{"id":780,"date":"2023-08-25T11:48:38","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/?p=780"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:48:38","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:48:38","slug":"built-to-rent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2023\/08\/25\/built-to-rent\/","title":{"rendered":"Built to Rent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

First Glance
<\/strong>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 \u20ac700\/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 \u201cpurpose built, luxury<\/em> student accommodation\u201d like Kavanagh Court where I spent my first year paying \u20ac1,080\/mo for a tiny en-suite and a shared kitchen. It honestly makes me miss Brooklyn real estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Double Take
<\/strong>As I quickly learned, Ireland is in the midst of a housing crisis. If I had<\/em> attempted to find housing myself I might have paid even more, fallen for a scam<\/a>, or gotten packed into a bunk filled bar<\/a> without as much as a hot plate for \u20ac600\/mo. I feel incredibly lucky this year to have found a nice four-bedroom house with other international folks for \u20ac900\/mo. Lucky. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s very helpful Twitter thread,<\/a> the crash led a bunch of property speculators to go bankrupt, and their land was absorbed by the government. Ireland\u2019s 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 \u201cbuilt-to-rent housing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019re owned cooperatively, or maybe things are uneven with some apartments owned by their occupants and others rented out. \u201cBuilt-to-rent,\u201d 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 \u201ctwodios\u201d where, according to property developer Savills<\/a>, \u201ccompact personal space is compensated for by extensive communal space.\u201d And despite the less-than-ideal room size, built-to-rent accommodation is considered luxury, with a standard \u201ctwodio\u201d priced generally around \u20ac2,500.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The reason these corner-cutting-luxury-digs haven\u2019t been thrown out in favor of normal affordable housing is that Dublin provides a built-in market for built-to-rent: the \u201cyoung and increasingly international mobile workers\u201d<\/a> brought to Ireland by multinational tech corporations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you weren\u2019t previously aware, essentially every multinational company\u2014Facebook, Microsoft, Accenture, Medtronic, Salesforce, Google, TikTok, etc\u2014is 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\u2019 rent. Essentially, built-to-rent housing isn\u2019t 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 \u201cinvestments\u201d these companies supposedly make in the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hindsight
<\/strong>Built-to-rent isn\u2019t the only driver of Ireland\u2019s 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 \u201cSalesforce house\u201d 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<\/a>. 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\u2019s multinational monarchs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First GlanceWhen 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… Continue reading Built to Rent<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[21,19,30],"class_list":["post-780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-architecture","tag-ireland","tag-money","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}