Sinn Féin’s €39bn housing plan: affordable homes from €250,000, freezing rents and 300,000 new units in five years
https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/09/02/sinn-fein-pledges-to-spend-39-billion-on-housing-over-next-five-years-to-deliver-300000-homes-if-in-government/
Posted by Top-Needleworker-863
27 Comments
What are people’s thoughts on this? It seems a bit too good to be true. For me, it’s just not doable. There’s already a shortage of construction labour in the country. How do they plan on achieving this with that in mind?
I can imagine some aspects of this will be mired in court battles, particularly rent freezes for three years.
I’m rather out of touch but is €250-300k for a home “affordable” for most?
>Affordable homes would be provided at between €250,000-300,000, while the State would retain ownership of the land on which these houses stand.
Also interesting to me that they would get back into the leasehold business – can anyone wiser than me explain that?
What’s the 300,000 for if you don’t own the house? Or you own the house but not the land it’s on.
How in the name of Jehovah would that work?
>aspects of the strategy include establishing a public building company and, separately, trialling direct building by the State
Is this not just doing the same thing twice?
If you have a state building company, what would they be doing if not direct building ?
I don’t think the lack of cash is our issue in this case. There are both human, I.e. people to actually build them and structural: planning, red tape, legal.etc that need to be addressed.
Why do they not want to let you owm the land your house is on?
Ya wouldn’t build a bike shed for €250,000 🤣🫶
The more I read of it, the more I like.
The problem is getting them built . During the boom they were often badly built because there’s not enough experienced builders to go around .
The government is allocating 7bn to housing already this year. SF makes it sound better that they give a 5 year total when the 5 years total for the government will be an extra 35bn on top of this 7bn.
Ultimately their 39bn can’t be spent if mary lou and housing spokesperson Eoin o’broin keep objecting to developments on behalf of their nimby constituents
Those are very cheap houses… Suspiciously cheap.
Don’t forget that Mary Lou recently objected to 1600 homes being built in Drumcondra.
“The contentious strategic housing development proposal attracted more than 120 submissions, including from Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, who stated that approval would only exacerbate the housing crisis.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2023/01/27/plan-for-1600-apartments-in-drumcondra-is-blocked-by-high-court/
I just hope they will rethink the way they build houses. Just slapping a bunch semi d with a shrinking garden space and one parking spot, on the town/city outskirts it’s not for everyone.
I’m all for rebuilding town centers around the country. Most of them were built when Ireland was piss poor and look so ugly now, not to mention most are sitting empty and basically need to be rebuilt anyways. Build tall (three stores high at least) and something different. Denmark comes to my mind how pretty and interesting looking some apartments are.
Last but not least – where will they get builders? There needs to be incentives to attract them and it won’t be cheap. Same with expanding all the services – garda, healthcare, gp’s and so on. It’s a massive task and this country is not ready for it.
I have no idea if their plan would work but at least they seem to be considering the housing crisis as a “crisis” or “emergency” while FG/FF are just asleep at the wheel for years on end
Gov. cant build bike shed for 300k and they want to try with housing?
Assuming €250K per house that would be €75 Billion.
Affordable home means price floor for the housing market.
It’s only the beginning of a housing strategy, while definitely a good start.
Having a lump sum and target number of units is all well and good, but they have they actually addressed any of the core issues that are obstructing construction?
Where are the units going to be built?
Our planning system is completely unfit for purpose, to the extent it is just an objection system more than anything else. An overhaul of the process and the dealing of spurious 3rd party complaints, plus introduction of proper urban planning needs to be looked at. Honestly all current political parties are complicit in pushing through objections and blocking developments, how can we trust a system that’s already broken to deliver higher numbers?
Who’s going to build them?
We already have a shortage of construction workers, and a dwindling number of apprentices coming up through the ranks. Apprentice pay and conditions especially need to be looked at to incentivise young people into the industry. There are record numbers of apprentice drop outs at the moment as they just can’t make ends meet.
How will costs be managed?
