
30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis - CharlesDodgson
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/29/empty-dublin-housing-crisis-airbnb-homelessness-landlords
======
burlesona
It’s hard to untangle problems like this from supply and demand of housing.
Are the hotels in Dublin vacant because everyone prefers AirBnBs? Ie. is
tourist lodging over or under-supplied?

Two straightforward treatments I’d want to see tested:

1\. A significant “hotel tax” or “vacancy tax” to make it very expensive to
let housing sit idle. Reduce the profitability of tourist rental and units
will shift back to local rent.

2\. Significantly expand the supply of housing by removing barriers to
development. This phenomenon is happening around the world as cities try to
keep existing neighborhoods under glass and prevent any change, damning
younger generations to have no place to live.

Another thing I would love to see is the development of new cities with robust
transit connection to the nearby older ones. I don’t know enough about Dublin
to be specific, but I do know that across the US one of the things that is
happening is a generational trend toward wanting urban living, to the point
that many people don’t even consider living in suburban or rural towns.
However there’s no reason we can’t build new “urban” cities: places starting
with a Main Street, compact walkable design, street grid, designed to
organically scale up to a genuine large urban center over time. This was
common practice in the 1800s, and we have plenty of models around the world to
copy from, we just quit doing this in the car age. Why not bring this back?

~~~
Shivetya
I would not want to see a vacancy tax however a hotel tax serves its purpose
because it targets the use of the property. still i would limit the hotel tax
to housing employed for that purpose for a majority of the year. this would
let those who summer elsewhere to enjoy the benefits of their home while only
hitting those who choose to live elsewhere all the time.

the second point you made is a well known issue across the world, it simply
comes down to a politically correct version of red lining. the terms are
changed to make it palatable but the effect is the same. those in need are
forced out, their presence is only desired during work hours to perform work

~~~
Dylan16807
You can summer elsewhere without getting hit by a vacancy tax.

A house that's empty most of the year really is making the problem worse, and
if they don't want to change then they can pay some money to offset the harm.

------
docker_up
This is happening in places like Toronto as well. I visited there an stayed at
an Airbnb near the CN Tower. The condo itself was newer and large swathes of
the condo were occupied by Airbnbers. It was obvious, people with luggage were
coming in and out at all hours of the day. The Uber driver I got also said he
was maintaining 2 condos in downtown Toronto for Airbnb.

The next time there's a recession, things like this will only worsen it
because people will be foreclosing on large numbers of housing properties
because they were used for investment.

~~~
segmondy
I'm not sure that it's Airbnb. if properties can appreciated at 10% per year.
Then they are a much better investment and safer investment vehicle than most
of what is out there. If I truly believe I can buy a house somewhere and get
10% year in and year out. I'm going to buy one. I might keep it vacant since I
don't feel like being a landlord or dealing with rent control laws. When it's
time to get my money out, I'll sell and move on.

While some of us might not believe this, there are enough people who see real
estate as such a safe investment. Some of them are from other countries and
they're looking for a place to park their money that's not a bank or volatile
like the stock market.

~~~
yitianjian
Plus - housing is fairly secured and unlikely to ever go to zero, it's tied to
an asset, and you can invest on loaned principal without extreme risk in case
of failure.

~~~
TuringNYC
Assuming you purchased your house with 20% down and 80% mortgage (which is
very common), housing only has to go down 20% for you to "go to zero."

Further, unlike stocks, buying/selling houses incurs fees (round-trip fees can
be anywhere from 5% to 12% depending on your city/state/country), so really, a
house going down 15% is like you going to zero.

------
rb808
> homeless families stay in hotels, and tourists stay in houses.

Great quote that applies worldwide. And agreed its dumb. Hotels should be most
efficient, I dont know how houses can be cheaper.

~~~
jayalpha
Hotels have to follow many laws. AirBnB renters do not.

