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

Yes you did, it was a big pile of nonsense.

The facts as you posted yourself is 75% pay tax which is the majority. By a significant amount.

The amount of nonsense you have shared on this thread is incredible while claiming to be a LL to try make it credible. No idea why people would spend some much time to share incorrect information

I meant to respond to this a few days ago.

I think a lot of people are drawing an unnecessarily large distinction between a local authority a) funding a developer to build social housing and b) buying completed units off a developer.

You often hear people asking "why don't the council build their own housing rather than swooping in a buying up what is supposed to be for us"?

They argue that:

a) With funding developments: Here the local authority is building new units for necessary social housing and leaving the rest of the market more or less the same.

b) With purchasing completed homes: Here the local authority is "stealing" homes from decent working first time buyers.

I would argue however that both are pretty much the same from the point of view of the impact on private buyers as well as cost to the local authority, though there may be arguments in favour or against each of these options depending on circumstance.

Both take away resources from building elsewhere. Both involve private operators taking a profit. The main difference is that in the first, the council bears the risk with the developer being paid up front. The second, is that the developer takes the risk. But in both cases the cost gets passed on to the council. In reality it is not too different between a private individual buying off plans or buying a competed unit. Both and have advantages and disadvantages to the buyer, but I think we can all agree that it is still buying.

I think people who draw a huge distinction between the two are probably simply against the perceived unfairness of social housing but don't fully realize it. The fact is that if you are going to have social housing then the public sector is going to be involved in the private market in some way and draw resources from it thereby pushing up prices elsewhere. Doesn't mean it should not be done but there's no way around it unfortunately.

Yes I was only considering two options but these are often discussed by people on threads like this. For example, a council buys up a block from a developer for social housing and people object saying "why don't councils "build" their own social housing"? But this "build" involves paying a developer who might otherwise be building for the open market. So private buyers also lose out in this second case and to much the same extent. It really mainly the optics that are different.

We can discuss the other options you mention but the same principle applies: that any sort of social housing provision whether the council builds direct, or purchases or rents; the price for private buyers or renters goes up in some way.

I think this is why politicians like a certain amount of social housing. It gives them a hard hat photo opportunity but also it keeps the house prices of their constituents who have already bought high.

None of this means that social housing should not be built but it means that it is not sufficient in itself to solve the housing crisis. The appalling value in the private market must also be tackled. Doing so not only brings down the cost of housing for ordinary people: ftbs and renter, but also costs to councils when they provide necessary social housing and also the need for that social housing is reduced.

While I think you are still failing to understand the points I was making earlier, overall I agree with your post about the need to increase the production of new homes for both private and social housing.

Years into the crisis? Foresaw Covid, migration, or the war in Ukraine did you?

The simple fact is no Government, or indeed change of Government, was going to see the crisis in advance, or will accelerate the building of houses over what's being done presently. It's all BS to complain about and say something should have been done before the fact.

After the crash there was any amount of empty houses, rentals and cheap houses to buy, yet there seems to be some soothsayers on here stating that that was the ideal time for the state to engage in the building of thousands of them, absolute nonsense.

The lack of house building in Ireland has been a known huge problem since 2014. Covid (in 2020), or the war in Ukraine (in 2022), are not what caused it, and are no excuse for it still being ongoing.

Thats some hilarious effort to brush off the utter failure of multiple Fine Gael governments over the last decade to fix the problem in any way.

The opposition parties may not be able to do much better on housing, but they absolutely can't do worse. And they can at least try, and have laid out plans to build far more housing than our current government are aiming to. We have a decade's worth of real world evidence that FG in particular have no desire to build housing.

[2016] How Ireland's housing crisis grew out of control

https://www.thejournal.ie/snapshot-of-one-county-how-irelands-housing-crisis-grew-out-of-control-2825668-Jun2016/

[2014] "THE HOUSING SHORTAGE in Ireland could become a “full-blown crisis” if nothing is done about it – and the government needs to address this in Budget 2014.

https://www.thejournal.ie/threshold-pre-budget-2014-submission-1078664-Sep2013/

Did you read the comments below your second link? Didn't seem to be a lot of support for what he was proposing, even if it looks to be pretty prescient.

Meanwhile this was SF's alternative budget in 2014, not much mention of a housing crisis there..

What exact policy tools does DCC have that allow it to fund and build large numbers of social housing?

That policy is controlled at national governmental level, not local council.

It will have no fund if it builds up 40 million in debt

Apart from that DCC was handed funding just never built under Sinn Fein. I can guess why they didn’t build but I wont

“DCC would not comment” 🤦‍♂️

https://m.independent.ie/regionals/herald/dublins-social-housing-units-slashed-in-half-despite-crisis/34642511.html

Thats their budget published in October 2014, the year I mentioned.

His link only contains their budget from October 2013.

So I'll ask agian, what exact measures should DCC have used that were available to them? Or are you, as usual, talking nonsense and going to stop replying when asked for specifics?

Because you still haven't replied to the questions asked repeatedly of you on the last page by myself and other posters, when you were last called out on your claims:

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121610334/#Comment_121610334

Sorry I don't have all day to sit on the web. I had already answered it, do you want 100 posts saying the same thing over and over again? sorry I don't have time for that

I shared an article, what are you struggling with? DCC had budget they didn't use it. They had tenants who's rent could give them more budget to build houses. They didn't collect. They also didn't remove any tenants apart from 1 while building up arrears of 40m.

How many houses would 40m build?

Sinn Fein won the majority in DCC based on building houses. They used to have an article on their website proclaiming they would build houses after they got announced. That was deleted recently.

Im sure the next post will be "but but it was someone else's fault" as everything is always someone else's fault with Sinn Fein.

DCC had €40m in uncollected rent. If Mary-Lou can build houses for €300k in 2024, she could have built them for €200k in 2014 meaning at least 200 were left unbuilt as a result of Sinn Fein's failures.

If you add this to the unspent capital allocation of €300m, that is another 1,500 houses going abegging. That SF presided over this level of incompetence is not surprising to anyone who has watched their performance governing in the North.

My link is the literal SF budget submission for that year. And I quoted the relevant section on housing.

You claimed that no housing crisis existed before 2020, and nobody had any plans to fix it. How does the quoted Sep13 budget align with this theory?

You post more on this forum than almost anyone else, literally hundreds of posts a month every month since you joined, so the evidence would suggest you apparently do have plenty of time to sit on the web.

As usual you haven't answered when asked a direct question, so I'll ask agian. What exact measures should DCC have used to fund and build large scale housing?

The earliest link in my post that he was replying to was published in 2014, as I indicated. His point that I was replying to claimed that the causes of the housing crisis only began in 2020, and nobody in Ireland was causing for measures to fix it before then. Which the evidence would strongly suggest he was wildly incorrect on, no?