| > There's plenty of money for people to pay for houses. Well, you really have to mortgage yourself to the hilt to buy a house now in Ireland, it's ridiculous. With a single normal (non-director etc) wage it's almost impossible. > So you have one group of people holding on to land like their lives depended on it, trying to increase the value, and another group trying to lower the value of that land and increase the value of their own homes by preventing the owners from building on it. I was told that when the republic was founded land ownership was forbidden (or public or something) to avoid this very thing? But this was a pretty 'severe' person, maybe they were bending the truth. I don't know. But the objection system is crazy yes. It doesn't explain though how Ireland was one big building site before the credit crisis and now nothing is being built. The whole country (outside Dublin) is one big empty space and yet houses in such shortage that the prices are extreme :( There's more than enough space for everyone to live comfortably and affordably. Also, I don't really agree that having houses nearby would decrease the value of the existing ones. Houses in urban areas are generally much more expensive than those in backwater villages. And a lot of people prefer to live in urban areas. In fact this is one of the reasons I left the country. Outside Dublin every town is way too small to have decent services and Dublin is way too expensive to live there. |