Full coverage: Housing

Regulations should be judged not by their aims but by their effects. From housing standards to climate policy, well-meaning rules in Ireland risk pricing people out of homes and stifling urban renewal — unless policymakers properly weigh costs, benefits, and trade-offs.

There is a ubiquity to housing shortages across much of the Western world. Tim White, a research fellow at the London School of Economics, outlines the need for deterrence on institutional investors.

The collapse in new housing starts this year isn’t just a post-incentive hangover – it’s a sign of deeper issues in how Ireland is building, planning, and managing its long-term housing strategy.

Having resisted media efforts to report on the destination of vast public spending to tackle homelessness for the past decade, authorities are slowly changing tack.

The pandemic has left its mark on the jobs and housing markets. Jobs became hybrid and the trend of more expensive counties seeing greater house price growth was halted. Is there a new model emerging?

The latest iteration of the National Development Plan sets funding allocations first, leaving project prioritisation for later – except for three Dublin infrastructure mammoths.

Despite robust first-time buyer demand, new housing supply is slowing and second-hand market turnover remains worryingly flat.

It says a lot about the capacity of our state that it can grasp and grapple with Donald Trump more easily and with more surety than putting bricks on top of other bricks in fields outside of towns and cities.

The challenge of finding accommodation for staff is evolving from a major concern expressed in anonymised business surveys into a toxic mix of unhealthy attitudes and practices.

It is absolutely right that, in a democratic system, the people – at national and local level – help set the parameters on housing policy. However, the State has a responsibility to those not living somewhere yet. It must provide for the future as well as the present.