from Hacker News

30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis

by CharlesDodgson on 11/29/18, 2:14 PM with 141 comments

  • by burlesona on 11/29/18, 4:39 PM

    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?

  • by docker_up on 11/29/18, 4:30 PM

    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.

  • by rb808 on 11/29/18, 3:57 PM

    > homeless families stay in hotels, and tourists stay in houses.

    Great quote that applies worldwide. And agreed its dumb. Hotels should be most efficient, I dont know how houses can be cheaper.

  • by nyghtly on 11/29/18, 4:25 PM

    Potential regulatory solution in Boston:

    "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."

    https://www.avalara.com/mylodgetax/en/blog/2018/06/boston-ci...

  • by scotty79 on 11/29/18, 4:44 PM

    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.

  • by Irishsteve on 11/29/18, 6:59 PM

    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.

  • by mjevans on 11/29/18, 6:08 PM

    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).

  • by Udik on 11/29/18, 7:10 PM

    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:

    https://youtu.be/ZD9R1LMM5Zs

  • by everyone on 11/29/18, 5:56 PM

    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.

  • by selimnairb on 11/29/18, 6:12 PM

    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.

  • by AlexTWithBeard on 11/29/18, 6:15 PM

    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...

  • by cauliflower99 on 11/29/18, 4:59 PM

    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?

  • by _eht on 11/29/18, 4:23 PM

    I've been told by some fellow HN'ers in other threads that housing problems like this are akin to domain squatting. SMH.

  • by sologoub on 11/29/18, 7:11 PM

    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.

  • by akshayB on 11/29/18, 4:02 PM

    It sounds like government needs to adjust the laws so it encourages the homeowners to rent rather then Airbnb.

  • by squozzer on 11/29/18, 4:41 PM

    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.)

  • by jpollock on 11/29/18, 6:44 PM

    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.

  • by starbeast on 11/29/18, 5:33 PM

    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.

  • by dev_north_east on 11/30/18, 11:49 AM

    How about building up? There's a huge lack of any sizable flat developments in Dublin, it's all housing sprawl out into Meath and Kildare.

    It's a fine place to visit but no way I'd live there (again). Traffic woes, housing woes etc. I dunno how the Dubs do it tbh.

  • by dubliner2077 on 11/30/18, 6:38 AM

    They like to simulate them being big cities like New York or Tokyo in terms of cost of living and rent prices.

    The country just build HOUSES for few people and nothing high or apartment blocks... Again, instead, we build offices.

    Truth is Dublin is one of the most appalling cities in the world.

  • by knuxus on 11/29/18, 3:58 PM

    People would rather make more money in less time...

  • by dmitriid on 11/29/18, 4:18 PM

    > Dublin came out as the world’s worst capital for affordable accommodation

    They should try Stockholm. It can't be worse than Stockholm, surely.

  • by frabbit on 11/30/18, 10:14 PM

    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))

  • by pascalxus on 11/29/18, 7:08 PM

    Just another story about the evils of zoning and housing regulation. How much do you want to bet builders aren't allowed to build more housing there?

  • by eggy on 11/29/18, 4:39 PM

    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.

  • by wallace_f on 11/29/18, 4:16 PM

    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.