11 ms·

30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis

154 points by CharlesDodgson 8y ago

docker_up 8y ago
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.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  France too. The amount of locked area is quite sad and no legal solution to turn this into a useful asset for homeless and owners.
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  "things like this will only worsen it because people will be foreclosing on large numbers of housing properties because they were used for investment" Thats only the property was purchased with debt (mortgage). If these investments were not purchased with debt then there will be no foreclosing.
  - docker_up 8y ago
    I would wager that most investment properties are bought with debt, ie. leverage. It makes more sense to purchase a property with a fraction of the cost and then use Airbnb to pay for the mortgage. Only extremely naive investors would be spending their cash to buy a property when they could instead get multiple properties using leverage/debt.
    - inscionent 8y ago
      > Only extremely naive investors would be spending their cash to buy a property Smart investors use other people's money and hope for the bailout. Galaxy brain investors use other people's money and write the bailout.
- segmondy 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - inscionent 8y ago
      Going to zero has zero to do with real estate being a secure investment. Owning an underwater property and running into a situation where the investor can't continue to make the mortgage payments is just as bad as the asset going to zero for most. > you can invest on loaned principal without extreme risk in case of failure Yes, when this happens thousands upon thousands of times you have the 2008 world wide financial crisis.
    - TuringNYC 8y ago
      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.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    This is morally reprehensible.
- api 8y ago
  It's not just AirBnB. It's also that real estate has been backstopped by the Fed and the government. So far it's a can't-lose investment over longer time spans, so if you can afford to stack up properly it's a sure thing way to build wealth. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Affordable housing means existing homeowners lose equity.
- Svoka 8y ago
  In Toronto it's beneficial to buy property as investment. Condo value usually doubles in price over 5 years. https://toronto.listing.ca/condo-price-history.htm https://toronto.listing.ca/condo-price-history.htm Which means rich people end up hoarding property. You don't even have to rent it out. Just wait a little bit and make a bank.
rb808 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jefftk 8y ago
  > I don't know how houses can be cheaper. Houses can be cheaper if we allow building more of them. Right now supply is heavily constrained by zoning and density limits.
  - oldmanhorton 8y ago
    Sure, but a ton of people I know who stay in AirBnB do so because they prefer the experience, not because it’s cheaper. Perhaps that segment I see is biased but I’m not sure more hotels -> lower cost and more diverse locations will fix the problem
    - vadym909 8y ago
      It is cute and a brilliant business when someone rents out their place for a weekend. It becomes a serious problem when vultures abuse the rules and convert homes into hotels.
knuxus 8y ago
People would rather make more money in less time...
- CountSessine 8y ago
  ...hence regulations and laws.
akshayB 8y ago
It sounds like government needs to adjust the laws so it encourages the homeowners to rent rather then Airbnb.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  The infrastructure is there. Plenty of EU jurisdictions levy a fee that Airbnb collects. Except in my experience it was 1 EUR/ evening. Funny how the locals pay for all of the upkeep or historical sites, and I get to see it for free or nearly free.
- searine 8y ago
  That just side steps the problems, and Airbnb is just an excuse. There needs to be regulation that makes it easier for the tenant to also be the owner.
  - imAsking9836 8y ago
    Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent. Owners will stop renting if they fear to lose their property if a tenant remains for more than say a year. You need to regulate the amount of time you can AirBnB a place before facing a fine. Ideally you would earn 300$ for putting your place on AirBnB for two months or 700$ for renting it a year. (Simple numbers just an example). And we would still have the stagnant salaries and sky high property values that no one can afford problems.
    - searine 8y ago
      >but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent Maybe i wasn't clear, but my point was that when renting is the most common way of living, it is not healthy for society. Ownership promotes community and responsibility. Renting is parasitic and enables social stratification in to elites and tenants. Prices are inflated and are used as investments rather than housing. This is where the government needs to add regulation to prevent exploitation of the market.
wallace_f 8y ago
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.
dmitriid 8y ago
> Dublin came out as the world’s worst capital for affordable accommodation They should try Stockholm. It can't be worse than Stockholm, surely.
- miramardesign 8y ago
  immigration has become a nice scam: 1) become a politician 2) buy property 3) vote in mass immigration and call anyone who disagrees -ist 4) give the new immigrants heavy housing subsidies. 5) the money comes right to the politicians back in the form of rents 6) profit
_eht 8y ago
I've been told by some fellow HN'ers in other threads that housing problems like this are akin to domain squatting. SMH.
nyghtly 8y ago
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-city-council-passes-strict-new-short-term-rental-law.html https://www.avalara.com/mylodgetax/en/blog/2018/06/boston-ci...
- hackermailman 8y ago
