In today’s Ireland, the rich live in houses that were built for the poor

by PistolAndRapier

12 comments
  1. There’s another point to make here, if even the rich can only afford poor standard accommodation. Portobello is not exactly amazing, the streets are broken and littered, full of cars, zero greenery, many houses are neglected, some have clear structural issues, walls and gardens are used as toilets by the crowds of Camden St and the Barge etc. So it’s interesting to see it used as an example of how “the rich” live unless to show how they experience a drop in standards too

  2. When I look at the value in housing in some major cities in the states (Dallas/Hueston) and what you would get for 500k compared to here, it’s quite depressing.

  3. More and more rich and middle class people want to live near dublin

    Not enough houses for rich and middle class people are being built/have been built

    Rich and middle class people move into the only other option available to them, housing for poor people

  4. Two parallel things are going on:

    1) housing is unaffordable
    2) people are valuing townhouses in convenient locations, which a lot of those places represent.

  5. And the less-rich fit multiple families into a house built for the rich, thats been split into apartments

  6. Terraced ex council houses needing a full refurb selling for 500-700k. Healthy market

  7. As recently as the early 2000s a lot of poorer people in Dublin lived in houses that were built for the rich. Barely possible now.

  8. I bought an 1860 house in a historically working class area and think about this a lot, not that I consider myself rich but I find it ironic that as a working class social climber i feel like ‘I made it’ by buying… a working class house. However there are nuances. Firstly, people in the 19th century almost never owned property, they were overwhelmingly tenants. Actually, looking at the census data i can see that at multiple points in time more than one family shared the house in which I now live alone. There were fewer rich and middle class people 160 years ago than there are now, but the built environment of 160 years ago still predominantly survived, therefore we ought to upgrade/convert existing houses for the much larger middle class of today. Moreover people like the curb appeal of older property, specifically the cottage like look of poor workers homes, and that curb appeal is expensive to maintain and in itself a class marker now.  

     The alternative to disregarding the current residential property stock to build new, bigger, property just does not work in Europe (we just don’t have the space) as opposed to America and is not environmentally sustainable.

  9. Because location. Much like the Kartoffelrækkerne in Copenhagen which were built for the poor in the 1880s but are now among the most expensive properties in all of the city.

  10. Well there are cases where they were built for the rich, became unfashionable and then the poor moved in, then the rich liked them again and so on.

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