Any government subsidy whatsoever is going to turbocharge house prices.
As intended.
Pouring petrol on a fire
These types of schemes, a sticking plaster for broken bones, are the reason we are in this mess to begin with.
These ridiculous schemes aren’t going to fix supply and affordability. It’s just going to push more money to developers and increase prices even further from now record highs. Fuck FF and FG.
Isn’t that the intended outcome?
I am looking to buy my first house in Dublin, more than likely it will be a secondhand house, got AIP and all and even I don’t want this shit. How about lower taxes being paid by selling second hand homes below a price. It would be much better overall for buyers and sellers of investment properties. Like we are in a fucking housing crisis. Build more, lower bord plenala authority to disrupt and object to any minute matter.
The only thing that’s going to reduce or even stabilise prices is a huge increase in supply and we aren’t really capable of doing that as we don’t have the capacity in the construction sector and seem to be doing politically incapable of doing anything to ramp that up, and are somewhat frozen on the spot because of the aftermath of the last construction bubble.
I read that as house parties and was a bit confused for a sec.
But that’s the point – why do we have articles talking about these plans as though there is some hypothetical situation where it’s possible that subsidies may increase house prices? It’s a certainty, and it’s the point. I would love a media that would make this argument instead, we have a media that will just allow them talk around it.
The spice must flow!
FFG HQ👇
You can only turbocharge house prices so much before riots will bring them down again.
Voters (the ones this policy is aimed at) should remember that.
I don’t necessarily agree with the help to buy scheme as it stands, but it does make some economic sense. Yes it drives up the price of new builds, but theoretically at least this should increase the supply of new houses. But now extending this to second hand houses has absolutely no such benefits.
Trying to help the demand without also increasing supply will always be devastating. These short sighted policies are some of the reason we are in this mess to begin with.
All FF and FG can do is just throw money at something to make it worse. Half the issue is that all they are listening to is the construction sector who have zero interest in fixing the issue and want more profit margins.
Why not provide housing to construction workers in a fashion similar to refugees? Surely that would help import bodies into the sector.
Neoliberalism has failed all of us. If we don’t move to the left the fascists will be the ones offering the alternative, and before we know it we’ll have fallen into it. Its happening globally as Neoliberalism fails globally
Mission accomplished then. And the public are about to give them the mandate to do so. Anyone who votes FFG and complains about housing deserves to be openly mocked for it.
Have you considered building more houses? Whatever happened to social housing in this country? When did we decide that Thatcherism was the best political movement to come out of the 20th century?
If one of the parties said “we’ll build 100,000 council houses” or some shit I’d vote for them. This subsidy crap is stupid. There’s enough demand there to beat the band. We need more supply.
I woke up last night after strange cheese-driven dreams of my warm and cozy dog which has been dead for six months, and a Ryanair Boeing 747 taking its first flight at 6 in the morning….
Just flinging cash at it won’t solve the problem. It’ll just create inflation. Which is now everyone’s problem.
-The State now has a massive budget surplus through sheer luck.
-The State has near full employment – in theory, anyone who wants to work can find a job
-The State can’t spend the money because there’s insufficient worker capacity to deliver services to match. (Maybe we can raise military and healthcare salaries to – y’know above poverty level, but that would involve giving people a break)
-If the State dumps that money into the economy it’ll just trigger inflation – more money for the same amount of work capacity – which makes everyone unhappy.
-The State can’t import foreign workers to up the capacity because there’s nowhere for them to live. Or will have to pay a premium to cover massive rents.
-The state has a complete lack of housing, pushing rents through the roof.
-The state lacks the tradeworkers to build houses. Especially *good* trade workers. They either went to Australia – or never trained in the first place due to a decade of no building industry in the country, so no jobs for them.
-The state can’t import any more tradeworkers because it has nowhere for them to live now.
-The State can’t also do any infrastructure upgrades to ‘invest in the future’ because those also require workers, and we’re back to triggering inflation and infuriating people with 2 Litres of coke for 4 euro and 10 euro sandwich ‘deals’ at petrol stations.
-The state has no accommodation for refugees. It has to put them in any spare bed it can find, which is causing community stress and driving the far-right.
-Inflation is causing social stress, which can also drive the far-right.
-Anything the state tries to do to mitigate one will drive the other.
Breraking it down into a summary, GPT-style we get:
Insufficient accomodation for workers.
Insufficient workers to build accomodation for workers.
Inability to import workers because there’s no accomodation for workers.
Inability to inject money to solve this problem without causing inflation, because there’s insufficient workers.
That’s some pickle.
As for the solution – This is a problem that needs a level of intelligence that’s probably been exported from the State in the last few decades.
What I think it looks like, is finding some way to reduce the man-hours input into housing, or offshore as much of it as possible, allowing the same amount of work-time inside the State to build more houses.
Maybe Harland and Wolff or Volkswagen (Or some other mass-manufacturer with excess workforce that’s about to go titsup or close factories that have no work to do) could build steel houses in a factory as knockdown kits and ship them here to be assembled.
I don’t even know if that’s practical. What does this even look like?
We need a radical plan to increase the amount of qualified people working in construction. We had 100,000 before the crash and we only recently got back there (with a million more people living in the country). We can’t wait for a trickle of apprentices, we need to aggressively bring in a workforce.
Something like a visa program that exempts you from income taxes if you complete a contract, with the first wave of workers throwing up temporary housing for the second wave. They built cities in the desert with large migrant workforces, Australia is constantly dragging people in… Supply is our biggest problem, and a workforce to build followed by finance and then planning are issues. But right now there’s planning in place for 55,000 apartments in Dublin, for example – most of which aren’t near being built.
26 comments
Any government subsidy whatsoever is going to turbocharge house prices.
