be wrong.
I think that's important--letting experts or ideas be wrong. I don't see evidence of humanity having success solving difficult problems without competition and experimentation.
But this particular problem will continue to grow because it wont be addressed in this way. Committees, bureaucracies, academics and journalists will surely discuss it though.
Orwell speaks more eloquently about this concept in The Lion and the Unicorn.
immigration has become a nice scam:
1) become a politician
2) buy property
3) vote in mass immigration and call anyone who disagrees -ist
4) give the new immigrants heavy housing subsidies.
5) the money comes right to the politicians back in the form of rents
6) profit
"The new law allows short-term rentals to be offered only by owners who live in the properties they rent out. Owners of small multifamily buildings who live on premises may also rent out one of the other units in the building along with the unit they live in."
Here the solution was to have AirBnB collect a tax on their site, and it disappears into general revenues where they claim it will help build social housing schemes. A better solution would be to permit renters to sublet out their own suites on AirBnB, give them equal access to the gig economy as landlords do. You go on strike or vacation, have the right to sublet out your suite to make extra income.
As a landlord, I don't want my tenants renting to people I haven't had a chance to vet. At least if I'm taking on the risks or ABnB I'm also reaping the rewards. Good luck collecting from my tenant if their hotel guests damage the property.
What are security deposits like in California? Most places I've lived (in Canada) security deposits can't be any more than a month or two of rent, and a really really bad BnB guest could easily do tens of thousands of dollars of damage to an apartment.
As somebody who rents in the same block, I don't want this.
We built hotels for people on holidays, not residential apartment blocks.
My life shouldn't be upended by constant/"badly" behaved AirBnB guests just so you can make a buck.
These apartment blocks are _homes_ for most people.
This is the law in NYC and I still see entire apartments listed on my block every time I check Airbnb. It is very hard to enforce because you need someone to complain, then the police have to catch visitors 'in the act,' and then you have to go through the whole fining and prosecution process.
That's interesting that they need someone to complain?
Vancouver just enacted a similar law to Boston's - AirBnbs only allowed in a secondary suite in a primary residence. In exchange for being allowed to continue operating in the city, AirBnb requires a city business license (which is only granted for secondary suites) from all Vancouver BnBs, and forwards the list of all BnBs to the city every month. Then if an address doesn't match up with a business license, the city fines the property owner. If you don't pay, the city takes you or your house to court and you get a nice fat lien on the property.
This doesn't seem to work as well with condos and apartments, though. I think the city has left enforcement up to strata orgs which is probably a mistake?
This is happening in places like Toronto as well. I visited there an stayed at an Airbnb near the CN Tower. The condo itself was newer and large swathes of the condo were occupied by Airbnbers. It was obvious, people with luggage were coming in and out at all hours of the day. The Uber driver I got also said he was maintaining 2 condos in downtown Toronto for Airbnb.
The next time there's a recession, things like this will only worsen it because people will be foreclosing on large numbers of housing properties because they were used for investment.
"things like this will only worsen it because people will be foreclosing on large numbers of housing properties because they were used for investment" Thats only the property was purchased with debt (mortgage). If these investments were not purchased with debt then there will be no foreclosing.
I would wager that most investment properties are bought with debt, ie. leverage. It makes more sense to purchase a property with a fraction of the cost and then use Airbnb to pay for the mortgage. Only extremely naive investors would be spending their cash to buy a property when they could instead get multiple properties using leverage/debt.
I'm not sure that it's Airbnb. if properties can appreciated at 10% per year. Then they are a much better investment and safer investment vehicle than most of what is out there. If I truly believe I can buy a house somewhere and get 10% year in and year out. I'm going to buy one. I might keep it vacant since I don't feel like being a landlord or dealing with rent control laws. When it's time to get my money out, I'll sell and move on.
While some of us might not believe this, there are enough people who see real estate as such a safe investment. Some of them are from other countries and they're looking for a place to park their money that's not a bank or volatile like the stock market.
Plus - housing is fairly secured and unlikely to ever go to zero, it's tied to an asset, and you can invest on loaned principal without extreme risk in case of failure.
Going to zero has zero to do with real estate being a secure investment. Owning an underwater property and running into a situation where the investor can't continue to make the mortgage payments is just as bad as the asset going to zero for most.
> you can invest on loaned principal without extreme risk in case of failure
Yes, when this happens thousands upon thousands of times you have the 2008 world wide financial crisis.
Assuming you purchased your house with 20% down and 80% mortgage (which is very common), housing only has to go down 20% for you to "go to zero."
