Street Votes: A proposed response to Ireland's housing crisis

Of course, heritage's stubbornness is also why my own county lost 40% of thatched buildings in the last 20 years and will probably lose them all in the next 20.

In some cases buildings are worth literally less than nothing (the land would be worth more without them) because heritage is naive enough to think some rich eccentric wants to plow millions of Euro in to fixing some dump in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, 150,000 for this building is a joke - https://www.offalyexpress.ie/news/home/1081285/historic-mill...

The land would be worth more if the building were demolished (and it had planning permission to build homes). But heritage officers won't allow that, so nature will demolish slowly (and make the town ever uglier in the process) and THEN in 30 years or so it will finally be demolished.

Asking a random person on the internet to not do what is in their best interest because ... "utopia" is really naive, and quite absurd tbh.

The difference between the two is the risk of a bad tenant.

With my personal property we were fortunate to never have a really bad tenant. We had high ish turnover (it's a starter home, indeed was our starter home, so typically people grow out of it.) we'd lose a month or so if rent between tenants, there would be some money spent on maintainence and so on. Our time was uncoated.

We have strong tenant laws here, so if you geg a bad tenant, who literally just stops paying, it can take months of lost rent, and significant legal fees to get an eviction. Bizarre as it sounds its cheaper to _pay_ a bad tenant to leave than drag it out in the courts.

For institutions this is a cost of doing business, and is factored into overall rent.

If a private owner encounters such a situation it basically causes them to sell out - one more private property goes into institutional hands.

In other words private owners don't understand the risks and "hidden costs". As long as they only gave good tenants things are rosy. First bad one, and they exit the supply chain (and have lots of good horror stories for their mates.)

So I think your cause/effect is backwards. Good tenant laws (which I think are generally a good thing for good tenants) can make house-rental unattractive to individuals. Resulting in mostly "for profit" housing supply. Plus good tenants subsidise bad ones.

Ironically strong tenant laws also make it a _very_ tough market for new, or risky, tenants. Landlords understand the high costs involved, and do become very risk-adverse with applicants. Which is bad if you have high risk factors (like self-employment).

It's a very delicate balance to get tight. We need strong tenant protections, but we also need some landlord protections to keep the market in balance.

And yes I meant there isn’t a mortgage deduction but had think while typing.

People in finance and IT can make a ton compared to other folk. If the top tax band was raised to 500,000k or something all that extra money would just go on bigger houses, fancy cars and holidays and shit.

A less progressive tax system is bad for society. Eg. I just got a letter saying kids books will be free in primary schools now. Don't get me wrong, there are big problems in Ireland, but taxing well off people less is not gonna fix anything!

At least that is good, as immigration takes a lot of what little available housing that is available.

It's the same in the USA. Housing prices are shooting up on everything and 40 million Mexicans - not counting all the immigrants from other countries - that have moved here. Don't tell me that has zero effect on the housing market here in the USA. Probably more than all other causes combined.

I just don’t think that it’s politically feasible nor practical— like most everything at the federal level, including things as fundamental as the IRS tax code or debt ceiling, it would be subject to large changes every year.

“We won’t approve this tax code unless no new housing in California is allowed but also multi-family is banned in many these states” would now be a possible (even likely) debate.

At least California/Texas/whatever representatives are beholden to their own state enough that they won’t actively sabotage their constituents to gain political points. We saw this with the SALT tax repeal under Trump as a specific way to hurt populous blue states and do essentially nothing to rural red states (except Texas, which ironically was a big benefactor of that policy due to its high property taxes). Why wouldn’t federal zoning fall into the same trap?

Furthermore, from a constitutional perspective, there’s no way barring an amendment for the federal government to control how non-federally-owned land is used. The whole purpose of states is to govern matters within their borders, and the federal to govern matters which exceed any one state’s borders. Even the Federal Highway Administration, arguably the closest analog, is not in charge of building or planning highways directly— it just funds plans it approves, but it doesn’t dictate what those plans are, instead leaving it up to the states to grapple with routes and ROW.

