Irish govt considers demolishing 000s of newly built houses

Running_Horse

Lots of spare houses is a good thing that can only make housing more affordable in the future.

According to this discussion, some are planning for a future population of 8,000,000:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1078775

Maybe those houses will be needed in the not too distant future.

tara747

Degenerate wrote: »

It doesn't look so bad when you look at what the guy said:

"I have no doubt that some loans that will come into the possession of the Nama will result in the demolition of badly designed buildings in inappropriate locations,"

Yes, that will be a good thing, and hopefully they will restore the sites on which they stood to their former state (especially if they were in a scenic spot), or at least landscape them or something - not leave them as waste ground.

Running_Horse wrote: »

Lots of spare houses is a good thing that can only make housing more affordable in the future.

According to this discussion, some are planning for a future population of 8,000,000:

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1078775

Maybe those houses will be needed in the not too distant future.

Absolutely. Which makes you wonder - are they doing it to prop up house prices in the future???? :eek: They probably won't be able to anyway... there are simply too many surplus houses.

As for the 8m population, Ireland is currently a net exporter of people (or getting there fast)... so that is very unlikely imho.

Generali

MRSTITTLEMOUSE wrote: »

Trouble is new builds just don't stand up to standards for social housing.
We had flats,(sorry a luxury apartment complex) built here at the beginning of the recession and not one has been sold.
It was expected the council may have took them over but no,it was in the local paper that they may have to be demolished as they were just not up to local council housing standard.
Having once bought a new build myself I can understand that.
Most are rubbish.

It is worth remembering that there are 2 different things here:

1. Are the flats any good
2. Do they meet a particular bureaucratic standard

They may be perfectly well built but not meet a set of standards.

To use an example from a different sector, there is a hotel in Ascot (or at least used to be) called the Berysteade(sp?). It was a pretty nice place and if you stayed there you'd imagine it was a 4 star hotel - pretty decent food. The only thing was, it only got 2 stars. The reason? It didn't have full length mirrors in the rooms.

It would be crazy to knock the houses down just to support the building sector.

stonethrower

Generali wrote: »

It is worth remembering that there are 2 different things here:

1. Are the flats any good
2. Do they meet a particular bureaucratic standard

They may be perfectly well built but not meet a set of standards.

To use an example from a different sector, there is a hotel in Ascot (or at least used to be) called the Berysteade(sp?). It was a pretty nice place and if you stayed there you'd imagine it was a 4 star hotel - pretty decent food. The only thing was, it only got 2 stars. The reason? It didn't have full length mirrors in the rooms.

It would be crazy to knock the houses down just to support the building sector.

Generali I have worked both here and in Ireland on new builds and I can say I wouldn't touch 95% of them, they are built to a very poor standard in 20 or so years I reckon it will as cheap to knock them down as to keep renovating them. Its worse over here as the size is a lot smaller.

GDB2222

We gave a lift to a german builder working in Ireland and got talking. He complained that the standard of work he was required to do was shoddy. He'd been working there for 8 years. Amongst lots of complaints, he thought that they didn't allow enough drying time before rendering, so the render was all cracked and wouldn't do its job properly.

Besides that, the architecture was awful, or more likely non-existent, just being thrown up as a rectangular box by the builder. It was really just like lego, as built by a not very imaginative child. Occasionally, they'd put odd shaped window frames in these rectangles, which just looked out of place. Maybe they'd been on special offer at the builders merchants?

The_White_Horse

lostinrates wrote: »

Tara, this is terrible....is there no need for social housing, or homless shelters or anything like that? it seems so...wasteful.

i haven't read any of this, but is it fair that lots of young families have paid (lots of money) for houses, only for layabouts and the like to be given houses for free?

Seems very unfair to me.

The_White_Horse

there was something on Radio 4 yesterday about the passport offices in Ireland being under seige from people desperate to move away - to USA or australia

Lotus-eater

Getting rid of all those houses won't hurt the average house prices though. In fact it may make them all pick up, Which you have to suppose, will make the general feelgood factor in Ireland pick up too. If I was in charge, I'd be working on that.

Generali

Lotus-eater wrote: »

Getting rid of all those houses won't hurt the average house prices though. In fact it may make them all pick up, Which you have to suppose, will make the general feelgood factor in Ireland pick up too. If I was in charge, I'd be working on that.

Think about the links that normally make house prices rise:

Economy is going well => people willing to pay a bit more for a house =>house prices rising

So we can apply some logic here: house prices rise as a result of the economy doing well. We can reverse things and apply false logic (IMO) too: the economy does well as a result of house prices rising:

house prices rising => people willing to pay a bit more for a house =>
Economy is going well


So what to do? Well if you subscribe to the latter creed then you'd try to prop up the housing market in order to ensure the economy remains active. If the former then keeping the economy going is the concern.

Having a thriving economy is the thing, not a particular sector of the economy thriving.

shane42

virtualy all irish new builds need knocking down , the quality is comical.