Alone a 24h reception will cost you. 3 people around the clock? Weekends? How
many rooms do you have?

~~~
betaby
A stayed in at least two different hotels in UK and there were no 24h
receptionists there. There was self check-in/out machine in the lobby. Hotels
were about 50-80 rooms in size.

------
nyghtly
Potential regulatory solution in Boston:

"The new law allows short-term rentals to be offered only by owners who live
in the properties they rent out. Owners of small multifamily buildings who
live on premises may also rent out one of the other units in the building
along with the unit they live in."

[https://www.avalara.com/mylodgetax/en/blog/2018/06/boston-
ci...](https://www.avalara.com/mylodgetax/en/blog/2018/06/boston-city-council-
passes-strict-new-short-term-rental-law.html)

~~~
pastor_elm
This is the law in NYC and I still see entire apartments listed on my block
every time I check Airbnb. It is very hard to enforce because you need someone
to complain, then the police have to catch visitors 'in the act,' and then you
have to go through the whole fining and prosecution process.

~~~
CountSessine
That's interesting that they need someone to complain?

Vancouver just enacted a similar law to Boston's - AirBnbs only allowed in a
secondary suite in a primary residence. In exchange for being allowed to
continue operating in the city, AirBnb requires a city business license (which
is only granted for secondary suites) from all Vancouver BnBs, and forwards
the list of all BnBs to the city every month. Then if an address doesn't match
up with a business license, the city fines the property owner. If you don't
pay, the city takes you or your house to court and you get a nice fat lien on
the property.

This doesn't seem to work as well with condos and apartments, though. I think
the city has left enforcement up to strata orgs which is probably a mistake?

------
scotty79
Property tax should be progressive. If you own 10 apartments you should need
to sell 10th to pay yearly tax for the 9 remaining ones. Taxes gathered this
way should found basic income.

This would crash the property market but it would make flats available nearly
to all who need it.

Flats can't be both affordable and good investment for superrich.

Top 500 richest folks got their money differnt ways but the most common source
is real estate, usually 3rd generation of hoarders.

~~~
ergo14
I'm sorry, I lived in a socialist country behind iron curtain. You do not want
to repeat same mistakes, if someone worked (few family generations worked for
them, more likely) for those 10 apartments it should be theirs, period.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
So did I, but still don't get it: your parents worked hard - all the kudos to
them.

What does it have to do with you and your wealth you've gotten from them for
free without even lifting a finger?

~~~
balfirevic
If you are going with the premise that someone's parents rightfully earned
their wealth and it is fully theirs for them to do what they please with it -
then it is also theirs to give to their children.

It is not about child's right to that wealth - it is about parent's right to
give it to their children.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
It is absolutely within parents' rights to give their property to whoever they
want - as long as the child pays the income tax on the money that fell from
the sky.

~~~
imtringued
The parents already paid income tax. Where is the problem?

Children inherit lots of things from their parents like their genetics,
upbringing, location, food, clothing and a place to live without paying taxes
on those things so why should the inherited money or property be taxed? All of
those things "fell from the sky", how is money different?

------
Irishsteve
1 Bed apartment in city center Dublin 2K a month. Thats 24K a year. For the
sake of simplicity, that means you earn 48K to pay for that 24k (Tax) The
landlord gets 24K into their pocket. They pay the government 12K in tax (50%
threshold assumed again)

Landlord spends that 12k on fun activities. They pay 23% VAT

The government is making an absolute fortune with this absurd rental market.

Let's not even get into the high cost of mortgages because the government has
a non trivial share in banks after they went bust 10 years ago.

------
mjevans
Housing needs to not be an investment; it needs to not be /attractive/ as an
investment.

