Ronan Lyons is Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin, where his primary research areas are housing markets, urban economics, and economic history.
A series of deadlines in the past two years have caused artificial fits and starts in homebuilding. What happens next?
With house price inflation slowing and a significant rise in second-hand homes available for sale, it is tempting to conclude that supply is finally recovering. But weakening demand is playing a significant role in the cooling market.
For 50 years, Ireland has tried to hold Dublin back. The result has not been a smaller capital, but a more sprawling one – with homes pushed further from jobs and transport.
I genuinely hope that we get to mark the end of the housing crisis within the next couple of years. But we will be living with an unhealthy housing system for some time to come – and the political system needs to remember that and not get distracted.
A house price can tell us what the market is charging. It cannot tell us how many people are unable to form the household they actually want.
The capital has seen the slowest rental inflation in Ireland over recent years. That should be good news. Instead, it shows how badly the rental crisis has spread beyond Dublin.
The amount currently spent bidding against Irish households for a fixed pool of homes can be repurposed and recycled through a fund designed for a 40-year payback and a return no higher than the State’s own cost of borrowing.
Anchoring rents to cost and tapering subsidies by income is a design, not a budget line.
Cost-rental should be anchored to the cost of providing homes, not an arbitrary discount from market rents. Until that changes, Ireland's flagship social-rental model will work only where market rents are high enough to make the numbers add up.
House prices fell in Dublin in the second quarter of this year. The question is whether it is a blip, a Dublin-specific adjustment, or the first sign of something larger.
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