When we can’t even build a bike shelter for the proposed sale price, how will we avoid spiraling costs and prevent this 39Bn turning into 390Bn in Children’s Hospital style? Contractors make their profits by being smart about change orders and variations, and I just don’t believe there’s the competency in government or the public sector to properly manage them. Same issue for build quality, delivery schedule etc
We need to build up, it is the way forward to help us out of this crises
I’m so sick of how people pretend this is such a complex issue. It’s actually very simple. Building dwellings are very easy. I’d know I’ve build a few. Planning is deliberately over complicated, petty, slow and impractical. This comes from the Dermot Bannon generation of (it’ll cost 20k to knock a small garden wall kinda bs) or 300k to build a bike shed.
Builders can be found at home and abroad. The Irish build world cities in the past. The Chinese and Mexicans build the US railways. For example in Ukraine right now there are families who need to rebuild their lives and could do with extra money and well paid work. We could start initiatives all over the world for properly paid skilled workers on temporary visas.
But where will they live while they work? Temporary worker villages of, a few months on a few months off, like oil rigs, the army etc…
It’s not rocket science. Theres just no vision. Because priority 1 is to protect wealth in the status quo and create more wealth during the apparent “Fix” of the problem.
Priority 5 is to fix the issue, so long as all other priorities are met first.
It’s the same with climate. It’s not “we need to get EVs and solar panels to everyone stat” no it’s “we need to make a killing on EVs and solar panels while people are forced into change”
The thing is the restrictions on who you can resell to and for how much would never hold.
Eventually it would be unwound because doing so would be popular and you’d find that 150k the state “owned” in the land given over as yet another subsidy because the state owned the land would lapse. When Thatcher started letting people buy out council houses, it was in effect a subsidy from the state to the “lower” middle class making a whole raft of Tory voters.
So you’d have SF making “quasi” council houses and then quite likely FF or FG in future years doing a Thatcher on it.
Which is “grand” provided you are the beneficiary of that 100-200k at today’s prices but not so grand for every other tax payers.
More than that, Sinn Fein’s solution to throw yet more money at housing, when funding is not what is holding the system up, is a “look at me” solution in search of a problem and quite likely to cause inflation.
What are the problems ?
* The planning system is slow and easily abused by vexatious claimants
* The lack of people to actually do the work
O’Broin’s plan doesn’t really address those two issues.
And then there’s the “lets make a public builder”
What so we can be amazed at how much money the public sector spaffs up the wall at an even grander scale than the Dail bikesheds ?
You watch council workers scratching their arses for two weeks “fixing” a pavement somewhere and tell me again that a bunch of overpaid government builders, unionised up the wazoo who can’t be fired will deliver anything except large pension bills to the tax payer.
Building house cost cheaper than building bike shelter so
Freezing rents will see all landlords pull out of the market and likely mass evictions.
I always thought sinn feins demographic would be the more vulnerable that can’t afford a deposit for a house, but all their policies seem to have the outcome of reducing the number of available rental units
250k starting is not affordable for the majority of people looking for mortgages
Sinn Fein’s credibility has been shot to fuck. They are very good making surface level announcements we will spend X billion on building et cetera but they fall apart when they have to go into the detail.
They are talking about houses being sold on leasehold, to selected Ltd bidders and other such mechanics. I don’t think this will work, private banks will not be incentivised to give out such mortgages. It would have to be done by some form of state guarantee or by a state owned financial institution.
And then there is the big issue, who are all these houses being built for? Unless there is some kind of a restriction built in that only citizens can get on these lists it is absolutely pointless. The demand is never ending and the biggest component of it is the demand from immigrants.
SO one of our biggest issues is lack of construction staff and Sinn Fein idea to reduce house prices is to create another company, government owned with pensions etc, to take staff from private sector and pay them to build.
Which would drive up the price for the construction staff as they are more in demand, slowing down current projects and costing the tax payer billions long term as we have to provide nice government pensions to all these staff member.
Now thats just one of the small issues I see with this nonsense from Sinn Fein
Try telling someone they are buying a house, but not actually buying a house and the government at any stage can kick you out of the house because the government owns the property it sits on. Is that even legal in Ireland?
Or this another case of the insurance proposal which was also a load of boll**ks but Sinn fein got some good press from it and the online army had something to push around the web