There is essentially none. The government are using this as their means to āboost supplyā. Itās a fig leaf and a completely phony policy and will do more damage to the market long term than good, and we are subsiding these funds millions and millions of euro to do this.
Could that money be better spent? Yes.
Student Accommodation has always been overpriced, particularly in Dublin and has nothing to do with standards, my memories of college in Waterford was 4 people in the front room of a 3 bed semi in digs for Ā£40 a week when the grant was Ā£38 a week.
How many co-living units have been granted planning by the government?
Why?
All it accomplishes is individuals or groupings with access to capital profiteering out of a housing crisis while the ordinary citizens are lumbered and suffer with it.
It was ever thus. Thatās a good justification to allow gouging to continue so.
You are saying they are coming in lowering standards, Iām saying standards are already low and I would assume a higher level of accountability for a multi unit owner than a one off landlord.
Your saying your standards in the 90s(?) were shut so they canāt lower standards. Thatās a silly argument. Higher level of accountability for a multi unit owner? Thatās a big assumption. How so?
There are minimum standards that have to be adhered to.
Young lads arenāt doing trades, more interested in chasing tail in the RTCs then tipping abroad. Rural gaa clubs are feeling it, the housing market is feeling it.
Good debate here even if posters are constrained by their biases. The objections to planning especially by politicians is infuriating. Can the gubbermint become landlords, use state land to build stock then long term rent it or sell it. But then who builds it, and who does so without thinking a government contract is free money and milks the fuck out of it.
Would you say they heard about the RTCs from an ANCO ad on the wireless?
It works all over the world. Why not here?
Why do people insist on their own standards on others? And by standards I mean this notion of needing a garden or even your own kitchen. Why are you the arbiter on that?
It costs about 900-1000 p/m to rent in the Montrose student accommodation beside UCD. Consider that you arenāt paying for transport to get to college as you are right beside it. Then consider that utilities are all covered, including WiFi. Then put it into perspective that these are largely 10 month leases against standard 12 month leases. Is it still expensive? You can certainly argue thatās the case, but the headline figures are grossly misleading. For as long as I have been on this earth I have heard that student accom is in crisis and over priced. Ireland, however, remains one with some of the highest educational attainment rates on earth.
I have also heard a lot of the on campus accommodation costs. Lots of financially illiterate journalists and commentators talking about rises in rental incomes as profits. The first question I would have is where people think this money actually goes if it really is profit- Irish colleges are in terrible shape financially and these are not private landlords. The second and real question I have though is what people think represents profits? There are maintenance costs to these facilities. Moreover, however, there is capital spent in colleges that ultimately requires cash. Trinity and UCD are building lots of student accommodation right now for example. This is arguably decades late, but it is being done and the key point on student accommodation is that it easily forecast.
You can reasonably guess the number of people currently renting across Dublin as a result of a lack of on campus and privately provided student accommodation. Those students are largely living in inappropriate places, like 3 bed semi detached houses. This will free up housing stock. Moreover these things will improve areas. The student accommodation on Dominick Street being built has already dramatically improved the public realm and in time will improve the social mix in the area.
It certainly requires regulation to ensure that these places do not become a means to rent to private tenants, but there is gross hyperbole on these things.
TV GaGa did a feature abut them last week
EMMA DUNCAN
october 1 2019, 12:01am, the times
emma duncan
San Francisco shows what happens when rent controls are used to tackle a housing shortage
Iāve just been in San Francisco, where my son lives. It is, in many ways, an astonishing place. What Manchester was to the 19th century, San Francisco is to the 21st: the heart of a technological revolution that has changed the way people all over the planet live and work. As a result of the wealth that this innovation has created, San Francisco and its environs have the highest density of billionaires on the planet. It is also the most visibly poor place of any I have been to outside India or South Africa, and the horrors on show hold lessons for London.
