There's no restrictions on height nor density in the Docklands area of Dublin: an area within walking distance of the centre of the city, and with a good regular tram link, that is mostly vacant. Similarly, many areas on major tram routes are not so restricted, such as Sandyford and Cherrywood (these three areas, along with East Point, also happen to be where much of the tech boom is focused). So your denser/higher suggestion is being done and is having no affect—residential rents in these areas are the highest in the city, and much of the units available are left empty as a result.
Meanwhile, in terms of actual supply, even outside of those areas, Dublin has an estimated 40000 vacant residential units, and plenty of vacant commercial units on top of that.
The primary reason for this is that rent prices are not demand-based as much property is financialised—rent isn't a driver for owners, and there are little to no penalties for lack of tenancy, as other cities have.
Even if the apartment prices are rising rapidly and you plan to sell the apartment once the price goes up - why not also collect rental yield while you are waiting?
Then, when the prices hit peak value in a decade or two the investors might sell and keeping the apartment empty was more effective than renting it.
Keeping it empty long-term means leaving on the table an amount of money comparable to the mortgage. You could fill it and buy another one! If they both appreciate, all the better.
An apartment sitting idle should be a disaster - the higher rent obtained in the following years would need to be significantly higher just to break even in terms of yield.
I would've thought as full occupancy as possible at all times, i.e. renting out at market rates, would be the most profitable strategy.
Well it depends on where you are. Some places have different laws no idea about Dublin but some places protect renters from having the price spike up too quickly and have fixed rates once a contract is signed.
Edit: I of course have a subjective opinion on this from my point of view and where I am from the laws are heavily in favor of tenants so it is next to impossible to throw people out or hike up the price once an apartment is rented out.
If you search for "financialisation of property" or "financialisation of housing", you'll find quite a lot of research in this area (mostly paywalled :( ) but also quite a few elucidating articles.
Still, it seems very irrational and thus unsustainable.
Don't know how true this is, or whether it applies in Dublin, but it is one answer that I've heard when I asked the same question.
I'm dubious that people in real-estate can't understand local prices, I mean within London there are vast differences by street-by-street. I'm also dubious that empty properties & claims about what they could rent for will fool many people.
IIUC, it's not that they don't understand local prices, they instead don't care. At this scale the landlord's focus is investors in the property portfolio, not people who might actually use the property.
One possible reason is rent control, can anyone comment?
If what you risk is getting stuck for 30 years with a tenant paying last year's rent (and you think it will rise) then that could be serious money, of the sort which might make a rational landlord leave it empty.
The root cause of high rents in Dublin is two-fold: competition for rental units is extremely high, which drives prices up; meanwhile rent is usually a function of the mortgage that exists on the property, which is determined by the price of the construction and/or the value of the land it's built on – and that's where you get massive amounts of speculation in Dublin. Land in Dublin is so expensive that it drives up the cost of everything else along the chain.
Most of the vacant units in Dublin are old, and in terrible shape. They're largely owned by people who either don't have the resources (money/energy/time) to improve them so they meet minimum standards, or they're owned by people who know they can let them sit for five or ten or twenty years and sell them for a profit then. The site they're on is nearly always going to increase in value, regardless of the state of the property.
I know a councillor who worked on a report which predicted, in the 70's, that because of Irish property laws it was possible that this could be happen, and the laws should be reformed. The laws were never reformed and it happened.
And it's not like they're actually building tall there. 12 stories? 15 stories?
That's a tiny area compared to the demand for housing.
> your denser/higher suggestion is being done and is having no affect
Nonsense. Dublin has a very low density compared to any other European city. It's almost rural.
> Dublin has an estimated 40000 vacant residential units
...which is clearly not enough to lower rents given the 1347359 inhabitants in the metro area.
> The primary reason for this is that rent prices are not demand-based as much property is financialised—rent isn't a driver for owners, and there are little to no penalties for lack of tenancy, as other cities have.
True. But investors cannot buy unlimited amounts of property. Increasing supply of cheap and good quality (for a change) apartments would obviously help.
40,000 was my figure, but the population isn't that high; 40,000 is a lot more than 3%—back of a napkin math would put it closer to the 12% gross mark, but I'm pretty sure there are real figures available as that figure came from AIRO who analyse/republish CSO[0] data
[0] https://cso.ie/
Did not get to digging through CSO data... but probably a better idea than googling & finding only people counting advertised apartments as a measure.
Dublin isn't cramped by geography. Five miles west of downtown is farmland.
It sounds like they're not allowing enough construction to meet demand, and then being shocked when the obvious outcome (prioritization of some uses) occurs.
Just because land owners can make more from developing housing in the modern urbanization doesn't mean commercial retail/art/dining/entertainment spaces should be pushed out, otherwise the declining proximity benefits of urbanization lose their appeal.
Maybe if the club was in the basement it might work, but I'd love to get some insight from someone who deals with acoustics!
People can decide they're willing to live with the noise for the convenient location but there will always be some amount of noticeable noise if you live on the same block as a night club.
The sorts of venues mentioned in this article remind me of the old warehouse parties I used to go to here in Melbourne ~10 years ago, when I was well in to my 30s. They just wouldn’t have worked in a new place.
In the same vein and more my crowd, you can't just open a (good) dive bar, it takes years to develop the community atmosphere they wind up becoming.
The exit is into the shopping centre, so noise and chatter from people leaving isn't a big problem.