  Here the solution was to have AirBnB collect a tax on their site, and it disappears into general revenues where they claim it will help build social housing schemes. A better solution would be to permit renters to sublet out their own suites on AirBnB, give them equal access to the gig economy as landlords do. You go on strike or vacation, have the right to sublet out your suite to make extra income.
  - devocracy 8y ago
    As a landlord, I don't want my tenants renting to people I haven't had a chance to vet. At least if I'm taking on the risks or ABnB I'm also reaping the rewards. Good luck collecting from my tenant if their hotel guests damage the property.
    - jdblair 8y ago
      Isn't that what the security deposit is for? I say this as a landlord, in California it's common to allow tenants to sublet for less than 30 days.
      - CountSessine 8y ago
        What are security deposits like in California? Most places I've lived (in Canada) security deposits can't be any more than a month or two of rent, and a really really bad BnB guest could easily do tens of thousands of dollars of damage to an apartment.
eggy 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- CharlesDodgson 8y ago
  The city is very concentric, with a lot of corporate jobs in the docklands and state jobs central. We had a half baked attempt at decentralisation in the past, but it was a mess and only lead to incredible waste. Sadly the remote work opportunities are the oddity, rather than the norm, especially for govt. jobs.
burlesona 8y ago
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?
- purple_ducks 8y ago
  > by removing barriers to development That's quite broad. Barriers to development were lowered and ignored during the Celtic tiger era. Really poor housing was built and funnily enough, it was still sold at obnoxiously high prices. The only people pushing for this are property developers and thankfully so far, most of the country has remained strong on not falling for this spiel again. *This doesn't exclude building higher in city center.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    Removing barriers to entry does not mean allowing low quality housing to be built. It instead means things like getting rid of building height limits.
    - 8y ago
squozzer 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
scotty79 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - ska 8y ago
    I take your point, (and I'm not supporting parents contention) but it's worth recalling that under Eisenhower the highest progressive marginal tax rate was something like 90% - hardly anyone's idea of a communist state. Unsurprising as the two concepts are quite separable.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      Almost no one actually paid that though: Between 1950 and 1959, he notes, the highest earning 1 percent of Americans paid an effective tax rate of 42 percent. https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-...
      - ska 8y ago
        Yes that's true (and expected, after all that's what the "progressive" part means). Not supporting the silly 10 apartments thing. I'm just pointing out that progressive taxation, even with very high top marginal rates, is not socialism - and we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend it is.
jbob2000 8y ago
So burn them down. If they are empty and owned by a bunch of wealthy councilmen, then nothing will be lost. You already can't live in them. Your protests are doing nothing. You are already homeless. Burn the houses down.
- cabaalis 8y ago
  This is exactly the kind of call for violent measures that gets people in trouble in social media. This is a public forum, after all. If you truly believe what you wrote, perhaps you should also consider that "wealth" is a very subjective measure, and there are those who would certainly consider you unworthy of owning your property since they have so little. Would you appreciate someone telling them to burn down your place while you're at work?
- stale2002 8y ago
  They aren't empty, though. Tourists are living in them.
- sctb 8y ago
  You're breaking the guidelines too often with uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments. We eventually ban accounts that continue, so would you please stop? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
miramardesign 8y ago
this is what happens when you let foreigners with unstable currency buy property but the property security is provided by the taxpayers expense. we in fact are subsidizing and securitzing china and other coutries outflow of capital
cauliflower99 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- JetSpiegel 8y ago
  > How can we increase the market to make it attractive for people to build? The title of this submission mentions 30k EMPTY houses sitting idle, and the solution is build more?
starbeast 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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).
everyone 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Where'd you go? Doing the same thing myself.
  - everyone 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
      - 8y ago
mjevans 8y ago
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).
- AdrianB1 8y ago
  You can directly confiscate. They did it in my country and they were called communists; most properties were never given back. Wealthy people should be punished. Everybody should be poor, they said.
- pauldelany 8y ago
  One reason there isn't much political will for this in Ireland: https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/nearly-one-in-five-tds-are-landlords-registry-shows-399892.html https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/nearly-one-in-five-tds...
selimnairb 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
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...
jpollock 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Irishsteve 8y ago
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.
pascalxus 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
Udik 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    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.
sologoub 8y ago
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.
dubliner2077 8y ago
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.
dev_north_east 8y ago
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.
frabbit 8y ago
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))