As Tom Knowles reported in The Times yesterday, there are more than 8,000 homeless men and women on the streets of what is, with a population of less than 900,000, a small city. Every time we stepped out of our city-centre hotel, we saw homeless people slumped on the pavements or wandering aimlessly. In the Tenderloin district, a formerly respectable area a quarter of a mile away, there are homeless encampments on most blocks and shit on the pavements. People do not walk there if they can avoid it.
In the four days we were there, I went into maybe ten shops. In three of them, homeless people walked in, took stuff and walked out. In Starbucks, for instance, a homeless man swept a lot of biscuits and chocolates from beside the till into a bag. I started to say something to try to stop him, then looked at the woman behind the till who shrugged her shoulders. I asked the manager how often this happened; he said seven or eight times a day. I asked him what he did about it; he said he filed āan incident reportā.
My son said that the police have given up on property crime because they are short of resources, because this sort of crime is so common and because there is a certain sympathy for the perpetrators. We took two buses when I was there; on one of them, the man in the seat in front of us peed on the floor. My son said it was a regular occurrence.
Many of the homeless people were clearly off their heads on drugs or mentally disturbed, muttering to themselves, lurching around the pavement, yelling incoherently. I saw two fights between homeless people rolling on the ground, wrestling and punching. A woman who was obviously high wandered around our hotel lobby and had to be eased out by staff; another was badgering staff in a nail bar that my daughter and I visited, talking nineteen to the dozen, clearly on drugs.
Homelessness seems to be an equal-opportunity business: probably the majority of people on the streets were men but there were many women. Iād guess that about half were black and half white.
When you talk to San Franciscans, many take the view that homeless people are sent there from cities whose welfare provision is less generous than Californiaās. That seems implausible, since there is little welfare on offer in San Francisco, and surveys of the homeless population show that the vast majority are local.
Those who have studied the problem say that the main explanation is the price of property. The tech industry is so big and well paid that demand for property has pushed prices to insane levels. Average rents are about twice what they are in London. To pay the rent on a one-bedroom flat in London you would need to work about 170 hours on the minimum wage; in San Francisco, you would need to work 300 hours. As rents rise, people get turfed out of their homes and end up on the streets; combine that with negligible health provision for the poor and you end up with a lot of mentally ill people on the streets.
The response to rising rents in San Francisco has been rent controls. Nearly half the homes in the city are now covered by them. But they have made the situation worse, not better, because they discourage people from letting out property and thus reduce supply, pushing house prices up further.
The solution is not to control rents but to build more homes. When a city becomes as powerful an economic magnet as San Francisco has, it is bound to attract people. If you donāt build more housing to accommodate them, poor locals are going to get turfed out in favour of well-paid newcomers; and you cannot accommodate the increase in demand and keep the city low-rise. You need to build blocks of flats.
San Franciscoās mayor ā a woman called, marvellously, London Breed ā wants to allow more development but both the right and the left oppose it. The right wants to protect the value of its property and to keep poor people at a safe distance. My son has joined a group called Yimby (Yes in my backyard) Action, which is supporting a proposal for a homeless shelter near where he lives. At a recent meeting, a man waved a picture of his wife and children in my sonās face, accusing him of wanting to murder them. The left opposes development because it wants to keep San Francisco the way it was in 1968 and distrusts developers, whom it invariably describes as āproperty speculatorsā.
London is, obviously, far from being the hell that San Francisco has become. But the number of homeless is rising, our refusal to allow development around the capital has pushed prices to unaffordable levels and the rent controls that Labour advocates as a solution will only make the problem worse. We need to encourage, and allow, more homebuilding
They seem to use housing charities over here to do just this. Not sure how it works though.
Thatās a really shit article.
Heās not wrong about San Fran tho
Who isnāt? Emma?
I was going to say the same - one for the āterrible pieces of journalismā thread.
Yes
I think Emma is a woman. Sheās wrong on an awful lot of things, just based on that article alone. Itās amazing someone can write something so bad and get paid for it.
woman hater glas out this morning