“Emigrants finally realise that everywhere outside Ireland isn’t a good for all utopia”
The property markets in Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc have been running far ahead of Ireland almost a decade before the crisis hit here.
I’ve been an emigrant, some things work better abroad, some things worse. Apologies, though following this Christmas and spending time with some people who have come back from abroad, the complaints and expectations of entitlement from some of them is just striking.
Also “expat”, fuck off, you’re an immigrant.
The housing crisis is a thing all over the western world. I watched a documentary recently about a small community in Colorado, previously it was a quiet mountain town full of locals but it’s now s tourist hot spot with many outsiders buying up property, reducing housing stock and pushing up prices. The locals can no longer afford to live there, local economy tanks, seasonal temporary jobs on low wages replace permanent work and so it goes. It was almost a carbon copy of what’s happened in Ireland, Wales, Cornwall in England and parts of France and Denmark.
Edit: didn’t read the article just pissed off with the whole housing thing.
We see commenters on here all the time talking about “getting out of this shithole” and they think that they can just land in Canada or somewhere in the EU or whatever and all the woes will just evaporate.
I lived in Germany just a couple of years ago, specifically in Hamburg and let me assure people that it is barely slightly better than Dublin. There are queues around the corner for rent and you need to have everything in order and be quite aggressive to get a place, rent is expensive and houses are very expensive.
There is a housing crisis in almost every developed nation in the world.
I live in Asia, and there’s also a housing crisis in many Asian countries, luckily I was able to get on the property ladder a while back. There are two main reasons I left, job opportunities and weather. There are plenty of things I miss, but not enough to return. A trip home every couple of years scratches the itch.
Houses are expensive everywhere, not just in Ireland.
As the interest rates on offer go down and investment opertunities are nonexistent, people with money are looking for somewhere to put it.
People with money could be the private investor, pension funds or investment funds.
There is no returns to be had on investments in anything so rentals look more and more appealing.
So, how does this work exactly, we look to the problems the rest of the world to say ah sure that’s grand while they look to ours to justify their own problems and everyone just wallows in the shit?
I couldn’t really give a fuck about Canada or other countries, I live here.
This is not okay, it is not normal, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
The ECB set interest rates at 0% for the past decade. Some European counties have mortgages at 1%. No surprise that house prices have shot up as a result of consumers being able to borrow at such low rates.
Thanks to the Celtic tiger crash Ireland has some of the strictest borrowing rules. This has meant that house prices here haven’t increased at the same pace as other parts of the world. It’s little consolation for first time buyers who can’t buy a house, but we’ll be one of the least affected countries when the next crash comes.
Silly whataboutism. Sure it’s crazy everywhere, but the difference is the quality of rental properties here for the price you pay are terrible compared to most places.
[deleted]
Wow I’m surprised. s/
It’s hilarious when I see people complaining about Ireland saying they will move to country A or B, but then you have people from those countries complaining about similar things (or even other stuff too).
Nice “put up with crap here because you won’t get better anywhere else” propaganda to avert pressure away from doing anything to help people. Just keep voting FFG and paying the landlords.
People point this out and use it as an argument that ‘oh there is nothing we can do, this is just the way things are’
It’s not true. There are housing issues all over the western world because neoliberalism is dictating housing policy all over the western world.
There are dozens of policies that could help solve this issue. The main one is the state-building council-owned homes. But these policies are all profoundly against neoliberalism.
Make no mistake. If the state seized unused land and funded the construction of 200k houses and apartments in Dublin over the next 5 years, banned second home ownership, only allowed people with local links to buy, and sold them for 10% of market value, mandated that any purchasors had to actually live in them, and banned the resale of them for more than the original sale price, prices would collapse. But of course, this is completely against neoliberalism.
Globally we are in for a hard time ahead. Housing has been allowed to become an investment vehicle for too many people. My father for instance. He acknowledges that there is a problem. But thinks it’s great that he is renting out his second home for 30k a year. Even though he sees and articulates that the situation for my generation is fucked is he going to vote for a party that pledges to drive down rents?
Very interesting times ahead. How are young people going to buy into capitalism when they have no capital themselves? What’s going to happen to birth rates? How does the state fund a population of pensioners who don’t own their own homes?
