I don't know about Ireland, but in UK they are known for buying huge amount of land getting all the grants and permits for building say, 10k houses, then they build ~500 houses a year, because if they built more it would crash the price. So now there is no land to buy and build on by yourself, and developers build fewer houses than they theoretically could to keep the prices high. Not to mention absolutely abysmal quality of newbuilds at every price level, and the smallest(by area) size of newbuilds anywhere in Europe - the average new house in the UK is smaller than an average flat in most of EU. And of course there are only really 3 big companies which have completely strong armed the market so you either buy from them, or pay 4x the price from a "boutique" developer just so your walls aren't made out of cardboard.
Yeah this is the landbanking problem. The solution is something like a land value tax which penalizes this kind of speculation and development-throttling. In fact there was a great article about that I just posted: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-and-the-liber...
Successive Ministers for Housing have dramatically under-built social housing, every year, for decades. This, while a "housing emergency" has been recognised for near as long.
These failures are used to justify things like the HAP scheme, which subsidize landlords directly. If this seems stupid - you're right. Many have pointed this out, but the politicians and landlords and developers responsible don't see any issue.
We sometimes subsidize developers to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions, just so we can rent the future property off of them, at above market rate, for decades. And we give it back afterward!
We allow developers to lobby the Government on policies that will make housing less affordable for young people.
Sometimes we just straight up give them €150,000 taxpayer cash per unit, to build "unprofitable" €450,000 units.
All this, while we have all time high homelessness rates, with hundreds of thousands more Irish adults living on friends couches.... While State homelessness organizations accuse charities who question this of "virtue signalling".
Even our constructions materials companies are staggeringly corrupt, eg, CRH (https://villagemagazine.ie/a-history-of-scandal/). They're widely known among Irish people to be criminal, and have been for a long time. See the mica blocks scandal for another example. Yet somehow they all keep getting lucrative contracts. No one is ever punished. And every time there's a big documentary planned about their various mafia type scams, it gets pulled. "Orders from up top".