People in the neighborhood are mostly families.
It has a lot to do with what you can expect from your neighborhood. A nightclub opening up right next door in a silent neighborhood is a recipe for a disaster, but it is similar with people moving into regions with a famous nightlife expecting a normal place to live. I for example dont have much sympathy for people moving in next to Frankfurt central station and then start to complain about the drunks, punks, junkies and hookers. Its like moving in next to train tracks and complaining about the sound of the trains.
Only a very small subset of people living in the city will use nightclubs. It is reasonable that they are not given priority over things essential to living (housing, accomodations, transport, public services, etc..).
Edit: Also worth noting is the daylife, shall we say. That is, cafes and the like are a lot more popular than they used to be.
People move to the city because of things to do which includes nightclubs, restaurants, museums, theater, sports venues, cultural events, etc.
If all you want is a bunch of houses and roads connecting them and basic public services, you can get that for a fraction of the price in the suburbs.
> People move to the city because of things to do which includes nightclubs, restaurants, museums, theater, sports venues, cultural events, etc.
Now remove nightclubs from this list, and you still get a list of attractive reasons to settle in a city.
You don't have to infringe on the night of others to still have an enjoyable city. To repeat myself: you could close all the nightclubs in a city and you would still have plenty to live for there.
1. It has been publicly recognized as such for quite long now. Crisis meaning that lower income families are unable to compete in this market (i.e. evictions and such). Also this is a hindrance to further economic development (who's going to work on all these new jobs when s/he'll have trouble making ends meet?). You get the idea.
I still like it here, but I have a flat that I got crazy cheap in 2013 and is rent controlled (incidentally, a horrifically stupid policy enacted _especially_ badly here, making the housing crisis even worse). I also just got a remote job and bought a house in Offaly.
I used to encourage people to come to Dublin because it offered better QOL than the bay (I like not being annoyed on weekends and holidays, and that even my non-tech-worker wife gets a month off a year by law) but I really can't any more unless your housing is arranged or you have a fantastic (California-level) offer
Don't confuse density with its opposite, sprawling. Irish and british cities often have large, low density, horrible sprawls.
Huge gains could be made by bringing more 'above the shop' units into use. Vacancy and dereliction are massive issues, both in the city centre and further out - tackling that through vacant site levies or compulsory purchase orders would be huge. Regulating the abuse of AirBnB could bring a few thousand rental units in the city back into long-term use practically overnight.
As far as building new stock goes, everything is too expensive because land is too expensive. Development land around the city has been stockpiled and hoarded for decades, creating artificial scarcity and driving up prices. It's basically impossible to make a profit on reasonably dense, reasonably priced, two or three bed apartment schemes in Dublin. The SCSI and PII have good reports on this if you want to look them up. It's nearly always more profitable (and easier) to just sit on the land rather than actually develop it. The reason all the nightclubs are being replaced by hotels is a result of this: hotels are a lot more commercially viable than almost any other form of development right now. (Hotel beds in Dublin had over 90% occupancy rates last summer - they're bursting and demand is massive.)
The majority of new residential building happens in the outer suburbs and commuter belt, from Lucan to Navan. Just 31 (!!!) new homes were built in Dublin 1 (the very centre of the city) in 2018.
Apartments made up just 13% of new builds in the state last year. The apartments we do build are, on average, smaller, darker, less well serviced, and more expensive than almost any other European city. The apartments built between 1995 and 2008 are riddled with issues, from fire safety to damp to electrics. I think that accounts for a lot of Irish people's apparent antipathy towards apartment living, much more than any nonsense about an inherent desire for a semi-d with a garden.
Rents are expensive because of an increase in the numbers renting (doubled in last decade); because the rent-certainty regulation is weak or non-existent; because tenure security does not exist; because build-to-rent is expensive to develop; because REITs and larger commercial landlords are soaking up all supply and charging as much as they can. Take your pick. It's a mess.
Sorry to go on, but I just finished a six-month deep dive on the reasons behind the housing crisis in Dublin and there is just so much misinformation out there, it's frustrating.
P.S. In case anyone wants to hear more, I made a four-episode podcast series about this, the final episode of which just went up today:
www.dublininquirer.com/2019/02/27/supply-demand-a-podcast-about-dublin-s-housing-crisis-episode-4
There's an awful lot of urban sprawl because of those archaic rules and you add to that a pretty terrible public transport by Western Europe standards. Dublin is pretty terrible place to live in if you're not wealthy.
Any attempt to improve both situations are thwarted by aforementioned NIMBY folks which are only looking out for themselves, among them the people in power.[0]
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/the-irish-times...
People have legitimate reasons for not liking apartments in Dublin of which noise is a major reason.
Lax planning & building regs. dictated to politicians by developers ensured that apartments were small and had neighbours on pretty much every side.
Most people who left apartments did so for valid reasons, not an obsession with land.
Living long term in 98% of apartments in Dublin would ruin your quality of life.
There was 0 chance of being able to sit quietly in that apartment and just concentrate or listen to music at an ambient level.
It's great that your tolerance level for noise is that high - most peoples' aren't, thus the constant exodus to the surrounding counties to get a house(which itself is no longer doable with a sane commute (<1 hr))
Dublin's population is 1.3 million. It's not London. It's not San Francisco. It's not New York.
Home owners, including large financial groups, sustain this policy.