Yes houses cost more overseas in certain places, *but wages reflect that a little in most places*. Relative to wages, our rents are some of the worst in the world.
Of course you can cherry pick countries with worse housing problems, but the vast bulk of the western world is not paying an average of 40% of their income on rent. And this article is 2 years old! The crisis has only been exacerbated since then.
Relative to wages, US, German and UK rents are cheaper than ours for instance.
Not that bad here in Madrid, which is still considered to be expensive for rent for Spain. There’s decent supply of apartments because apartment living is accepted and plenty are nice and compact if you’re looking to cut costs. I’m paying €340 a month with 3 roommates currently and live 8-10 mins from city centre on metro.
that’s a hilarious headline
Major differences though.
The buildings in these countries usually aren’t rotting with mold and in disrepair.
The area/m^2 of the places to rent are much bigger than they are in Ireland.
The places with these crisis actually have good amenities such as reliable public transport, hospital bed capacity and entertainment venues.
These places also have less street crime, less deadlock traffic and more people friendly roads.
So yeah, it is greener on the other side, I’m getting more bang for my buck even if I move to a place with a crisis.
When I lived abroad the average wage still allowed me to pay rent/bills/groceries and have a decent chunk of disposable income, all while renting a fairly decent house with all the mod cons. Housing was still an issue, but greed and poor quality rentals means Ireland is still a different kettle of fish.
Who wrote this? This isn’t news to anyone that rents or owns a home. At least I think it wouldn’t be…
The issue/takeaway from this article is Ireland is comparable in charging the same in rent as other global cities like Dubai. I’d much rather pay for a place in Berlin, Ontario, Stockholm or Paris, than Cork, Galway, Limerick, or Dublin.
I’m not disparaging Irish cities, but the quality of life is not comparable. That’s the issue. How has Ireland become as expensive to live as these countries that offer so much more? The infrastructure and amentities don’t reflect the cost of living.
While it’s still a lot, at least there’s stuff going on in those cities. What’s going on in Ireland? Lockdowns, junkies, pubs, and coffee shops? And you pay 1200 a month for that. No wonder it’s acceptable for most people to be functioning alcoholics in this country. Christ.
It’s like that Chinese quote that went viral on their version of Take Me Out when someone was asked if money was important and she said, “I’d rather be crying in a BMW than smile on a bicycle”. Ireland still has the training wheels on but charges the price of a BMW.
I’ve rented in Spain and the US and it’s definitely not all peaches and cream
1) in Spain you generally have to front between 3 and 6 months rent to secure a place. 1 month of that disappears to the agent. Depending on where you are, the places can be of dubious quality or size. Madrid you need to have AC and good heating, you generally find places that have one and not the other. When you try to jimmy together a solution for what you don’t have, you pay out your ass in utilities.
The upside is that you could die in that place an be paying pretty the same rent
2) Oh boy – the US. Outside of the major cities – renting is seen as a second class citizen. We rented in San Francisco and it was normal – but rents were off the charts. We had a OK place for $2500 but it needed refurbed and bought into the 21st century but it was grand. A top quality place would cost you around $6K a month. A buddy bought a place for $750K and sold it for close to $2m and it went to the bidder that showed up to his door with all expenses paid trip to Hawaii to get over the stress of selling and moving.
We rented a while here in Texas and had nothing but shit experiences with landlords. Now we own and our place has gone up in value by $100K in little over 18 months and we are looking at leaving the shithole that is Texas and moving somewhere civilized and back to renting for a while
Housing demand is high over here in Sweden, but still much cheaper to rent or buy over here overall.
Keep it simple.
Money printer goes brrrr = prices go up.
It’s cheaper to push this new type of “it’s everywhere not just here” narrative than to find more efficient ways to build as many apartments as possible I guess … 🤷
The reason is inflation. Ever since 2008 central banks have been doing Quantitave Easing, a technical term for increasing the supply of money. The object of this is to prop up banks and companies that would collapse without cheap loans from the lender of last resort. The problem is it creates inflation. For the last decade all this new money has been going to banks and investment funds, which is why we’ve seen inflation in stock markets and property markets, but not Consumer Price Inflation. This is a part of why we have massive wealth inequality now.