Further, unlike stocks, buying/selling houses incurs fees (round-trip fees can be anywhere from 5% to 12% depending on your city/state/country), so really, a house going down 15% is like you going to zero.
It's not just AirBnB. It's also that real estate has been backstopped by the Fed and the government. So far it's a can't-lose investment over longer time spans, so if you can afford to stack up properly it's a sure thing way to build wealth.
Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Affordable housing means existing homeowners lose equity.
I think it is also a problem of perception and living within your means. It is mentioned a lot of people 'are commuting crazy distances', and 'Four hours a day in a car or a bus.'
I commuted up to four hours a day for several years in order to have a nice, affordable home on a lake. I couldn't afford NYC rents, and I was born and bred in Brooklyn with family and friends to assist in finding deals on rents. Meanwhile, I had friends who I grew up living in NYC with rent control, and collecting unemployment in between waiting/waitressing jobs. I thought a lot of work in Ireland was call center/IT work. Can young people, other than students, work remotely? How about online courses with a 4 hour commute once a week to check in with advisors and other students? The world will adapt. Government can't regulate fixes.
But governments do a LOT to restrict housing supply, particularly of compact, affordable, walkable development. They could remove those barriers and let more housing be built if they wanted the situation to improve.
The city is very concentric, with a lot of corporate jobs in the docklands and state jobs central.
We had a half baked attempt at decentralisation in the past, but it was a mess and only lead to incredible waste. Sadly the remote work opportunities are the oddity, rather than the norm, especially for govt. jobs.
It’s hard to untangle problems like this from supply and demand of housing. Are the hotels in Dublin vacant because everyone prefers AirBnBs? Ie. is tourist lodging over or under-supplied?
Two straightforward treatments I’d want to see tested:
1. A significant “hotel tax” or “vacancy tax” to make it very expensive to let housing sit idle. Reduce the profitability of tourist rental and units will shift back to local rent.
2. Significantly expand the supply of housing by removing barriers to development. This phenomenon is happening around the world as cities try to keep existing neighborhoods under glass and prevent any change, damning younger generations to have no place to live.
Another thing I would love to see is the development of new cities with robust transit connection to the nearby older ones. I don’t know enough about Dublin to be specific, but I do know that across the US one of the things that is happening is a generational trend toward wanting urban living, to the point that many people don’t even consider living in suburban or rural towns. However there’s no reason we can’t build new “urban” cities: places starting with a Main Street, compact walkable design, street grid, designed to organically scale up to a genuine large urban center over time. This was common practice in the 1800s, and we have plenty of models around the world to copy from, we just quit doing this in the car age. Why not bring this back?
That's quite broad.
Barriers to development were lowered and ignored during the Celtic tiger era.
Really poor housing was built and funnily enough, it was still sold at obnoxiously high prices.
The only people pushing for this are property developers and thankfully so far, most of the country has remained strong on not falling for this spiel again.
*This doesn't exclude building higher in city center.
Piggybacking on this, I believe it would mean things like decreasing "Environmental Review Process" and "Comment Periods" as well as density restrictions.
Or even doing that as part of an urban development planning review where most of the review and impact is assessed and pre-approved as long as the proposed changes mostly match what was envisioned. Make the actual review and approval more like asking for a variance.
The problem with new towns now versus the 1800's is now all land has an owner in the USA with legal protections, in the 1800's we just took land from the occupants the native Americans - it's sort of like a Platonic ideal to start from scratch but never going to happen without a disruptive event. Europe just got lucky that so much of their cities were pre-automobile age, USA got unlucky in that sense. That sort of brings us back to the Amazon/sports type bidding war with incentives from local government entities.
"Another thing I would love to see is the development of new cities with robust transit connection to the nearby older... "
Incidentally, this is part of why I'm moving to a house near Tullamore in a couple months. It's 53 minutes by train from Dublin (Heuston) - and yet off the radar of my friends, some of whom spend that much time commuting to work via bus from within Dublin city.
For what it's worth I made a site where you can see places for rent and sale and how far they are from job centers via rail (and the schedules)
I would not want to see a vacancy tax however a hotel tax serves its purpose because it targets the use of the property. still i would limit the hotel tax to housing employed for that purpose for a majority of the year. this would let those who summer elsewhere to enjoy the benefits of their home while only hitting those who choose to live elsewhere all the time.
the second point you made is a well known issue across the world, it simply comes down to a politically correct version of red lining. the terms are changed to make it palatable but the effect is the same. those in need are forced out, their presence is only desired during work hours to perform work
You can summer elsewhere without getting hit by a vacancy tax.
