[mandmandam]

I object to the characterization of Ireland's housing issues as somehow accidental, or solely due to broad market forces.

At every major decision point there were intelligent people screaming in the ear of media and politicians that property developers were getting away with murder.

I knew teenagers who emigrated as the writing was so clearly on the wall, and the entire time our print and TV media were inflating the bubble with every tool at their disposal.

Trails of brown envelopes (bribes) have been sniffed out repeatedly, and then left to grow cold. Large scale developments were made and begun without any plan whatsoever to connect them to basic and necessary infrastructure such as sewage, or schools.

The media have pointed fingers at immigrants, dole scroungers, and market forces - anything but policy. They give airtime to politicians who have been repeatedly proven to be actively working against us and caught in lies over and over. They smear anyone speaking truth.

And when it all went tits up the same fuckers - property developers and politicians and media - made even more money. For example, with NAMA, which this author inexplicably ignores completely.

Irish housing policy for the last decade has been to sell property to vulture funds and foreign investors at firesale prices tax free, while the average Irish worker has none of the same advantages and no chance of getting on the ladder whatsoever.

Our Minister of State for Housing recently tried to get his monkeys to find flaws in an ESRI report saying we could borrow billions for social housing. Our Minister for Housing has come through with just 5% of his promised build number. THIS IS POLICY.

Our government funds landlords with schemes such as HAP (1.5 billion euro directly to landlords since 2017) instead of building fucking houses. They then use those schemes to twist the numbers, pissing in our face and telling us its raining despite clear record homelessness and child poverty.

We give foreign companies billions to build houses which we then rent off of them for decades and don't own at the end. It's sheer, clear insanity. And this Oxford chap seems completely unaware, yet wholly confident in his "understanding" of the issues we have.

This crisis was NOT built on misunderstandings, or myth, or innocent mistakes and apathy. It was CONSTRUCTED. And at every point, the wrong people have profited at the expense of the 40% of Irish who don't own a house.

And if I'm not wrong, neoliberals and banks are running this scam all over the world.

[pxue]

You can approach things like this in two ways:

- academic, like the author. Look for the facts and numbers and derive your understanding of the events from it, and only it.

- investigative, like the events of Spotlight. Pull on a thread and see how deep it goes.

You need bit of both to discover the whole truth.

[adam_arthur]

How can the blame be put on property developers?

Most of property costs can be tied to government policy, re: zoning, interest rates, tax laws etc.

The government is usually always the one that could fix the problem by encouraging building. E.g. in the US we have an 18% tariff on Canadian lumber, which artificially increases cost to build (though is meant to protect domestic lumber industry).

Many municipalities have zoning laws that prevent densification etc.

Government could easily require investors to put more money down in residential (New Zealand just did this), increase tax on non owner occupied, upzone to allow more dense homes/building, office to residential conversions, etc.

[mandmandam]

Developers fucked us over in a lot of ways. Government and media and banking were fully in on it, and still are.

Remember how I talked about housing estates being built where there was no desire or infrastructure there? They did this by taking advantage of human psychology. When people turned out against a development, they'd simply resubmit the proposal in 6 months or a year and this time people would be fatigued and not fight it. I have personally heard them talk about doing this with my own ears. They made backhanders to politicians, they paid off newspapers and TV stations, they made deals with substandard suppliers.

And why did they do this? There was huge money in it. Government funds, aforesaid substandard materials, treating workers like shit. Ever way the system could be gamed it was gamed; and they didn't even try all that hard to hide it.

Look up CRH, Ireland's concrete cartel. Look up mica blocks in Donegal. Look up NAMA corruption. There's more than enough information out there to put all the pieces together but media and Gardai refuse to do so. Half the population is aware of how fucked all this is and it remains an open secret; so seeing revisionist wank coming out of Oxford academia is actually offensive.

... So, developers got paid. Media got paid. Establishment politicians got paid. Banks got paid repeatedly, as did their bondholders. Everyone got paid except for the people, who were and are being cynically and systematically fleeced before, during and after each boom bust cycle.

[baq]

> How can the blame be put on property developers?

The easiest answer is that property developers are ultimately responsible for policies in legal and not exactly legal ways.

[Fordec]

Most of the government policy at the time can be tied to bribes by developers. Look up "brown envelopes"[0] or the subsequent Mahon (formerly Flood) tribunal.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2003/0501/37800-flood/

[adam_arthur]

So why blame the developers and not the government?

People lobby for different things all the time, it's the government that sets the rules. The only power public has is to vote out those officials, or lobby the other way.