Since March 2020 the US Federal Reserve have bought over $2T of Mortgage-Backed Securities and are still buying $100b a month. This is all new money and is designed to prop up house prices in order to keep banks and pensions afloat. They spend even more buying bonds with new money in order to keep interest rates low so people and funds will keep borrowing.
The Irish housing market has become a sentient being and is writing propaganda articles for the Irish Times.
The housing crisis is created by investment funds.
The neoliberal system previously capitalised on providing subprime mortgage loan for their own benefit causing the Great Recession. Now, capitalists are using the housing crisis to shaft the people.
Different method, same misery.
Hopefully the Irish on Reddit can discover this as well to get a bit of perspective.
Yank here. I live in the Midwest USA in a town of 100,000 people and housing prices have gone through the roof (pun intended) in the last 5 years. Recently anyone looking to purchase a home has to go $20,000-$50,000 over asking price to even have their offer considered. Sometimes the banks won’t even cover the difference and the purchasers have to pony up the extra money from their own pockets. A coworker’s lease was recently up and he had to move in with me because his rent for a 2 bedroom apartment was going to be over $2200 a month.
It still sounds worse in Dublin, but it seems like everywhere with decent jobs is becoming outrageously expensive.
There is an upside though. My wife and I both owned houses before we were married (pre COVID) and this year we were able to flip them both and buy a new house and completely pay off our mortgage.
We’re heading for another global bubble burst and It’s not gonna be pretty
When I read “it’s crazy here” I immediately knew they were talking about Ontario, most likely Toronto or close to it.
It’s an absolute nightmare here in Vancouver.
I was over in The Basque Country recently, housing is very expensive in San Sebastian and Bilbao which I totally understand these are amazing cities with a lot going for them. The thing that really blew my mind were the prices in the villages about 30mins outside these cities (pop 10k+). For a residence suitable for a family you’ll not be getting change from 300k.
32 comments
“Emigrants finally realise that everywhere outside Ireland isn’t a good for all utopia”
The property markets in Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc have been running far ahead of Ireland almost a decade before the crisis hit here.
I’ve been an emigrant, some things work better abroad, some things worse. Apologies, though following this Christmas and spending time with some people who have come back from abroad, the complaints and expectations of entitlement from some of them is just striking.
Also “expat”, fuck off, you’re an immigrant.
The housing crisis is a thing all over the western world. I watched a documentary recently about a small community in Colorado, previously it was a quiet mountain town full of locals but it’s now s tourist hot spot with many outsiders buying up property, reducing housing stock and pushing up prices. The locals can no longer afford to live there, local economy tanks, seasonal temporary jobs on low wages replace permanent work and so it goes. It was almost a carbon copy of what’s happened in Ireland, Wales, Cornwall in England and parts of France and Denmark.
Edit: didn’t read the article just pissed off with the whole housing thing.
We see commenters on here all the time talking about “getting out of this shithole” and they think that they can just land in Canada or somewhere in the EU or whatever and all the woes will just evaporate.
I lived in Germany just a couple of years ago, specifically in Hamburg and let me assure people that it is barely slightly better than Dublin. There are queues around the corner for rent and you need to have everything in order and be quite aggressive to get a place, rent is expensive and houses are very expensive.
There is a housing crisis in almost every developed nation in the world.
I live in Asia, and there’s also a housing crisis in many Asian countries, luckily I was able to get on the property ladder a while back. There are two main reasons I left, job opportunities and weather. There are plenty of things I miss, but not enough to return. A trip home every couple of years scratches the itch.
Houses are expensive everywhere, not just in Ireland.
As the interest rates on offer go down and investment opertunities are nonexistent, people with money are looking for somewhere to put it.
People with money could be the private investor, pension funds or investment funds.
There is no returns to be had on investments in anything so rentals look more and more appealing.
So, how does this work exactly, we look to the problems the rest of the world to say ah sure that’s grand while they look to ours to justify their own problems and everyone just wallows in the shit?
I couldn’t really give a fuck about Canada or other countries, I live here.
