The thing with trains is they need relatively flat terrain; you’ve nothing but hill all the way to WGH and again onto Fermoy and mitchelstown
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Irish politicians continue to think there can reinvent the wheel.
bizarre
A homeless Dublin family living in Bridies spare room in Gortahork
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The Covid-19 pandemic has changed pretty much every aspect of our lives and with it most of our livelihoods.
From how we teach and learn to how we eat and play – and of course whether and where we work – has all be reset by the pandemic.
Covid-19 has also affected, of course, our housing market. And from the first weeks of lockdown in Ireland, two themes kept coming up again and again as people tried to process what Covid-19 might mean for Ireland’s housing system and Ireland’s housing woes.
The first was whether Covid-19 – by bringing about a fundamental shift in how we work – could do something to address the imbalance between cities (especially Dublin) and the rest of the country.
Over the past thirty years, the average Dublin home has gone from being no more expensive than the average home in rural Ireland to being twice as expensive.
Could Covid-19, by forcing people to work from home in a temporary way that could become permanent, change that dynamic and relieve the pressure on Dublin? To answer that question, it would help to understand why Dublin has become so much more expensive than the rest of the country for housing.
Stop spreading our population so thinly
The typical Irish politician – and perhaps even the typical person on the street – might give the answer that Dublin is simply too big for Ireland. This has the anodyne policy prescription of ‘balanced regional development’ and who could possibly be against that? Wouldn’t life be so much better if we had counterbalances to Dublin’s heft in Cork and Galway and somewhere else?
The problem with this argument is that there is very little evidence to support the idea that Dublin is too big for Ireland. It is an empirical truth, when you look at countries across the world, that the smaller the country, the bigger a fraction of its total population and economic activity ends up in its largest city.
Take Iceland and Italy. Iceland has a population of less than 400,000 and almost two thirds of those live in the greater Reykjavík area. Italy has a population of over 60 million and just 7 per cent live in the largest city, Rome. Repeat the same exercise across the fifty or so states in Europe and there is a very clear pattern: the smaller the country, the bigger the fraction in its largest city.
Of European countries of a similar size to Ireland – say, above 1 million but below 10 million – most have a large city that makes up over a quarter and in some cases more than one third of the total population. Oslo makes up one third of Norway’s population, while Copenhagen makes up even more of Denmark’s. Zagreb, Budapest and Helsinki all account for between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of their country’s population.
Dublin not being too big is, of course, not quite the same as Cork, Galway and Limerick being too small. And there is some evidence to suggest that when you compare ‘second tier’ cities in Ireland with their peers in other countries, they are smaller. But this leads us to precisely the opposite conclusion to the one that Irish politicians want to hear. Instead of boosting those cities by diverting Dubliners into them, instead we as a country need to stop spreading our population so thinly. If Dublin is not too big but the ‘second tier’ cities are too small, it is the rest of the country that is too large.
This is obvious once you look at statistics on urbanization. Across Ireland’s peer group, typically between 80 per cent and 85 per cent of the population live in cities. And as measured by where people work, Ireland in 2016 was a very normal place, compared to its peers: the biggest cities and towns make up about 85 per cent of all places of work. But when you look instead at where Irish people live, rather than work, a very different picture emerges. Just two thirds of Irish people live in cities – the smallest fraction of any high-income country.
The problem is not that Dublin has become too big in population terms. Rather, the problem is that those working in Dublin have not been given the accommodation to go with their jobs. In the language of economics, it is not the case that there is ‘too much’ housing demand for Dublin – rather that over the past three decades, there has been too little housing supply. The result has been some of the longest commutes in Europe, with significant adverse consequences for personal and environmental well-being.
A health crisis (and what it means for our housing crisis)
What has all this got to do with Covid-19? Humans are and have always been social creatures and that will not change. We like to cluster together. We don’t just do this for work reasons, although it is true that Ireland specializes in activities – like internationally traded services – that cluster even more than other activities, like manufacturing.
We also like to cluster for leisure reasons – and the richer we become as a society, the more we do this on average. Covid-19 is a serious disruption of normality, one that may persist for a number of years until immunity is obtained, one way or another. But, as with every other pandemic, it will pass and humans will go back to being humans, clustering in ever greater numbers because that’s what we like doing best.