A house that's empty most of the year really is making the problem worse, and if they don't want to change then they can pay some money to offset the harm.
They already pay income tax on the income from the letting and unless you create a company that owns the house it’s very hard to deduct the upkeep costs from your taxes and if you transfer the ownership to a company you lose the property if you want to transfer it to back to yourself it would incur a high tax liability.
The vacancy tax is just a limited version of the classic "Land Value tax", which would make sense for popular urban cities but not for suburban or rural areas.
The point of the vacancy tax is to prioritize the limited local space for the local population who live and work in the city. Vancouver is implementing a mild version of a vacancy tax to curb the issue with empty houses.
> It’s hard to untangle problems like this from supply and demand of housing.
Well said. And the article makes a mess of it - discussing so many things without actually discussing the causes of homelessness - mental illness, lack of skills, the need for daycare, handicaps, and myriad others. Plus, the big one advocates like to pretend doesn’t exist - drug addiction.
Why? Because dealing with the root causes is really hard. So much easier to blame something else. E.g at one point it says there’s a total of 1,400 homeless in Dublin and earlier says “3,165 entire properties listed on Airbnb in Dublin, compared with only 1,329 available for long-term rent“.
Since only a small portion of long-term rentals are available at any point in time (the total number of long term rentals could be what - tens of thousands?) one might wonder why those numbers were used or if the guardian has vindetta against Airbnb...but reguardless...
If there’s 1,329 available for for long-term, why aren’t they putting the 1400 homeless in them? That would leave only 71 homeless! The rest could go to Airbnb...done. Problem solved.
But of course, it’s not solved.
And as for why homeless are placed in hotels rather than Airbnb or long-term rentals - its likely because its easier to contact a few large entities (hotels) to arrange lodging than it is to contact 1400 individuals. That and the neighbors might not be to happy.
It seems cities with housing problems where AirBnB is a factor could adopt a property tax scheme similar to what US counties implement already -
1) Tax based on property value (ad valorem);
2) Ad valorem deduction if owner lives on property (homestead exemption)
PLUS some tax distinction for "declared" - not sure if verifiable - long-term (6 - 12 month minimum) vs short-term (AirBnB) rental.
I think taxes might work better or at least sound less draconian than simply banning AirBnB or restrictions such as when rooms can be let (e.g. Jacksonville Beach FL had some kind of ordinance restricting lets to certain months of the year.)
Another approach is land value tax, ie. make it very expensive to have idle buildings or parking lots in the city center. You can still have some deductions for primary residences to lessen the impact on them, while creating incentives to keep landlords from low-occupancy uses.
Property tax should be progressive. If you own 10 apartments you should need to sell 10th to pay yearly tax for the 9 remaining ones. Taxes gathered this way should found basic income.
This would crash the property market but it would make flats available nearly to all who need it.
Flats can't be both affordable and good investment for superrich.
Top 500 richest folks got their money differnt ways but the most common source is real estate, usually 3rd generation of hoarders.
I'm sorry, I lived in a socialist country behind iron curtain. You do not want to repeat same mistakes, if someone worked (few family generations worked for them, more likely) for those 10 apartments it should be theirs, period.
I take your point, (and I'm not supporting parents contention) but it's worth recalling that under Eisenhower the highest progressive marginal tax rate was something like 90% - hardly anyone's idea of a communist state. Unsurprising as the two concepts are quite separable.
Yes that's true (and expected, after all that's what the "progressive" part means).
Not supporting the silly 10 apartments thing.
I'm just pointing out that progressive taxation, even with very high top marginal rates, is not socialism - and we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend it is.
So if you have on the flag more that one red star you are by definition excepted from communist or socialist measures? The world is more gray than black and white and USA has its share of socialism in it.
Of course not, that's silly. So is the idea that progressive property tax (regardless of it's merit or lack thereof as an idea) is logically dismissed as a inevitable step towards eastern-block style communism.
So what does it have to do with you or anyone else that never lifted a finger, but have expectations? If it is not your family's properties, hands off and move on.
They paid tax on the money they earned, they worked for it. This one time payment doesn't absolve their heirs from receiving the money in perpetuity without paying a single penny of tax on the same money in the future.
People get high and might and see it as some sort of double tax, inheritance tax is the price heirs pay for receiving money they didn't earn through their own means.
