Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

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If you think this is relevant, then solution is obvious: Increase taxes on small wages until people can't effort rent and rents will decrease. Hint: it's not relevant.

Housing benefits must be spent on housing. People can use UBI any way they want. With UBI, people can more easily move from expensive cities if housing is not affordable, and then rents and prices must adjust.

The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand. Every urban economist agrees that the solution is to build more housing. Rent controls don't increase the number of housing units; only building more increases the housing supply. It does not have to be affordable housing; just build more housing units and all price points eventually get an affordable house.

Japan is an island like the UK, but they built the infrastructure and enough housing. At the height of its asset price bubble around 1990, the value of real estate in Japan was higher than that of the entire United States. But they built enough to match the demand. Now their population is in decline, and there are empty houses at the edge of the cities.

One fun thing about Ireland is that building homes in the countryside is nearly illegal, unless you have "local needs" (aka your parents are from there). It's a de-facto xenophobic "Irish people only" building rule, and the EU has ruled it illegal, yet it remains, because the Irish planning system is a reasonable contender for the worst possible way to plan your cities and towns.

The planning system here certainly has lots of problematic aspects, but making it difficult to build one-off homes in the countryside isn't one of them. As a housing solution, it's hugely inefficient and worse, it spoils the landscape. When the practice went unchecked in earlier decades, it lead to what was dubbed "bungalow blight".

Indeed, the problem is that Ireland makes it damn near impossible to build anything anywhere, still imposes parking minimums, still uses _their own_ failure to build infrastructure as a reason to deny people homes, still has many, many planners who almost seem personally insulted by the idea that you might want a house with "eaves" or literally anything different from what already exists (ironically they're hellbent on making sure nothing is as interesting as e.g. Eyeries village), and still despises anything that isn't sitting on a giant carbon-intensive blob of concrete.

The _excellent_ IrishVernacular.com had a great website showing how to build a modern, comfortable house for 25k (make it 50k now with inflation), but when I talked to planners in Offaly (yech) about the idea of a pier foundation or a metal roof they got visibly angry. (The site is gone but archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210216212333/https://www.irish... ) Interestingly, metal roofs are cheaper and last longer (and can look perfectly nice, I'm not talking about tin roofs here). But planners are threatened by anything that makes housing more affordable.

As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago. If you're curious, the book "Whittled Away" is a really good examination of this, and how ecologically barren Ireland really is - https://iwt.ie/product/whittled-away/. And rural homes don't need to be car-dependent monstrosities, I made a video about how we could improve active transport in rural areas at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew (of course, even the greens think bikes are only toys outside the city, and my cllrs from FF/FG/SF practically laughed at me when I suggested bike infrastructure where we lived in the midlands).

Of course, the real galling bit is that Ireland has peak "rules for thee and not for me" energy, by saying you can opt out of all that so long as you're a true native son and have parents from the area (the EU has rightly pointed out that this is discriminatory, but Ireland just... breaks the law. And nothing happens) - https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/locals-only-planning-r... . So apparently one-off houses are great, but only for culchies.

> As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago.

Love this comment so much. And it's true!

I grew up in Ireland and was immersed in the "everything in Ireland is the best" mentality. I think it was when I started regularly visiting the Hudson Valley in New York, which is mostly still wooded, that I really realized the "countryside" in Ireland is just manmade. It's not natural. The whole island was trees.

My understanding is that you've left Ireland; hope you're making your peace with the problems of the country now that you don't have to deal with them as much!

I live in the Netherlands, which has plenty of issues in its own right, but it's been a better place to raise kids. Finding a place to live here was easier, which is kind of insane considering how bad the housing crisis is in NL, and my kids can bike to school safely.

I really like Ireland. I think it's an amazing place. But it's really, really, really badly run. And it seems like most policymaking (like this, or rent control, or help to buy, etc) was built on vibes instead of logic.

Housing is more important than aesthetics.

If you think that's true then why do you want to live in the country side?

The comment "With UBI, people can more easily move from expensive cities if housing is not affordable, and then rents and prices must adjust" suggested people leave expensive cities. In Ireland this generally means moving to rural areas and commuting, though there are also smaller towns you could commute from.

> Housing benefits must be spent on housing.

It is almost impossible to receive housing benefit in Ireland. Legally all landlords must accept it, practically few to none in major cities do.

> The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand.

About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds, another huge (difficult to specify) percentage are bought to rent by small to medium sized landlords. The Irish state Land Development Agency build around 3.5k homes per year, meanwhile Davies estimate the state needs around 93k new homes per year. Investing in any kind of investment fund or ETFs is taxed at 41% under the exit tax in Ireland. In addition, the “deemed disposal” rule means investments are taxed as though sold every eight years, even if they haven't been.

These are all artificial extreme pressures on housing in Ireland specifically, that mean that this is not a simple 'supply and demand' problem. It's a supply and demand of people who need housing vs entities who require profit - and have concomitant class affiliations and monies to spend on political influence problem.

While this is all true, the reason housing in Ireland is an attractive investment is because it is incredibly scarce, and homeowners have the ability to preserve this scarcity.

Absolutely. Which is why it's economically and socially essentially - while being politically impossible, to crash the price of housing.

Everything Ireland has done to try to make housing more affordable has been a bizarre scheme to do so while increasing prices. Help To Buy was, to be blunt, incredibly dumb, but it did help increase home prices while giving some people (first time buyers) a little bit of money.

No, crashing the property market would be economically and socially catastrophic. We know this for a fact, because it happened 16 years ago and we're still feeling the effects.

What is required is that the many legal and financial barriers that exist to the economically-viable building of apartments and houses need to be dismantled. If we could have tens of thousands of new dwelling places made available each year, the asking prices for housing stock would start to gently decline. Society as a whole would accept this as a social good.

Hard disagree. I lived through the last recession (here in Dublin Ireland), and life was better for most people across most dimensions. Whether it would have been sustainably so is a broader argument. But cheap buildings led to a massive cultural renaissance that was effectively killed (by council and government dictat) five years later.

The only place in the developed world where housing prices have declined (or even remained stagnant) over the long term is Japan, a country in long term recession.

I wrote about this in detail here - https://garethstack.com/2015/10/28/by-believing-passionately...

93,000 new homes per year?

That's an impressive figure: The second largest city/settlement in Ireland, Belfast, has a population of about 350,000. If these new homes house three people each (a family with one child), it means that Ireland is growing at a speed of almost a new Belfast per year.

Is the economy growing at a similar speed to support eight or nine more Belfasts in the next 10 years?

It certainly is, here's the news article where I sourced the figure

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/02/05/republic-need...

The issue is as much a legacy of lack of investment as growth, as for a number of decades the state built no houses at all, forcing a generation into rental poverty.

A few years ago the figure was 50,000 per year. They have been failing to build enough homes for almost 2 decades now, and have a lot of catching up to do.

> About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds,

It does not matter who owns them. If there is enough housing, investments funds will lower rents to match the demand. Investment funds can do excessive rent seeking only if the supply is limited. It's good if foreigners invest in housing, because hoses can't be moved overseas.

Anyone disagreeing, argue against this statement:

Exess rent seeking is possible only when there is scarcity.

When people don't have choises, they must pay what is asked. If you have 100 people needing a house and 101 houses available, prices will decline. Maintaining empty house is a running loss and house prices and rents will decline to prevent that.

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