What this means is that Covid-19 will not give us the excuse to sprawl even further apart. Those already locked into long commutes will certainly benefit from the ability of being able to work from home a couple of days a week. But soothing the mistakes of the past is different from planning appropriately for the future. Covid-19 cannot distract us from the need to allow our cities to safely house all those who would live in them, if they only had affordable housing.
Central to this is the provision of more diverse housing to match the diversity in how we live. It’s not too much of a caricature of Ireland’s housing system to say that it is effectively one of uniformity: almost 90 per cent of Ireland’s homes are houses, compared to just 50 per cent across Europe as a whole. Irish people tend to think of houses as being a mix – from terraced houses to detached ones – but apartments as a single type.
But the other 50 per cent of Europe’s homes are apartments that come in a huge variety of types and sizes. This includes student housing and co-living for younger adults, as well as apartments for “pre-family” and “no family” singles and couples. It includes apartments for families but also for post-family “empty nesters”. And as Europe ages, it increasingly involves independent living and assisted living complexes. Ireland faces a huge shortage of all these types of apartment homes, one that is set to grow as Irish households continue to become smaller, wealthier and more urban.
A short-term blame game
So acute is Ireland’s shortage of apartments that people are looking for scapegoats, blaming for example short-term letting platforms for the high level of market rents. The apparent glut of short-term lets moving to the long-term rental market has been the second recurring theme in the discussion of Ireland’s housing market since the outbreak of Covid-19.
That there is definitely something going on is obvious from the statistics on the number of properties being advertised. In April and May, the number of homes for sale fell by three quarters, year-on-year, a measure of how much every day life had frozen up. In many parts of the rental sector, the number of homes listed also fell, if less spectacularly. In Leinster, excluding Dublin, for example, the number of homes listed for rent fell by almost half, compared to the same month in 2019. In Munster, listings were down by a quarter.
But in Dublin, rental listings actually rose year-on-year – albeit marginally – in April. Across the full first six months of 2020, the capital city saw an extra 3,000 properties advertised for rent than in the first half of 2019. It is very likely that a key driver of this is homes formerly available for short-term lettings moving to the long-term rental market, as other factors – such as unemployment or those from elsewhere returning home – are not likely to be concentrated in Dublin.
I will leave it to others to resolve the debate as to whether different regulations, or better enforcement of existing regulations, of short-term lets could have brought about that type of shift before Covid-19. (Although it is worth perhaps noting that if you are against short-term lets, but want tourism to remain a major source of employment, then logically you should be in favour of the construction of more hotels. Otherwise, where will the tourists stay?)
Instead, it is worth putting those 3,000 additional rental listings in context. The evidence of the last two decades indicates that, when supply and demand are in balance, Dublin’s rental market usually processes about 1,000 homes per week. What we have seen, therefore, is the movement of about three weeks’ worth of supply.
It does very little to address the underlying shortage of rental accommodation in Dublin and indeed across Ireland. For Dublin alone, my estimate is that the city is short about 75,000 rental homes. Across the country, we need to build hundreds of thousands of rental homes – both market rental and social rental – especially for smaller households of 1-2 persons, who are now the majority of households in the country.
Covid-19 changes almost nothing of this dynamic, apart from taking away something like three months during which new homes could have been built. With every wave that recurs, we lose more time to address our housing shortages.
How the mothership is observed overseas
Ooooft.
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Some cunt left the light on in the attic room.
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So much anger directed at AIB for finally cutting back on branches.
What’s the point of giving rooral types all these broadband connections if they are going to moan when things go modern?
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Rural broadband is costing 12k per person
Sure without it most people would need to drive to their nearest town for internet. What is a better option in your mind?
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Rural broadband is the modern infrastructural equivalent of the railways. Expensive but absolutely worth it.
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@Little_Lord_Fauntleroy and @Tim_Riggins would rather have everyone use carrier pigeon or drive to Dublin to do their messages
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Search engines instead of steam engines.
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I’m getting rigged up in September.
Tis about time Broadband made it to the peninsula
Elon Musk is putting trains in the sky that will provide broadband everywhere
Got the SIRO out here last year. Made some difference.