[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?

[adam_arthur]

We're talking about a system here. The housing market.

In your example, it's like saying crime is systemically high, and thinking blaming the criminals will solve it. You can and should prosecute individual criminals, but it does nothing to solve the underlying reasons that crime is high.

High crime is likely due to structural factors that the government has control over, and you'll never solve high crime by jailing everybody. Jailing nobody would be a structural factor encouraging high crime, however. But one which the government can be held accountable for.

It's naive to expect to solve societal problems through "shoulds" and not through rules and legislation.

[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).