As for unified styles, there's no laws about that AFAIK. They're probably just like that because the landowners want it that way. Lots of stuff in Japan is done (or not done) without any formal laws or rules, but rather because of social pressure and consensus. It's possible that some very unique or culturally-important districts do have certain rules though, which is why I wrote "... in most of Japan".

(That's out of 281 municipalities.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Wa...

In the US, I look at it this way: once you get your own school system, you surrender the moral authority to erect barriers to entry for new residents.

That's an opinion, of course, but I can't see how any other opinion leads to a stable outcome for society at large.

- in contrast to rural Ireland, urban Ireland is not very dense relative to other cities in Europe. Dublin has a height restriction on buildings (which may be being reconsidered) so there isn't much of the denser building that you get in cities like Paris (which has a lot of 5-6 story buildings which really ramp up the population density. Irish cities are instead rows of very tightly packed suburban homes - often terraced or semi-detached (sharing a side wall with a neighbor) with about 6-10 homes per acre.

Decades ago I was there for a few months, and it was rare to see somebody’s apartment. Nothing like NZ where you often end up visiting work colleagues homes. Also at that time there were plenty of people that were working there only temporarily.

Can you tell me how the dynamics in HK work out these days? What different things make a middle-class apartment in HK a prestigious item worth competing about, that is visible to peers? Are apartments in HK something that people spend their working lives saving for for status, or mostly for function?

Singapore is weird, because are not the vast majority of homes owned by the state - I know there’s something odd about Singapore apartments but I don’t know the details.

Not disagreeing: I have seen flash-as apartments in London during multiple work-stints and vacations there, and postcode does matter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boltons

I just don’t know anything about HK.

Yet this "analysis" is not even close to valid or realistic; it is circular, self-proving, a tautology, not disprovable.

"Location, location, location" is indeed the standard real estate mantra, but acting as if location is created by entirely extrinsic factors, and a town (the unit which creates zoning) has little or nothing to do with creating value, is preposterous.

There are plenty of towns that have highly comparable locations (same commute distances to metro areas, shopping, etc.), yet vastly different desirability and valuations. And of course, they live under the same state and country-level services. The difference is the approach to managing the town.

In that regard, zoning is not unidirectional. In the town I live, zoning is 2-acre minimum, and there area active programs to maintain and purchase open space to preserve. Yet tax rates are higher and values are lower than a neighboring town that has smaller zoning and more development. As I said, I could retire if I could re-develop my land and replace my house with a 6-unit condo. But instead, I need to spend $thousands just for permission to move the front walk stairs, and I can also watch ducks and geese use the wetlands that take up half my yard in their spring and fall migrations.

It is creating different values, and it does cost real money.

And the argument that zoning laws exist only to free-ride value is nonsense. I've lived in a town that had zoning in place, then repealed zoning when developers convinced the old-time farmers to vote with"your grandfather never needed to get a permit to build a barn, why should you?"-type arguments. Then a few years later, the town saw what developers and "entrepreneurs" were doing, and reinstated zoning after the bad behavior. And this was after "private investment" created more units that reduced individual tax burdens by spreading it over more housing units. Also, this was 150km from any coast or major city, so zero commuting going on, etc.

The country argument is pretty much the same as the town argument. Some countries invest more, and are more desirable. Yet, that does not give me the right to go live there just because I want to. And the simple fact is, that if everyone did do that, it would literally destroy what they came for, like a horde of locusts. The only way to preserve it is to preserve it.

>>If you care about the ecosystem, then you should want more zoning density, because suburban sprawl is what destroys ecosystems, not pockets of density which allow for maximum land to be open green space.

Yes, agree. I've also lived in apartments in small towns and walk-up railroad flat in Manhattan. As far as I'm concerned, once you no longer have a yard that's yours, it doesn't matter much if it's a 6-unit building or a square kilometer 500m tall city-in-a-box. So, generally, I agree that it would be best to have very-high-density cities, and very low density exurbs.

The problem is that everything is done incrementally. The push is inexorably to higher-density zoning, and further out from the city centers. The result is simply more destructive sprawl.

So, how do we get planning and funding enabling entire square kilometers of city space to be razed and rebuilt as even higher-density urban superstructures?