Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Publication
    Social housing's role in the Irish property boom and bust
    (UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, 2016-11-21) ;
    This paper argues, however, that the economic role of social housing has been fundamentally transformed over recent decades. The nature of this transformation plays an important part in understanding Ireland’s property boom and bust, and in understanding the nature of the current crisis in t he social housing sector. As elsewhere, the crisis commenced following the bursting of a pr operty bubble in 2007, but worsened considerably with the global financial cri sis the following year and resulted in the Irish government nationalising almost the entir e banking system in 2009 and negotiating an emergency loan from the European Uni on and the IMF to fund public spending and the bank bailout in 2010.
      417
  • Publication
    Housing Market Volatility,Stability and Social Rented Housing: comparing Austria and Ireland during the global financial crisis
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2017-02-26) ;
    Since the 1970s the prevalence and duration of housing market booms has increased in developed countries as has the busts which followed them. These developments and particularly their occurrence in a large number of countries simultaneously were key contributors to the global financial crisis of 2008. The literature on this crisis has focused primarily on the role of mortgage markets and home-ownership in driving housing booms and busts and also on the countries which have experienced the strongest busts, particularly in the English-speaking world. Despite the large number of social rented dwellings in Western Europe, the role of this sector has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper aims to address these omissions by the interaction of social housing and the housing market in Ireland, which experienced a specular housing market boom in the 1990s and strong bust in the 2000s and Austria which has a long tradition of housing market stability. It argues that social housing played a central but contrasting role shaping the housing market dynamics in these two countries. In Ireland social housing was pro-cyclical – it accelerated the housing market boom and intensified the bust - whereas Austrian social housing had a counter cyclical impact on the housing market and thereby helped to promote price stability. These outcomes were partially reflected in the different social housing policy regimes in use in these countries - Austria represents a 'unitary' and Ireland a 'dualist' housing regime in housing regime in Kemeny's (1995) typology. In addition, the sources of finance for social housing and the use of demand-side or supply-side subsidies were also important drivers of these contrasting outcomes.
      690
  • Publication
    Asset Price Keynesianism, Regional Imbalances and the Irish and Spanish Housing Booms and Busts
    (UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, 2015-07-20) ;
    Ireland and Spain were amongst the European countries which experienced the most severe economic and fiscal problems following the global financial crisis. The proximate causes of these economic crashes have been explored in-depth by researchers and governments, who have highlighted strong parallels between the policy, regulatory and economic factors which underpinned them. In both countries residential property price inflation increased dramatically from the late 1990s driven by increased availability of cheap mortgages but unusually was accompanied by marked growth in new house building. Thus, following the international credit crunch in 2008, a simultaneous contraction in both mortgage credit and house building occurred in Ireland and Spain, which precipitated a marked knock-on decline in the employment, tax revenue and consumer spending which the housing boom had underpinned. This paper argues that the Irish and Spanish housing booms and busts are similar not just in terms of scale and proximate causes but also in terms of fundamental causes. In both countries the housing boom/bust cycle was underpinned by a suite of macroeconomic policies which aimed to use asset price growth to underpin rising demand and economic growth, or in other words achieve what Robert Brenner (2006) terms 'asset-price Keynesianism'. This approach was particularly attractive to the Irish and Spanish governments because it enabled them to resolve historical legacies of industrial underdevelopment and regional imbalances by generating construction jobs in underdeveloped areas. As a result of the latter, local/regional governments in both countries played a key role in facilitating the implementation of this policy.
      888
  • Publication
    Tenure Mixing to Combat Public Housing Stigmatization: external benefits, internal challenges and contextual influences in three Dublin neighbourhoods
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2018-01-08) ; ;
    Combatting stigma in public housing is a key concern among policy makers in the Republic of Ireland and internationally and this paper critically assesses the mechanism most commonly employed to achieve this – ‘income mixing’ or ‘poverty deconcentration’ of public rented neighbourhoods by encouraging households with a wider mix of incomes to live there. This is most commonly achieved by ‘tenure mixing’ - providing private housing alongside public housing on the grounds that occupants of the former tenure tend to have higher incomes than occupants of the latter. To do this the paper draws together empirical research on three public housing neighbourhoods in Dublin - Ireland’s capital and largest city - and insights from the critical geography and urban studies literature, to critically examine the effectiveness of tenure mixing as a public housing destigmatizing tool. The analysis presented here demonstrates that tenure mixing often produces contradictory results – in terms of reduced external stigma but heightened internal or within neighbourhood stigmatization. It links these outcomes to the policy and socio-economic contextual factors which we argue which play a central but underappreciated role in shaping the implementation of tenure mixing and its impact on public housing stigmatization.
      1525