"average Dublin house prices should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark" according to Many Lou McD.

The thing is though housing is complex. Part of addressing the housing crisis means any solution has to address concerns around any solution that could potentially involve home owners being put into negative equity. Arguably anyone who ignores this concern can be said to ignoring the housing crisis. Remember at a national level the majority of voters own their own property so anyone who wants to form a majority government has to listen to the majority of voters ie home owners. At a local level it's even worse where NIMBYs can have a huge political impact when it comes to objections to new developments. As they own property in an area they have a lot more at stake locally than anyone renting/looking to buy in the same area. Look at the number of objections politicians of all parties support and a lot of them boil down to concerns around the impact a new development will have on local property prices.

Any plan to bring the average price of a house in Dublin down to 300k is doomed to fail because the majority of voters ie homeowners don't want their main asset to drop massively in value.

You can't complain about anyone ignoring the housing crisis and ignore people's concerns about negative equity. Concerns around negative equity/property values are one of the reasons we have a housing crisis in the first place.

Honest question, how do you help someone in negative equity?

As I suggested earlier, for those people looking to move from smaller apartments, the state could agree to purchase the apartment from them at the price they paid.

It would be cheaper than the state currently buying one bed apartments for 500k.

I'd imagine the state could also step in with lower cost loans for those in this particular situation.

I appreciate your view but I find it funny all the other posters saying you have to prevent negative equity and you come along saying people need to be held to account!

I think some people should face the consequences of negative equity, for example if you bought as an investment to rent, a holiday home, etc.

For those meeting strict criteria where they could show they would now be able to afford a larger property, and have such a need, then I think the state should help.

Exactly.

The govt cant cap the market price.

Its a wild assertion that SF have made and its effectivley not possible to achieve.

SF can cap the price of affordable homes, delivered by the govt only.

Thats all they can do.

And that percentage is a miniscule part of the housing stock. So even if they did implement a cap on govt delivered homes, there would be little to no impact on the wider market.

You were suggesting they buy an apartment that is in negative equity at the original price! So, say someone bought a place for 400k, they had a 10% deposit, so mortgaged for €360k. This is now worth €300k, the state buys it for €400k, when they could buy a property on the open market for €300k. Why would they (and all of us) want to spend money on that? They could get 4 apartments for market price or 3 subsidising negative equity in this way.

I wouldn't take it as a given and I wouldn't think it will happen overnight either.

But I think it's pretty clear that the key to increasing output is to increase labor supply. I'm entirely open to other suggestions but I can only see that happening with trades being more attractive than they currently are. I think offering longer term job security will have to be part of this and this will require state intervention.

And 32k houses is a small amount to be producing, we produced nearly 90k during the boom.

Let's not forget we also need to deep retrofit a significant amount of current housing stock too. Fossil fuels are out in 2040.

I dont think its an exaggeration, I think its an excellent demonstration of why its not possible to keep building housing near to where people want to work when people want to live and work in the same places that everyone else does. Sandyford is just one example of this, whats a reasonable commute from Sandyford in your mind? Cherrywood is still cranking out the houses & apartments, but they are not going to be cheap 3 beds when they are in a high demand area.

I agree with your last paragraph, but I think we are taking different things from it. I'm saying "dont do it" due to the knock on effects it will have everywhere else.

I'm also not saying that I have all the answers, I just know that whatever "below cost" housing is created by the government has to somehow be separated from the private housing market or they will interfere with each other and cause huge problems in that private market. The only option I see is to create houses that people only live in if they cannot afford anything else. This is really what happens today, no one picks the crappy run down house because they want to, its because thats all they can afford. This is the price point where the state belongs.

I just dont know how you create high density public housing and not end up with ghettos. I've been clear and honest on that from the start.

I don't think we need to fully replicate boom efforts and practices, nor do we need to get to that level of output.

I believe we had about 13% of the labor force working in the area back then, so we will need to get closer to that figure and in a manner which can be sustained.

There may well still be plenty who'd be willing to come and work here, perhaps from outside the EU, but let's face it, with nowhere now for them to live, that ship has passed. Perhaps 5 to 10 years ago it might have been a solid intervention for the state to start recruiting from abroad for construction workers, and limiting work-permits in none essential areas, but I guess that ship has passed.

So the focus will have to be on encouraging people already here, including school leavers, to the construction industry.

20% wouldn't impact anyone "too much"?

How much principal, percentagewise, do you think people have paid off after lets say 5 years?

maybe, but im not exactly convinced, everyone knows how hard it really is, ive met many lads crippled in their 40's/50's from it, everyone knows this!

Isn't that just adding yet more people to the states burden? I cant fathom how making more people dependent on the state is going to help anything, unless you want the 300K/house headline and ignore the multi-million euro budget hole that it creates.

You keep pulling these "solutions" out of thin air, but they lack proper detail. Saying strict criteria, for example, exactly how do you propose that takes shape? What kind of resources would be needed? Can anyone apply? How much negative equity? What if the house is inherited?

How would someone in negative equity for an apartment be able to afford a larger property? And why as well? Surely the fact they are in negative equity would be grounds that they would just end up in financial trouble again.

Preventing negative equity and holding people to account for being in it are vastly different. You can bring a horse to water etc