I'm not saying every penny should be taxed, sure have a threshold.However if you are 35 with no great skills and just waiting for a grand-parent to pass and inherit $/€/£3m. With the sole aim of buying 5-10 apartments and living off punitive rent you charge others who don't have rich grandparents, then you should be taxed to the hilt.
That IS double tax, income that bought it was taxed already.
"However if you are 35 with no great skills and just waiting for a grand-parent to pass and inherit $/€/£3m. With the sole aim of buying 5-10 apartments and living off punitive rent you charge others who don't have rich grandparents, then you should be taxed to the hilt. "
Everyone should be equal in the eyes of law - this is anything but that.
If you are going with the premise that someone's parents rightfully earned their wealth and it is fully theirs for them to do what they please with it - then it is also theirs to give to their children.
It is not about child's right to that wealth - it is about parent's right to give it to their children.
It is absolutely within parents' rights to give their property to whoever they want - as long as the child pays the income tax on the money that fell from the sky.
The parents already paid income tax. Where is the problem?
Children inherit lots of things from their parents like their genetics, upbringing, location, food, clothing and a place to live without paying taxes on those things so why should the inherited money or property be taxed? All of those things "fell from the sky", how is money different?
Parents can still be free to give what they own to children but you might prevent children from reciving it. For example by taxing whatever they recive.
That said I think inheritance tax is very bad idea and shouldn't exist.
I'm not saying anything should be taken away from anyone. Just taxed. Taxed enough to encourage you to do something with the property you sit on. Like ensuring you rent it at full capacity or sell it if it's not worth renting (because of tax).
Tax is so low right now that you can sit on whole lot of properties for years and not even bother to rent them and still not loose much money.
That seriously harms others and should be at least effectively discouraged.
Income used to pay interest on a home is not taxed (up to a limit). Paying interest (not principal) on a home mortgage is pretty much money down the drain (no wealth accumulation, a fee for the right to hold the debt). In this way, interest payments for housing you own are somewhat comparable to rent payments for housing you don't own.
The fact that income paid to interest is not taxed, yet income paid to rent is taxed can create a significant advantage to owning versus renting.
Income tax is not the only tax. There's tax on fuel, on tobacco. You tax cheap harmful things to make them more expensive to discourage them. Hoarding property is harmful and should be discouraged.
As a side note I think income tax should be 0. VAT as the main source of income seems way more just to me. Plus various taxes to make the environmental cost of activity known to the market (like CO2 tax, fuel tax) or tax on harmful things (like tobacco) to discourage them.
So people like me would pay no VAT on invoices because I export services (so they are reverse-charge in EU). I would only pay VAT on goods that I buy personally. I think the matter is more complex.
That's just an idea. I just think it should not be part of normal government budget because it could increase goverment spending for usual stuff and when that's increased it hardly ever goes down.
It might be different because there's no BI yet. BI is simple so the rules can be written to be simple too. Like setting up fund and spending on basic income not a fixed amount but last years fund income instead so the fund never gives away more than it earns.
This is why since 08 it has turned into an investment, though. The regulators that would fix it are at the behest of the investors paying them to exacerbate the status quo worldwide.
Criticising inherited wealth is justified, it is a major driver of inequality and bad for capitalism.
I'm not talking about the families that invest in businesses and build functioning businesses. The degree of hereditary land banking and hoarding of land assets is a real drain on society and an inefficient use of capital.
There is no great social benefit to society in this practice and it's morally unjustifiable to allow a certain class of land owners to enrich themselves.
I don't care if your great uncle was a duke, a business magnate or a large farmer, it's 2018 and you are not entitled to live solely on the rent of others!
So burn them down. If they are empty and owned by a bunch of wealthy councilmen, then nothing will be lost. You already can't live in them. Your protests are doing nothing. You are already homeless. Burn the houses down.
This is exactly the kind of call for violent measures that gets people in trouble in social media. This is a public forum, after all.
If you truly believe what you wrote, perhaps you should also consider that "wealth" is a very subjective measure, and there are those who would certainly consider you unworthy of owning your property since they have so little. Would you appreciate someone telling them to burn down your place while you're at work?
You're breaking the guidelines too often with uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments. We eventually ban accounts that continue, so would you please stop?
this is what happens when you let foreigners with unstable currency buy property but the property security is provided by the taxpayers expense. we in fact are subsidizing and securitzing china and other coutries outflow of capital
There is a question that nobody is asking: How can we increase the market to make it attractive for people to build?
People think by increasing regulations on house owners that this will be solved. This is false. Decreasing regulations allow more business men to invest in housing in the city. This increases competition in the long term, thereby bringing costs down.
