Dublin City Council previously issued demands for payment for 2018 to 2022, with the total amount in levy payments connected to the long vacant site running to just shy of €185,000.
The rise in home completions was largely driven by a surge in new apartments. But this surge has stopped due to the tightening of rent controls and the scrapping of Strategic Housing Developments, and Buy-to-Rent codes.
New York’s experience with rent controls in the interwar years was – compared to other rent control systems – less painful. Rents were kept in check until new supply came on stream. There is nothing at the moment, however, to suggest that Ireland is following the same route.
Kenneth Donfield has fought for five years, from the RTB to the Four Courts, to avoid eviction from his bedsit flat and home of 21 years in a building now owned by Eamon Waters. The High Court has decided that the fight will go on.
Ireland is 13 years into a rental market crisis. Despite eight years of evidence the strategy of capping rents and diverting demand doesn’t work, not a single party has any real strategy for the rental sector.
As voting day looms, Róisín Shortall talks taxation, dropping the spending cap, overhauling housing and halting a creeping privatisation of basic services in a Social Democrats government.
Institutions have been spooked by the prospect of capped returns, meaning Dublin has struggled to compete with other European cities for investment. Just €440m was invested in Ireland’s build-to-rent market in 2023, compared with €1.9bn the previous year.
The pandemic years appeared to cause a blip in small landlord activity but they came back strongly in 2022, according to new data from the Revenue Commissioners.
Since 2020 in particular, the government has thrown a lot more money at the problem, in particular for social housing of various hues. It has done so while also effectively ignoring the growing deficit of rental homes around the country.
John Collison says that Ireland’s economic success was founded on radical ideas. However, in a wide-ranging and forthright interview, the co-founder of Stripe wonders if complacency has seeped into the system.
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