Housing crises are generally a function of policy and markets, not, er, land. Like, the US is pretty sparsely populated and has one. Ireland has a particularly nasty one; again, low population density.
In the Irish case it’s largely down to an attitude after the financial crisis that Ireland would go back to its old pattern of bleeding out the working-age population through emigration, and therefore there was no need to keep the construction industry on life support in the way that other countries did. When this did not come to pass there was a problem; building shut down completely from 2008 to 2014, and while it’s now back on stream, there’s such a huge deficit from the period of no activity that it’s hard to overcome in the short term. Ireland currently has about seven times more housing starts per year per capita than the UK, and it’s still not good enough.
This is a case where a recession, coupled with bad policy, made a housing crisis far, far worse.
rsynnott|1 year ago
In the Irish case it’s largely down to an attitude after the financial crisis that Ireland would go back to its old pattern of bleeding out the working-age population through emigration, and therefore there was no need to keep the construction industry on life support in the way that other countries did. When this did not come to pass there was a problem; building shut down completely from 2008 to 2014, and while it’s now back on stream, there’s such a huge deficit from the period of no activity that it’s hard to overcome in the short term. Ireland currently has about seven times more housing starts per year per capita than the UK, and it’s still not good enough.
This is a case where a recession, coupled with bad policy, made a housing crisis far, far worse.