There were structural, government induced factors that helped lead to the 2008 GFC in the US too. You could blame irresponsible buyers, or the banks, but it's the government regulation that is the only thing that can structurally fix problems. Blaming actors within the system devised by govt doesn't solve anything, however cathartic it may feel.

[goodpoint]

> So why blame the developers and not the government?

Because responsibility comes with power. Developers are hugely wealthy and have incredible lobbying/bribing power and they are happy to use it.

They know very well that "lobbying" and creating housing bubbles is not a victimless crime and they do it anyways.

Politicians still get blame for accepting bribes but they are not billionaires themselves and it's understandably not easy to push back.

[mandmandam]

I think the fact that you've been pointed to firm evidence of bribes, yet call the developer's actions "lobbying" says a lot about your good faith here.

In case you're actually reachable though - just because a government fails to stand up for its people does not excuse the complicit parties who "lobby" them to fleece normal people by the millions.

[adam_arthur]

It's simply an ineffective way of looking at the world.

The government is the one that sets policies, not the developers. To me a government official that accepts a bribe and makes far reaching policies in response to one is much more culpable and to blame than somebody making the bribe.

It's like if a company hired a lot of unqualified people and then blamed those people when it failed, rather than their system of checks and balances in the hiring process.

Focusing on the player and not on the rules of the game is simply a losing mentality, sorry.

The whole point of democracy is about holding government accountable when they make mistakes. Diverting blame to non government actors doesn't solve anything

[mandmandam]

I’m curious - in what other contexts do you apply this "logic" ?

If the guy who robbed your house and cleared out your bank account bribed the judge to go free, would you then feel that the robber played the system well?

Would you be arguing that he doesn’t need to go to jail, only the judge? Because "democracy"??

... I fucking doubt it.

And I imagine you'd feel even worse when you find out that the burglar and the judge have worked together to clear out entire neighborhoods.

So why excuse theft on a national (even international) scale?

[disgruntledphd2]

Most of that happened before the craziness which was 2002 onwards. Like, Dublin planning is messed up because of brown envelopes, but they don't appear to have contributed in the same way to the worst excesses of the Boom.

The corruption was a little more subtle in those days (although I look forward to the coming NANA tribunal).

[ploika]

> Trails of brown envelopes (bribes) have been sniffed out repeatedly, and then left to grow cold. Large scale developments were made and begun without any plan whatsoever to connect them to basic and necessary infrastructure such as sewage, or schools.

Can't argue with this, in fairness.

> The media have pointed fingers at immigrants, dole scroungers, and market forces - anything but policy. They give airtime to politicians who have been repeatedly proven to be actively working against us and caught in lies over and over. They smear anyone speaking truth.

This is just not true. It's almost libellous it's so wide of the mark. I don't know where you're getting this from. Nobody of any substance has ever blamed the crash or the housing crisis on immigrants, people on the dole, direct provision or anything like that. Immigration in particular has been an absolute non-issue the entire time.

> Irish housing policy for the last decade has been to sell property to vulture funds and foreign investors at firesale prices tax free, while the average Irish worker has none of the same advantages and no chance of getting on the ladder whatsoever.

This is not true either. Vulture funds buy non-performing loans (not property, loans), of which there are many, and for which reason we have higher than average mortgage rates. It's distasteful, but without them our current account fees and loan rates would be higher than they already are.

REITs are not vulture funds. They generally build to rent: they finance the construction, and then collect the rent. Without them there would be thousands fewer apartments in Dublin in particular. Cork city went a full decade without a single apartment complex being built. They serve a purpose. They don't pay corporation tax, but they do pay tax. See here: https://www.revenue.ie/en/tax-professionals/tdm/income-tax-c...

The funds swooping in post-construction and buying entire blocks of houses or apartments that would otherwise have gone on the open market, they're a different story. They can die screaming.

> Our government funds landlords with schemes such as HAP (1.5 billion euro directly to landlords since 2017) instead of building fucking houses. They then use those schemes to twist the numbers, pissing in our face and telling us its raining despite clear record homelessness and child poverty. We give foreign companies billions to build houses which we then rent off of them for decades and don't own at the end. It's sheer, clear insanity. And this Oxford chap seems completely unaware, yet wholly confident in his "understanding" of the issues we have.

HAP is a bad scheme. Totally agree. The "Oxford Chap" is a Trinity academic who writes the daft.ie reports on housing in Ireland. He knows what's going on as well as you do.

> This crisis was NOT built on misunderstandings, or myth, or innocent mistakes and apathy. It was CONSTRUCTED. And at every point, the wrong people have profited at the expense of the 40% of Irish who don't own a house.

Nobody manufactured the crisis on purpose. That's tinfoil hattery.