This is not okay, it is not normal, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
The ECB set interest rates at 0% for the past decade. Some European counties have mortgages at 1%. No surprise that house prices have shot up as a result of consumers being able to borrow at such low rates.
Thanks to the Celtic tiger crash Ireland has some of the strictest borrowing rules. This has meant that house prices here haven’t increased at the same pace as other parts of the world. It’s little consolation for first time buyers who can’t buy a house, but we’ll be one of the least affected countries when the next crash comes.
Silly whataboutism. Sure it’s crazy everywhere, but the difference is the quality of rental properties here for the price you pay are terrible compared to most places.
[deleted]
Wow I’m surprised. s/
It’s hilarious when I see people complaining about Ireland saying they will move to country A or B, but then you have people from those countries complaining about similar things (or even other stuff too).
Nice “put up with crap here because you won’t get better anywhere else” propaganda to avert pressure away from doing anything to help people. Just keep voting FFG and paying the landlords.
People point this out and use it as an argument that ‘oh there is nothing we can do, this is just the way things are’
It’s not true. There are housing issues all over the western world because neoliberalism is dictating housing policy all over the western world.
There are dozens of policies that could help solve this issue. The main one is the state-building council-owned homes. But these policies are all profoundly against neoliberalism.
Make no mistake. If the state seized unused land and funded the construction of 200k houses and apartments in Dublin over the next 5 years, banned second home ownership, only allowed people with local links to buy, and sold them for 10% of market value, mandated that any purchasors had to actually live in them, and banned the resale of them for more than the original sale price, prices would collapse. But of course, this is completely against neoliberalism.
Globally we are in for a hard time ahead. Housing has been allowed to become an investment vehicle for too many people. My father for instance. He acknowledges that there is a problem. But thinks it’s great that he is renting out his second home for 30k a year. Even though he sees and articulates that the situation for my generation is fucked is he going to vote for a party that pledges to drive down rents?
Very interesting times ahead. How are young people going to buy into capitalism when they have no capital themselves? What’s going to happen to birth rates? How does the state fund a population of pensioners who don’t own their own homes?
Yes houses cost more overseas in certain places, *but wages reflect that a little in most places*. Relative to wages, our rents are some of the worst in the world.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.extra.ie/2019/08/28/news/irish-news/irish-people-wages-on-rent
Of course you can cherry pick countries with worse housing problems, but the vast bulk of the western world is not paying an average of 40% of their income on rent. And this article is 2 years old! The crisis has only been exacerbated since then.
Relative to wages, US, German and UK rents are cheaper than ours for instance.
Not that bad here in Madrid, which is still considered to be expensive for rent for Spain. There’s decent supply of apartments because apartment living is accepted and plenty are nice and compact if you’re looking to cut costs. I’m paying €340 a month with 3 roommates currently and live 8-10 mins from city centre on metro.
that’s a hilarious headline
Major differences though.
The buildings in these countries usually aren’t rotting with mold and in disrepair.
The area/m^2 of the places to rent are much bigger than they are in Ireland.
The places with these crisis actually have good amenities such as reliable public transport, hospital bed capacity and entertainment venues.
These places also have less street crime, less deadlock traffic and more people friendly roads.
So yeah, it is greener on the other side, I’m getting more bang for my buck even if I move to a place with a crisis.
When I lived abroad the average wage still allowed me to pay rent/bills/groceries and have a decent chunk of disposable income, all while renting a fairly decent house with all the mod cons. Housing was still an issue, but greed and poor quality rentals means Ireland is still a different kettle of fish.
Who wrote this? This isn’t news to anyone that rents or owns a home. At least I think it wouldn’t be…
The issue/takeaway from this article is Ireland is comparable in charging the same in rent as other global cities like Dubai. I’d much rather pay for a place in Berlin, Ontario, Stockholm or Paris, than Cork, Galway, Limerick, or Dublin.
I’m not disparaging Irish cities, but the quality of life is not comparable. That’s the issue. How has Ireland become as expensive to live as these countries that offer so much more? The infrastructure and amentities don’t reflect the cost of living.