Instead of increasing regulations on Airbnb letters, why not decrease regulations on renters and provide incentive?
No. The Irish government have been attempting just that and it's actually be exacerbating the problem.
The solution is for the government to behave if a countercyclical fashion: if the market isn't doing its job, the government has to compensate for the market failure.
Tax the hell out of all forms of residential-property-as-investment. Allow tax breaks on second properties if you can show you are using them and not renting them out or letting them go to seed and there should also be some exceptions for collective ownership and also stuff like homes for the elderly and other forms of sheltered care, but in general the commercial use of residential property shout be taxed to the hilt.
This is absolutely the simplest and probably most effective response to the problem. It does need to be couple with a commitment to building new housing stock by the government though (as pointed out by the article).
I moved to Dublin in 2000 to go to college, and finding a place to rent was extremely hard, they were very expensive, very low quality (eg. tiny mouldy basement) and you had no protection, there was no PRTB as far as I was aware, the landlords would always just keep your deposit and do whatever they wanted. I learned to never pay the last months rent (just keep fobbing them off with sob stories for a month) as the landlord would surely never give back my deposit.
from roughly 2000, to 2010, things got much better, it actually felt like a renters market at times. You could rent a whole house in the city for a reasonable amount, and tenancies could new be registered with the PRTB. So both parties had protection.
After that I found things gradually harder and harder. Harder to find a place, more crummy places for more money, landlords no longer registering with PRTB, doing whatever they want again, cus they know any tenant will have to put up with it and just feel lucky to have a place.
In 2016, I had had enough of it. I moved down to the country. It was a great move, I can go on great walks and cycles from my door, its quiet and peaceful, and I am avoiding all the noise, air pollution, scumbags, and issues of housing in Dublin.
To my parents house in a very remote spot in Co. Kilkenny.
I kept my lump sum that I had almost used to get a mortgage to get a house in Dublin.. and now I'm just living off of it without needing to work for a few years. :)
Hah, looked at a place in kilkenny ourselves. Waterford too, which seems underrated. Looks like we'll wind up in Offaly, buying a modest place cash with what we saved for a deposit in Dublin.
I assume you have the option to work remotely then. Sounds like the best of all worlds.... as long as.... (and this gets to what has been IMO one of the causes of the housing problem) ... you do not need access to a hospital or a university.
For as long as I can remember there have been calls to decentralize government infrastructure to rural locations to both ease the resource demands in Dublin and to allow people in the countryside to get a job near their families. By and large it has not happened. And when that has been coupled with the actual shutting of rural services (An Post, hospitals etc) using the excuse of austerity (itself triggered by housing speculation) the situation is just exacerbated.
Good luck in Offaly. I chose to move abroad over a decade ago instead of dealing with the implications of a gombeen state.
I understand. I moved abroad instead of dealing with the consequences of unbridled capitalism and record inequality. Ireland has plenty of problems but on the whole you could do a lot worse. Assuming the rule of law stays intact(ish) it should do better than most places w.r.t. climate change. My homeland is burning up, sadly.
I do work remote. Will be about 12 minute's drive from Tullamore, which is 53 minute train ride from Dublin. Hospital and even a greenway for cycling not too far. The long term plan is to structure life to be low overhead and be able to work for ourselves, do some permaculture as well.
Considered other countries but Ireland has been pretty good to us (crap bike infra notwithstanding) and, well, life is a long and winding road. I'd never get a house cash an hour from the job centers of my former home (Northern California).
This goverment suffers from a lack of imagination regarding rural Ireland. You'd think all they care about is cars and cows if you asked FG. Giving folks a bigger motorway to congest with two hour commutes won't save it. Yet I know plenty of Dubs who feel trapped renting kips and are open to other lifestyles.
Housing needs to not be an investment; it needs to not be /attractive/ as an investment.
Maybe that means massive taxes on the property if the owner isn't using it as a residence for at least 1/3rd of the year (to allow for snow-bird dual-home setups that are popular).
You can directly confiscate. They did it in my country and they were called communists; most properties were never given back.
Wealthy people should be punished. Everybody should be poor, they said.
I’d like to think that this situation could be improved by restricting flows of capital across borders for residential property purchase, and by not allowing domestic vulture capital/private equity firms to buy residential properties. Not sure how this passes constitutional muster here in the US, so perhaps we need a housing rights amendment.
I think it's easier to cut into the profits of those owning more than one house/flat. Here in Austria we have a 10% sales tax on the rent I pay, why can't that be fully shifted to the owners regardless if the apartments is rented out or not?