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.

agumonkey 8y ago
France too. The amount of locked area is quite sad and no legal solution to turn this into a useful asset for homeless and owners.
petermcneeley 8y ago
"things like this will only worsen it because people will be foreclosing on large numbers of housing properties because they were used for investment" Thats only the property was purchased with debt (mortgage). If these investments were not purchased with debt then there will be no foreclosing.
- docker_up 8y ago
  I would wager that most investment properties are bought with debt, ie. leverage. It makes more sense to purchase a property with a fraction of the cost and then use Airbnb to pay for the mortgage. Only extremely naive investors would be spending their cash to buy a property when they could instead get multiple properties using leverage/debt.
  - inscionent 8y ago
    > Only extremely naive investors would be spending their cash to buy a property Smart investors use other people's money and hope for the bailout. Galaxy brain investors use other people's money and write the bailout.
segmondy 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - inscionent 8y ago
    Going to zero has zero to do with real estate being a secure investment. Owning an underwater property and running into a situation where the investor can't continue to make the mortgage payments is just as bad as the asset going to zero for most. > you can invest on loaned principal without extreme risk in case of failure Yes, when this happens thousands upon thousands of times you have the 2008 world wide financial crisis.
  - TuringNYC 8y ago
    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.
- sitkack 8y ago
  This is morally reprehensible.
api 8y ago
It's not just AirBnB. It's also that real estate has been backstopped by the Fed and the government. So far it's a can't-lose investment over longer time spans, so if you can afford to stack up properly it's a sure thing way to build wealth. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Affordable housing means existing homeowners lose equity.
Svoka 8y ago
In Toronto it's beneficial to buy property as investment. Condo value usually doubles in price over 5 years. https://toronto.listing.ca/condo-price-history.htm https://toronto.listing.ca/condo-price-history.htm Which means rich people end up hoarding property. You don't even have to rent it out. Just wait a little bit and make a bank.

rb808 8y ago

> 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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jefftk 8y ago
> I don't know how houses can be cheaper. Houses can be cheaper if we allow building more of them. Right now supply is heavily constrained by zoning and density limits.
- oldmanhorton 8y ago
  Sure, but a ton of people I know who stay in AirBnB do so because they prefer the experience, not because it’s cheaper. Perhaps that segment I see is biased but I’m not sure more hotels -> lower cost and more diverse locations will fix the problem
  - vadym909 8y ago
    It is cute and a brilliant business when someone rents out their place for a weekend. It becomes a serious problem when vultures abuse the rules and convert homes into hotels.

knuxus 8y ago

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

CountSessine 8y ago
...hence regulations and laws.

akshayB 8y ago

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

Scoundreller 8y ago
The infrastructure is there. Plenty of EU jurisdictions levy a fee that Airbnb collects. Except in my experience it was 1 EUR/ evening. Funny how the locals pay for all of the upkeep or historical sites, and I get to see it for free or nearly free.
searine 8y ago
That just side steps the problems, and Airbnb is just an excuse. There needs to be regulation that makes it easier for the tenant to also be the owner.
- imAsking9836 8y ago
  Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent. Owners will stop renting if they fear to lose their property if a tenant remains for more than say a year. You need to regulate the amount of time you can AirBnB a place before facing a fine. Ideally you would earn 300$ for putting your place on AirBnB for two months or 700$ for renting it a year. (Simple numbers just an example). And we would still have the stagnant salaries and sky high property values that no one can afford problems.
  - searine 8y ago
    >but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent Maybe i wasn't clear, but my point was that when renting is the most common way of living, it is not healthy for society. Ownership promotes community and responsibility. Renting is parasitic and enables social stratification in to elites and tenants. Prices are inflated and are used as investments rather than housing. This is where the government needs to add regulation to prevent exploitation of the market.

wallace_f 8y ago

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.

dmitriid 8y ago

> Dublin came out as the world’s worst capital for affordable accommodation They should try Stockholm. It can't be worse than Stockholm, surely.

miramardesign 8y ago
immigration has become a nice scam: 1) become a politician 2) buy property 3) vote in mass immigration and call anyone who disagrees -ist 4) give the new immigrants heavy housing subsidies. 5) the money comes right to the politicians back in the form of rents 6) profit

