Irish Property Market chat II - *read mod note post #1 before posting*

The price/cost won't be a problem as everybody will have a load of extra cash because from those projections it looks like most people won't be having any children.

If the majority of the population are single or childless couples there will be plenty more money sloshing around to spend on houses!

Good point, not sure how it would work in practice.

I was sort of assuming that if we have a population of 7m, with proportionally less children, then presumably the children will be replaced by proportionally more adult tax payers.

The thinking is that we will converge with the Euro average, and they seem to get along swimmingly with this arrangement, so perhaps the change in demographics means our tax rate will converge with the euro average as well, might even see our taxes go down! Hurrah!

Correct, not always the case - about 15% of children live in a single parent household.

But if our fertility remains the same the majority of couples who have children will continue to have at least two or more children.

So even if the parents live apart the same fertility rate will struggle to generate more 1 or 2 person households than 3 person households.

The only way to converge with European averages of household size is to also move closer to European average fertility rates.

Unless you know of another way?

I don't know to be honest, but probably non working families have more children I'd guess.

The projections are based on everybody having fewer children, so yes definitely you'd expect working families to have fewer children.

But in order to have a majority of 1 and 2 person households it seems likely the majority of couples will have to go from having 2 children to having no children.

Assuming the majority of parents continue to stay together, a one child family is a three person household. You obviously cannot have 0.2 of a child.

Oddly, to calculate the deficit they used average household size of 2.4, not the actual household size.

A positive was they recommended that future building prioritised 1 and 2 person units rather than 3 bed

Obviously they weren't trying to calculate demand as in market demand, people trying to find a place to buy etc, they were specifically trying to calculate the deficit in the housing stock required to accommodate housing need for the population as at April 2022.

They stress this repeatedly eg:

Base housing policy on an assessment of the housing required for a well-functioning society.
This should not be conflated with market demand or construction sector capacity.

So they have ignored how many houses are required based on the actual average household size of 2.74, and instead calculated how many houses are required for an assumed preferred household size of 2.4.

The assumption obviously is that an average of household size of 2.74 does not make for a well-functioning society.

You're correct that much of the assumption rests on the fact that there are elevated numbers of adults living with their parents, but given our demographics, it would also appear to suggest that in this presumed well functioning society of 2.4 AHS, that a large proportion of those people with 2 or more children under 18 would prefer to have had less children, or that they would prefer not to live with them.

That seems a stretch to me.

I expect you're right. We will indeed continue to build more 3 bed houses than apartments.

But it makes a mockery of the entire thing. The whole 235k deficit thesis is predicated on the underlying household size being 2.4 - i.e there are far too many people who are currently living in households of 3 or more who would prefer to live households of 1 and 2.

That's a flimsy enough thesis as it stands, but building 3 bed houses for that mystery demographic takes us to a whole new level of lunacy.