Maybe that means massive taxes on the property if the owner isn't using it as
a residence for at least 1/3rd of the year (to allow for snow-bird dual-home
setups that are popular).

~~~
pauldelany
One reason there isn't much political will for this in Ireland:
[https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/nearly-one-in-five-
tds...](https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/nearly-one-in-five-tds-are-
landlords-registry-shows-399892.html)

------
Udik
I strongly doubt Airbnb has anything to do with it. The idea seems ridiculous,
especially for Dublin. From what I've seen, Dublin suffers from a chronic lack
of government planning and spending on housing and general urban planning; has
a sizable part of the population that lives and has lived maybe for centuries
in serious poverty, helped (and kept quiet) by the dole; it's a tech hub in a
tiny country with a formidable capacity of attraction of tech companies and
skilled workers, who inevitably compete with the natives for housing; but
being small, it's not flexible enough to accommodate the amount of immigrants,
and it's very sensitive to boom and busts: rents are now 2.5 times what they
were in 2009. Many council houses are horrific in build quality and lack of
maintenance. Developers, in the (apparent) complete lack of planning are
incredibly greedy, and happily destroy any existing building in the city
centre to replace it with brand new, extremely expensive ones. At the same
time a lot of old/ historical buildings in the city center are left empty and
rotting, amid wastegrounds closed by iron fences and barbed wire.

Ireland's culture seems to me a strange mix of great heart, fatalism, happy go
lucky attitude, greed and complete inability to plan the future.

Check this: an Irish comedian around 2008, when the crisis hit Ireland and the
properties prices crashed:

[https://youtu.be/ZD9R1LMM5Zs](https://youtu.be/ZD9R1LMM5Zs)

~~~
purple_ducks
> I strongly doubt Airbnb has anything to do with it.

In Dublin, there have consistently been more complete units for short term let
in any moment on AirBnB than there are units available to rent.

Introducing new supply won't solve the problem but it will significantly ease
it.

~~~
Udik
The listings on Airbnb at any given moment are _all_ the flats on offer in the
city, while the ones on offer for long term rental are there only for a few
weeks before disappearing from the market for years. So simply comparing the
absolute amount of flats on offer on Airbnb and, say, Daft.ie or Rent.ie
doesn't make much sense.

------
everyone
I moved to Dublin in 2000 to go to college, and finding a place to rent was
extremely hard, they were very expensive, very low quality (eg. tiny mouldy
basement) and you had no protection, there was no PRTB as far as I was aware,
the landlords would always just keep your deposit and do whatever they wanted.
I learned to never pay the last months rent (just keep fobbing them off with
sob stories for a month) as the landlord would surely never give back my
deposit.

from roughly 2000, to 2010, things got much better, it actually felt like a
renters market at times. You could rent a whole house in the city for a
reasonable amount, and tenancies could new be registered with the PRTB. So
both parties had protection.

After that I found things gradually harder and harder. Harder to find a place,
more crummy places for more money, landlords no longer registering with PRTB,
doing whatever they want again, cus they know any tenant will have to put up
with it and just feel lucky to have a place.

In 2016, I had had enough of it. I moved down to the country. It was a great
move, I can go on great walks and cycles from my door, its quiet and peaceful,
and I am avoiding all the noise, air pollution, scumbags, and issues of
housing in Dublin.

~~~
CalRobert
Where'd you go? Doing the same thing myself.

~~~
everyone
To my parents house in a very remote spot in Co. Kilkenny.

I kept my lump sum that I had almost used to get a mortgage to get a house in
Dublin.. and now I'm just living off of it without needing to work for a few
years. :)

~~~
CalRobert
Hah, looked at a place in kilkenny ourselves. Waterford too, which seems
underrated. Looks like we'll wind up in Offaly, buying a modest place cash
with what we saved for a deposit in Dublin.

~~~
frabbit
I assume you have the option to work remotely then. Sounds like the best of
all worlds.... as long as.... (and this gets to what has been IMO one of the
causes of the housing problem) ... you do not need access to a hospital or a
university.

For as long as I can remember there have been calls to decentralize government
infrastructure to rural locations to both ease the resource demands in Dublin
and to allow people in the countryside to get a job near their families. By
and large it has not happened. And when that has been coupled with the actual
shutting of rural services (An Post, hospitals etc) using the excuse of
austerity (itself triggered by housing speculation) the situation is just
exacerbated.

Good luck in Offaly. I chose to move abroad over a decade ago instead of
dealing with the implications of a gombeen state.

