About time someone spoke out on our housing disaster

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

At its height, they called it property porn; a nation salivating at the notional increase in the value of their homes, theoretically seeing their home double in value – and then coveting someone else’s pile because they’d become wealthy without doing anything at all.

That overlooked one small thing; you had to live in your house, so the only way to cash in on your new-found wealthy status was to live in a campervan.

You could make money of course if you’d bought a second home but for most people it should have been utterly irrelevant what their home was worth – because it was a base, not an asset.

You might as well have been putting an increasing value on your children.

And instead of feeling smug because the family home had doubled in price, you should have been devastated – because all this actually meant is that most children could never buy a property in the area they grew up in, because they’d been literally priced out of home.

Since those halcyon days of the Celtic Tiger, to mix the metaphors, the chickens have all come home to roost.

Not alone can this generation not buy where they grew, they can’t get a house to own or rent in the city they always called home.

Instead, vulture funds and developers have married their greed to build stacks of buy-to-let blocks where they can make another fortune on the backs on the tenants.

And our Government let that happen, just as it allowed the previous boom to bubble unabated, because they decided that the best sort of economy was one propped up entirely on the proceeds of stamp duty.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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