They keep saying "let's build more houses!".
Who's going to build them?
Conor Reddy, an undergraduate in genetics?
Erica Fleming studying for her degree in English?
Or Jenny Quinn, the PA?
I guess we'll have to invite some guys from Poland. Oh, wait...
I'm not convinced by the journalism in the article.
First, the journalist writes:
"The Greater Dublin area is reckoned to have more than 30,000 properties that are completely empty, many of which are owned by the local council."
However, they then don't get a quote from the council saying why their properties are empty.
That tells me they had a specific story they wanted to tell, without digging into why the systems the country has (state housing) to provide assistance aren't working.
1 Bed apartment in city center Dublin 2K a month.
Thats 24K a year.
For the sake of simplicity, that means you earn 48K to pay for that 24k (Tax)
The landlord gets 24K into their pocket.
They pay the government 12K in tax (50% threshold assumed again)
Landlord spends that 12k on fun activities. They pay 23% VAT
The government is making an absolute fortune with this absurd rental market.
Let's not even get into the high cost of mortgages because the government has a non trivial share in banks after they went bust 10 years ago.
It's considered bad practice to comment on HN stories one hasn't read. Did you happen to see anything in this story about zoning or housing regulation, or have specific knowledge to that affect?
That's exactly my point. They're not talking about the real cause of the problem, thus misleading all the readers and ignoring the elephant in the room.
Housing shortages are almost always a market failure due to regulation of some sort. They keep talking about it like the problem was existing landlords/AirBNB and to whom they're renting it out, etc. Instead of focusing on the real problem: lack of supply.
The lack of supply comes because neo-liberals decided the government should stop building social housing. So... yeah.. you are right, but for reasons that you won't like.
I strongly doubt Airbnb has anything to do with it. The idea seems ridiculous, especially for Dublin. From what I've seen, Dublin suffers from a chronic lack of government planning and spending on housing and general urban planning; has a sizable part of the population that lives and has lived maybe for centuries in serious poverty, helped (and kept quiet) by the dole; it's a tech hub in a tiny country with a formidable capacity of attraction of tech companies and skilled workers, who inevitably compete with the natives for housing; but being small, it's not flexible enough to accommodate the amount of immigrants, and it's very sensitive to boom and busts: rents are now 2.5 times what they were in 2009. Many council houses are horrific in build quality and lack of maintenance. Developers, in the (apparent) complete lack of planning are incredibly greedy, and happily destroy any existing building in the city centre to replace it with brand new, extremely expensive ones. At the same time a lot of old/ historical buildings in the city center are left empty and rotting, amid wastegrounds closed by iron fences and barbed wire.
Ireland's culture seems to me a strange mix of great heart, fatalism, happy go lucky attitude, greed and complete inability to plan the future.
Check this: an Irish comedian around 2008, when the crisis hit Ireland and the properties prices crashed:
The listings on Airbnb at any given moment are all the flats on offer in the city, while the ones on offer for long term rental are there only for a few weeks before disappearing from the market for years. So simply comparing the absolute amount of flats on offer on Airbnb and, say, Daft.ie or Rent.ie doesn't make much sense.
Maybe this is cultural and I have been grossly desensitized to how temporary rent/lease arrangements are in the US (except in rent controlled places), but I don’t quite understand the aversion to going with a private market renter apartment, subsidized by the government (council?).
What makes it so undesirable that the article protagonists are willing to put their kids through the wait in what is basically a shoe box?! (10 sq.m. is not big enough for two people!)
The risk of having to look for another place to rent in a year is the same in most of US. They appear to be protected from the increases by the subsidy, so doesn’t feel so bad.
One important point not mentioned in the discussion of this has been the accumulation of vast parcels of land by venture capitalists during the last housing crisis. There are people sitting on huge amounts of land that they acquired at knock-down prices during the government fire-sale. Media coverage has focused on the outright corruption alleged to have occurred in some cases (google NAMA and scandal) but even in the "legal" transfer of land the Irish taxpayers have effectively subsidized the purchase of these landbanks by private investors.
It is probably time for compulsory purchase orders at prices fair to the taxpayers. Hopefully this will scare off other predators as Ireland becomes known as a bad place to do dirty business in.
((I am dreaming... that will never happen... the Irish public by-and-large are neoliberal true believers... these are the fruits of their dearly held ideology))
Great quote that applies worldwide. And agreed its dumb. Hotels should be most efficient, I dont know how houses can be cheaper.
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