~~~
CalRobert
This goverment suffers from a lack of imagination regarding rural Ireland.
You'd think all they care about is cars and cows if you asked FG. Giving folks
a bigger motorway to congest with two hour commutes won't save it. Yet I know
plenty of Dubs who feel trapped renting kips and are open to other lifestyles.

------
selimnairb
I’d like to think that this situation could be improved by restricting flows
of capital across borders for residential property purchase, and by not
allowing domestic vulture capital/private equity firms to buy residential
properties. Not sure how this passes constitutional muster here in the US, so
perhaps we need a housing rights amendment.

~~~
TomK32
I think it's easier to cut into the profits of those owning more than one
house/flat. Here in Austria we have a 10% sales tax on the rent I pay, why
can't that be fully shifted to the owners regardless if the apartments is
rented out or not?

------
AlexTWithBeard
They keep saying "let's build more houses!". Who's going to build them? Conor
Reddy, an undergraduate in genetics? Erica Fleming studying for her degree in
English? Or Jenny Quinn, the PA?

I guess we'll have to invite some guys from Poland. Oh, wait...

------
cauliflower99
There is a question that nobody is asking: How can we increase the market to
make it attractive for people to build?

People think by increasing regulations on house owners that this will be
solved. This is false. Decreasing regulations allow more business men to
invest in housing in the city. This increases competition in the long term,
thereby bringing costs down.

Instead of increasing regulations on Airbnb letters, why not decrease
regulations on renters and provide incentive?

~~~
talideon
No. The Irish government have been attempting just that and it's actually be
exacerbating the problem.

The solution is for the government to behave if a countercyclical fashion: if
the market isn't doing its job, the government has to compensate for the
market failure.

------
_eht
I've been told by some fellow HN'ers in other threads that housing problems
like this are akin to domain squatting. SMH.

------
sologoub
Maybe this is cultural and I have been grossly desensitized to how temporary
rent/lease arrangements are in the US (except in rent controlled places), but
I don’t quite understand the aversion to going with a private market renter
apartment, subsidized by the government (council?).

What makes it so undesirable that the article protagonists are willing to put
their kids through the wait in what is basically a shoe box?! (10 sq.m. is not
big enough for two people!)

The risk of having to look for another place to rent in a year is the same in
most of US. They appear to be protected from the increases by the subsidy, so
doesn’t feel so bad.

------
akshayB
It sounds like government needs to adjust the laws so it encourages the
homeowners to rent rather then Airbnb.

~~~
pastor_elm
Dublin is a tourist town. The only thing that can compete with 100 euros a
night is a rent of 3000 euros a month.

~~~
AllegedAlec
Or fines for short-term renting which make normal rent the more feasible
option.

------
squozzer
It seems cities with housing problems where AirBnB is a factor could adopt a
property tax scheme similar to what US counties implement already -

1) Tax based on property value (ad valorem); 2) Ad valorem deduction if owner
lives on property (homestead exemption)

PLUS some tax distinction for "declared" \- not sure if verifiable - long-term
(6 - 12 month minimum) vs short-term (AirBnB) rental.

I think taxes might work better or at least sound less draconian than simply
banning AirBnB or restrictions such as when rooms can be let (e.g.
Jacksonville Beach FL had some kind of ordinance restricting lets to certain
months of the year.)

~~~
burlesona
Another approach is land value tax, ie. make it very expensive to have idle
buildings or parking lots in the city center. You can still have some
deductions for primary residences to lessen the impact on them, while creating
incentives to keep landlords from low-occupancy uses.

------
jpollock
I'm not convinced by the journalism in the article.

First, the journalist writes:

"The Greater Dublin area is reckoned to have more than 30,000 properties that
are completely empty, many of which are owned by the local council."

However, they then don't get a quote from the council saying why their
properties are empty.

That tells me they had a specific story they wanted to tell, without digging
into why the systems the country has (state housing) to provide assistance
aren't working.

------
starbeast
Tax the hell out of all forms of residential-property-as-investment. Allow tax
breaks on second properties if you can show you are using them and not renting
them out or letting them go to seed and there should also be some exceptions
for collective ownership and also stuff like homes for the elderly and other
forms of sheltered care, but in general the commercial use of residential
property shout be taxed to the hilt.

