First Glance
When I first moved to Dublin almost two years ago I was hopeful about housing. Sure, I had to take out a student loan to afford living abroad while I got my masters degree, but I was certain that Dublin rent would be a little more affordable than New York. I was wrong. Though on-campus housing is available from €700/mo, the college only has around 1,800 beds available to accommodate its 15,000+ undergraduate and postgraduate students. To make up the difference, the college contracts with private companies that operate “purpose built, luxury student accommodation” like Kavanagh Court where I spent my first year paying €1,080/mo for a tiny en-suite and a shared kitchen. It honestly makes me miss Brooklyn real estate.
Double Take
As I quickly learned, Ireland is in the midst of a housing crisis. If I had attempted to find housing myself I might have paid even more, fallen for a scam, or gotten packed into a bunk filled bar without as much as a hot plate for €600/mo. I feel incredibly lucky this year to have found a nice four-bedroom house with other international folks for €900/mo. Lucky.
The Irish housing crisis has its roots in the 2008 crash which hit the island and its property market harder than almost anywhere else. According to Rob Curley’s very helpful Twitter thread, the crash led a bunch of property speculators to go bankrupt, and their land was absorbed by the government. Ireland’s center-left neoliberal government then sold most of this land back to property speculators for peanuts. The speculators were then poised and ready to take advantage of a lucrative new loophole called “built-to-rent housing.”
Things can be broken down several ways in a normal apartment building. Maybe a landlord owns the whole building and rents out the units, maybe they’re owned cooperatively, or maybe things are uneven with some apartments owned by their occupants and others rented out. “Built-to-rent,” which started in London and subsequently spread across the sea, incorporates various shared amenities into the building like a gym, rooftop terrace, or coworking space, meaning a single management company rents out the rooms and runs all its communal spaces. The profitable loophole within Irish housing codes is that these extra amenities can be traded for lower design standards like bedroom area or unit density. This gives rise to dystopian concepts like “twodios” where, according to property developer Savills, “compact personal space is compensated for by extensive communal space.” And despite the less-than-ideal room size, built-to-rent accommodation is considered luxury, with a standard “twodio” priced generally around €2,500.
The reason these corner-cutting-luxury-digs haven’t been thrown out in favor of normal affordable housing is that Dublin provides a built-in market for built-to-rent: the “young and increasingly international mobile workers” brought to Ireland by multinational tech corporations.
If you weren’t previously aware, essentially every multinational company—Facebook, Microsoft, Accenture, Medtronic, Salesforce, Google, TikTok, etc—is headquartered in Dublin. Ireland is a tax haven, charging very little to foreign corporations who operate here, so it is advantageous for them to locate their offices and their workforce in the country. My roommate is a great example: they work for Microsoft and conduct business exclusively in the Netherlands, but they live and work in Ireland because it saves Microsoft tax money. Multinationals are eager to get their employees on the island and will offer huge relocation packages, set up housing in advance, and even cover months of their employees’ rent. Essentially, built-to-rent housing isn’t meant to be paid for by Dubliners or even human beings, but by employers. Built-to-rent is real estate speculation re-tooled to soak up some of the extra cash multinationals throw around as a result of their excessive tax breaks, the “investments” these companies supposedly make in the island.
Hindsight
Built-to-rent isn’t the only driver of Ireland’s housing crisis but it is indicative of the problems that come from a loosely regulated housing market where most major decisions are made by or in cooperation with private finance. Every direction you turn you find multinational profiteering: my current apartment used to be a “Salesforce house” before Covid, where the company would house its employees when they first came to Dublin. Uninest, the Dubai-based owner of my former student accommodation, recently merged with three other foreign student housing companies to form the US-based Yugo. At this point, housing in Dublin is so detached from reality that accommodation of the human beings who live here is simply too much of an inconvenience for Ireland’s multinational monarchs.