As intended.
Pouring petrol on a fire
These types of schemes, a sticking plaster for broken bones, are the reason we are in this mess to begin with.
These ridiculous schemes aren’t going to fix supply and affordability. It’s just going to push more money to developers and increase prices even further from now record highs. Fuck FF and FG.
Isn’t that the intended outcome?
I am looking to buy my first house in Dublin, more than likely it will be a secondhand house, got AIP and all and even I don’t want this shit. How about lower taxes being paid by selling second hand homes below a price. It would be much better overall for buyers and sellers of investment properties. Like we are in a fucking housing crisis. Build more, lower bord plenala authority to disrupt and object to any minute matter.
The only thing that’s going to reduce or even stabilise prices is a huge increase in supply and we aren’t really capable of doing that as we don’t have the capacity in the construction sector and seem to be doing politically incapable of doing anything to ramp that up, and are somewhat frozen on the spot because of the aftermath of the last construction bubble.
I read that as house parties and was a bit confused for a sec.
But that’s the point – why do we have articles talking about these plans as though there is some hypothetical situation where it’s possible that subsidies may increase house prices? It’s a certainty, and it’s the point. I would love a media that would make this argument instead, we have a media that will just allow them talk around it.
The spice must flow!
FFG HQ👇
You can only turbocharge house prices so much before riots will bring them down again.
Voters (the ones this policy is aimed at) should remember that.
I don’t necessarily agree with the help to buy scheme as it stands, but it does make some economic sense. Yes it drives up the price of new builds, but theoretically at least this should increase the supply of new houses. But now extending this to second hand houses has absolutely no such benefits.
Trying to help the demand without also increasing supply will always be devastating. These short sighted policies are some of the reason we are in this mess to begin with.
All FF and FG can do is just throw money at something to make it worse. Half the issue is that all they are listening to is the construction sector who have zero interest in fixing the issue and want more profit margins.
Why not provide housing to construction workers in a fashion similar to refugees? Surely that would help import bodies into the sector.
Neoliberalism has failed all of us. If we don’t move to the left the fascists will be the ones offering the alternative, and before we know it we’ll have fallen into it. Its happening globally as Neoliberalism fails globally
Mission accomplished then. And the public are about to give them the mandate to do so. Anyone who votes FFG and complains about housing deserves to be openly mocked for it.
Have you considered building more houses? Whatever happened to social housing in this country? When did we decide that Thatcherism was the best political movement to come out of the 20th century?
If one of the parties said “we’ll build 100,000 council houses” or some shit I’d vote for them. This subsidy crap is stupid. There’s enough demand there to beat the band. We need more supply.
I woke up last night after strange cheese-driven dreams of my warm and cozy dog which has been dead for six months, and a Ryanair Boeing 747 taking its first flight at 6 in the morning….
Just flinging cash at it won’t solve the problem. It’ll just create inflation. Which is now everyone’s problem.
-The State now has a massive budget surplus through sheer luck.
-The State has near full employment – in theory, anyone who wants to work can find a job
-The State can’t spend the money because there’s insufficient worker capacity to deliver services to match. (Maybe we can raise military and healthcare salaries to – y’know above poverty level, but that would involve giving people a break)
-If the State dumps that money into the economy it’ll just trigger inflation – more money for the same amount of work capacity – which makes everyone unhappy.
-The State can’t import foreign workers to up the capacity because there’s nowhere for them to live. Or will have to pay a premium to cover massive rents.
-The state has a complete lack of housing, pushing rents through the roof.
-The state lacks the tradeworkers to build houses. Especially *good* trade workers. They either went to Australia – or never trained in the first place due to a decade of no building industry in the country, so no jobs for them.
-The state can’t import any more tradeworkers because it has nowhere for them to live now.
-The State can’t also do any infrastructure upgrades to ‘invest in the future’ because those also require workers, and we’re back to triggering inflation and infuriating people with 2 Litres of coke for 4 euro and 10 euro sandwich ‘deals’ at petrol stations.
-The state has no accommodation for refugees. It has to put them in any spare bed it can find, which is causing community stress and driving the far-right.
-Inflation is causing social stress, which can also drive the far-right.
-Anything the state tries to do to mitigate one will drive the other.
Breraking it down into a summary, GPT-style we get:
Insufficient accomodation for workers.
Insufficient workers to build accomodation for workers.
Inability to import workers because there’s no accomodation for workers.
Inability to inject money to solve this problem without causing inflation, because there’s insufficient workers.
That’s some pickle.
As for the solution – This is a problem that needs a level of intelligence that’s probably been exported from the State in the last few decades.
What I think it looks like, is finding some way to reduce the man-hours input into housing, or offshore as much of it as possible, allowing the same amount of work-time inside the State to build more houses.
Maybe Harland and Wolff or Volkswagen (Or some other mass-manufacturer with excess workforce that’s about to go titsup or close factories that have no work to do) could build steel houses in a factory as knockdown kits and ship them here to be assembled.
I don’t even know if that’s practical. What does this even look like?
We need a radical plan to increase the amount of qualified people working in construction. We had 100,000 before the crash and we only recently got back there (with a million more people living in the country). We can’t wait for a trickle of apprentices, we need to aggressively bring in a workforce.
Something like a visa program that exempts you from income taxes if you complete a contract, with the first wave of workers throwing up temporary housing for the second wave. They built cities in the desert with large migrant workforces, Australia is constantly dragging people in… Supply is our biggest problem, and a workforce to build followed by finance and then planning are issues. But right now there’s planning in place for 55,000 apartments in Dublin, for example – most of which aren’t near being built.
As a home owner, this works for me.
They know. That’s the point.
They know
Yes, please drop these stupid ideas.
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