housing supply – The Irish Economy

Albert Saiz, a leading urban economist based at MIT, will be giving a special seminar next Monday (June 9th) at 3.30pm, hosted by the Department of Economics at TCD. The talk, which will take place in the IIIS Seminar Room, top floor of the Arts Building in Trinity College Dublin, is entitled: “Immigrant Locations and Native Residential Preferences in Spain: New Ghettos?” An abstract is given below.

Albert is also giving the keynote the following morning (Tuesday 10th) at a workshop hosted by the Policy Institute at TCD on the latest Irish housing market crisis, this time the lack of supply. The event is aimed at policy-makers and other decision-makers in the housing sector. As capacity is limited, if you’re interested in attending, please send me an email (firstname.surname@tcd.ie).

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Immigrant Locations and Native Residential Preferences in Spain: New Ghettos?

Abstract: In research we are studying the impact of immigration on native residential mobility in a European context. Before the economic crisis, Spain received an inflow of immigrants roughly equivalent to ten percent of the population in only ten years. We have obtained a massive data-set from the national registry, or Padron – everyone is required by law to register their address after moving to new dwellings. Importantly, all immigrants in Spain need to be inscribed in this municipal registry in order to be eligible for visas, and illegal immigrants can also register. We can identify the exact geo-location of the place of residence for each individual registered in the country – about 45 million- from 1999 to 2008. With this information, we study the residential responses of natives at the very micro level –including across buildings. We are finding fascinating patterns that suggest that immigration and the consequent white-flight that engendered in central cities greatly spurred suburbanization in the larger metropolises.

There is quite a bit of momentum currently – and thankfully, given the severity of the housing crisis – in the whole area of housing, rising prices and rents, and the lack of supply in Ireland’s urban centres. I had thought pretty much everyone involved was agreed that a lack of supply was indeed the root cause of rapidly rising rents and prices.

Hence my despair at reading this article in today’s Irish independent: Easy mortgages for first-time buyers are on the way. Shifting out demand to encourage supply seems to me to be like adding fuel to the fire in the hope that the fire brigade are more likely to turn up. The losers will be the very people the policy aims to help, first-time buyers who will be given more credit to bid against each other.

What is particularly disheartening is that it comes so soon after Ireland tried this before and it went so spectacularly wrong – while house price growth from 1995-2001 was driven by a combination of factors (including incomes growing faster than supply), house price growth 2001-2007 was driven almost exclusively by easy credit and that was where the damage was done.

As per last night’s Prime Time, if you want housing to be affordable, increase supply – it’s no more complicated than that. If supply is not forthcoming, we need to understand why, rather than push the price of housing further up. My suspicion is the current lack of supply is down to a complicated and overly prescriptive system of planning and building controls, coupled with an array of developer contributions and levies which shift the burden from existing to new residents. This could be replaced with a unified land use policy and a simple land value tax.

As for policy in relation to loan-to-value, pick a number (like 80%) as the maximum loan-to-value for anyone and stick with it. That way at least, policy won’t be responsible for turning a house price upswing into another bubble.