~~~
frabbit
This is absolutely the simplest and probably most effective response to the
problem. It does need to be couple with a commitment to building new housing
stock by the government though (as pointed out by the article).

------
dev_north_east
How about building up? There's a huge lack of any sizable flat developments in
Dublin, it's all housing sprawl out into Meath and Kildare.

It's a fine place to visit but no way I'd live there (again). Traffic woes,
housing woes etc. I dunno how the Dubs do it tbh.

------
dubliner2077
They like to simulate them being big cities like New York or Tokyo in terms of
cost of living and rent prices.

The country just build HOUSES for few people and nothing high or apartment
blocks... Again, instead, we build offices.

Truth is Dublin is one of the most appalling cities in the world.

------
knuxus
People would rather make more money in less time...

~~~
CountSessine
...hence regulations and laws.

------
dmitriid
> Dublin came out as the world’s worst capital for affordable accommodation

They should try Stockholm. It can't be worse than Stockholm, surely.

------
frabbit
One important point not mentioned in the discussion of this has been the
accumulation of vast parcels of land by venture capitalists during the last
housing crisis. There are people sitting on huge amounts of land that they
acquired at knock-down prices during the government fire-sale. Media coverage
has focused on the outright corruption alleged to have occurred in some cases
(google NAMA and scandal) but even in the "legal" transfer of land the Irish
taxpayers have effectively subsidized the purchase of these landbanks by
private investors.

It is probably time for compulsory purchase orders at prices fair to the
taxpayers. Hopefully this will scare off other predators as Ireland becomes
known as a bad place to do dirty business in.

((I am dreaming... that will never happen... the Irish public by-and-large are
neoliberal true believers... these are the fruits of their dearly held
ideology))

------
pascalxus
Just another story about the evils of zoning and housing regulation. How much
do you want to bet builders aren't allowed to build more housing there?

~~~
teachrdan
It's considered bad practice to comment on HN stories one hasn't read. Did you
happen to see anything in this story about zoning or housing regulation, or
have specific knowledge to that affect?

~~~
pascalxus
That's exactly my point. They're not talking about the real cause of the
problem, thus misleading all the readers and ignoring the elephant in the
room.

Housing shortages are almost always a market failure due to regulation of some
sort. They keep talking about it like the problem was existing
landlords/AirBNB and to whom they're renting it out, etc. Instead of focusing
on the real problem: lack of supply.

~~~
frabbit
The lack of supply comes because neo-liberals decided the government should
stop building social housing. So... yeah.. you are right, but for reasons that
you won't like.

------
eggy
I think it is also a problem of perception and living within your means. It is
mentioned a lot of people 'are commuting crazy distances', and 'Four hours a
day in a car or a bus.' I commuted up to four hours a day for several years in
order to have a nice, affordable home on a lake. I couldn't afford NYC rents,
and I was born and bred in Brooklyn with family and friends to assist in
finding deals on rents. Meanwhile, I had friends who I grew up living in NYC
with rent control, and collecting unemployment in between waiting/waitressing
jobs. I thought a lot of work in Ireland was call center/IT work. Can young
people, other than students, work remotely? How about online courses with a 4
hour commute once a week to check in with advisors and other students? The
world will adapt. Government can't regulate fixes.

~~~
burlesona
But governments do a LOT to restrict housing supply, particularly of compact,
affordable, walkable development. They could remove those barriers and let
more housing be built if they wanted the situation to improve.

------
wallace_f
When an exceptionally esteemed mathematician like Atiyah proposes a proof for
the Riemann hypothesis, it can still be wrong.

I think that's important--letting experts or ideas be wrong. I don't see
evidence of humanity having success solving difficult problems without
competition and experimentation.

But this particular problem will continue to grow because it wont be addressed
in this way. Committees, bureaucracies, academics and journalists will surely
discuss it though.

Orwell speaks more eloquently about this concept in The Lion and the Unicorn.