While it’s still a lot, at least there’s stuff going on in those cities. What’s going on in Ireland? Lockdowns, junkies, pubs, and coffee shops? And you pay 1200 a month for that. No wonder it’s acceptable for most people to be functioning alcoholics in this country. Christ.
It’s like that Chinese quote that went viral on their version of Take Me Out when someone was asked if money was important and she said, “I’d rather be crying in a BMW than smile on a bicycle”. Ireland still has the training wheels on but charges the price of a BMW.
I’ve rented in Spain and the US and it’s definitely not all peaches and cream
1) in Spain you generally have to front between 3 and 6 months rent to secure a place. 1 month of that disappears to the agent. Depending on where you are, the places can be of dubious quality or size. Madrid you need to have AC and good heating, you generally find places that have one and not the other. When you try to jimmy together a solution for what you don’t have, you pay out your ass in utilities.
The upside is that you could die in that place an be paying pretty the same rent
2) Oh boy – the US. Outside of the major cities – renting is seen as a second class citizen. We rented in San Francisco and it was normal – but rents were off the charts. We had a OK place for $2500 but it needed refurbed and bought into the 21st century but it was grand. A top quality place would cost you around $6K a month. A buddy bought a place for $750K and sold it for close to $2m and it went to the bidder that showed up to his door with all expenses paid trip to Hawaii to get over the stress of selling and moving.
We rented a while here in Texas and had nothing but shit experiences with landlords. Now we own and our place has gone up in value by $100K in little over 18 months and we are looking at leaving the shithole that is Texas and moving somewhere civilized and back to renting for a while
Housing demand is high over here in Sweden, but still much cheaper to rent or buy over here overall.
Keep it simple.
Money printer goes brrrr = prices go up.
It’s cheaper to push this new type of “it’s everywhere not just here” narrative than to find more efficient ways to build as many apartments as possible I guess … 🤷
The reason is inflation. Ever since 2008 central banks have been doing Quantitave Easing, a technical term for increasing the supply of money. The object of this is to prop up banks and companies that would collapse without cheap loans from the lender of last resort. The problem is it creates inflation. For the last decade all this new money has been going to banks and investment funds, which is why we’ve seen inflation in stock markets and property markets, but not Consumer Price Inflation. This is a part of why we have massive wealth inequality now.
Since March 2020 the US Federal Reserve have bought over $2T of Mortgage-Backed Securities and are still buying $100b a month. This is all new money and is designed to prop up house prices in order to keep banks and pensions afloat. They spend even more buying bonds with new money in order to keep interest rates low so people and funds will keep borrowing.
The Irish housing market has become a sentient being and is writing propaganda articles for the Irish Times.
The housing crisis is created by investment funds.
The neoliberal system previously capitalised on providing subprime mortgage loan for their own benefit causing the Great Recession. Now, capitalists are using the housing crisis to shaft the people.
Different method, same misery.
Hopefully the Irish on Reddit can discover this as well to get a bit of perspective.
Yank here. I live in the Midwest USA in a town of 100,000 people and housing prices have gone through the roof (pun intended) in the last 5 years. Recently anyone looking to purchase a home has to go $20,000-$50,000 over asking price to even have their offer considered. Sometimes the banks won’t even cover the difference and the purchasers have to pony up the extra money from their own pockets. A coworker’s lease was recently up and he had to move in with me because his rent for a 2 bedroom apartment was going to be over $2200 a month.
It still sounds worse in Dublin, but it seems like everywhere with decent jobs is becoming outrageously expensive.
There is an upside though. My wife and I both owned houses before we were married (pre COVID) and this year we were able to flip them both and buy a new house and completely pay off our mortgage.
We’re heading for another global bubble burst and It’s not gonna be pretty
When I read “it’s crazy here” I immediately knew they were talking about Ontario, most likely Toronto or close to it.
It’s an absolute nightmare here in Vancouver.
I was over in The Basque Country recently, housing is very expensive in San Sebastian and Bilbao which I totally understand these are amazing cities with a lot going for them. The thing that really blew my mind were the prices in the villages about 30mins outside these cities (pop 10k+). For a residence suitable for a family you’ll not be getting change from 300k.