_eht 8y ago

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

nyghtly 8y ago

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

hackermailman 8y ago
Here the solution was to have AirBnB collect a tax on their site, and it disappears into general revenues where they claim it will help build social housing schemes. A better solution would be to permit renters to sublet out their own suites on AirBnB, give them equal access to the gig economy as landlords do. You go on strike or vacation, have the right to sublet out your suite to make extra income.
- devocracy 8y ago
  As a landlord, I don't want my tenants renting to people I haven't had a chance to vet. At least if I'm taking on the risks or ABnB I'm also reaping the rewards. Good luck collecting from my tenant if their hotel guests damage the property.
  - jdblair 8y ago
    Isn't that what the security deposit is for? I say this as a landlord, in California it's common to allow tenants to sublet for less than 30 days.
    - CountSessine 8y ago
      What are security deposits like in California? Most places I've lived (in Canada) security deposits can't be any more than a month or two of rent, and a really really bad BnB guest could easily do tens of thousands of dollars of damage to an apartment.

eggy 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
CharlesDodgson 8y ago
The city is very concentric, with a lot of corporate jobs in the docklands and state jobs central. We had a half baked attempt at decentralisation in the past, but it was a mess and only lead to incredible waste. Sadly the remote work opportunities are the oddity, rather than the norm, especially for govt. jobs.

burlesona 8y ago

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?

purple_ducks 8y ago
> by removing barriers to development That's quite broad. Barriers to development were lowered and ignored during the Celtic tiger era. Really poor housing was built and funnily enough, it was still sold at obnoxiously high prices. The only people pushing for this are property developers and thankfully so far, most of the country has remained strong on not falling for this spiel again. *This doesn't exclude building higher in city center.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Removing barriers to entry does not mean allowing low quality housing to be built. It instead means things like getting rid of building height limits.
  - 8y ago

squozzer 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

scotty79 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- ska 8y ago
  I take your point, (and I'm not supporting parents contention) but it's worth recalling that under Eisenhower the highest progressive marginal tax rate was something like 90% - hardly anyone's idea of a communist state. Unsurprising as the two concepts are quite separable.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    Almost no one actually paid that though: Between 1950 and 1959, he notes, the highest earning 1 percent of Americans paid an effective tax rate of 42 percent. https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-...
    - ska 8y ago
      Yes that's true (and expected, after all that's what the "progressive" part means). Not supporting the silly 10 apartments thing. I'm just pointing out that progressive taxation, even with very high top marginal rates, is not socialism - and we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend it is.

jbob2000 8y ago

So burn them down. If they are empty and owned by a bunch of wealthy councilmen, then nothing will be lost. You already can't live in them. Your protests are doing nothing. You are already homeless. Burn the houses down.

cabaalis 8y ago
This is exactly the kind of call for violent measures that gets people in trouble in social media. This is a public forum, after all. If you truly believe what you wrote, perhaps you should also consider that "wealth" is a very subjective measure, and there are those who would certainly consider you unworthy of owning your property since they have so little. Would you appreciate someone telling them to burn down your place while you're at work?
stale2002 8y ago
They aren't empty, though. Tourists are living in them.
sctb 8y ago
You're breaking the guidelines too often with uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments. We eventually ban accounts that continue, so would you please stop? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

miramardesign 8y ago

this is what happens when you let foreigners with unstable currency buy property but the property security is provided by the taxpayers expense. we in fact are subsidizing and securitzing china and other coutries outflow of capital

cauliflower99 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
JetSpiegel 8y ago
> How can we increase the market to make it attractive for people to build? The title of this submission mentions 30k EMPTY houses sitting idle, and the solution is build more?

starbeast 8y ago

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 8y ago
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).

everyone 8y ago

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 8y ago
Where'd you go? Doing the same thing myself.
- everyone 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - 8y ago

mjevans 8y ago

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).

AdrianB1 8y ago
You can directly confiscate. They did it in my country and they were called communists; most properties were never given back. Wealthy people should be punished. Everybody should be poor, they said.
pauldelany 8y ago
One reason there isn't much political will for this in Ireland: https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/nearly-one-in-five-tds-are-landlords-registry-shows-399892.html https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/nearly-one-in-five-tds...

selimnairb 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago

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...

jpollock 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Irishsteve 8y ago

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.

pascalxus 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

Udik 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  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.

sologoub 8y ago

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.

dubliner2077 8y ago

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.

dev_north_east 8y ago

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.

frabbit 8y ago

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))