Where are 30-somethings supposed to live?

There is one factor successive governments don’t seem to have taken into account in planning for Ireland’s housing needs. Actually, there’s significantly more than one factor.

Some, such as the increase in building costs as a result of the pandemic, which will push up new house prices, couldn't have been predicted. Nor could the effect of the longest lockdown in Europe on plans to deliver 33,000 new houses annually.

But the one I'm referring to has been barrelling down the tracks at us since the 1990s. Let's call it the Virgin Megastore effect.

To understand its impact you need to go back to 1993, which was the year I started college in Dublin, and the last year I ever lived at home with my parents. It was also, conveniently for the Leaving Cert class of 1993, the year the law restricting the sale of condoms was lifted, following a case against Irish Family Planning Association which had been selling them in Virgin Megastore on Aston Quay in Dublin.

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For those of us who dipped our toes into adult life in the late 1990s, the gap between leaving home and buying a home was a short, enjoyable stint

The Virgin Megastore episode didn’t launch Ireland’s sexual revolution, but it came to symbolise the arrival of a moment of much greater social freedom. The impact of that freedom was already being felt in marriage trends in the 1990s, and ultimately is shaping current housing demands. In 1979, the average age of men getting married was 26.5; for women it was 24.

In 2009, the country by now awash with condoms, men were 34 getting married, and women were 32. By 2019, it was nearly 37 for men, 34 for women. Similar trends are being seen in first-time parenthood, and people entering same sex-marriages are typically older again.

If these patterns were to continue, today’s primary school children could end up being single until they are nearly 40, or for almost half their lives. What used to be an in-between stage of adulthood – too grown up to be still in the family home, not quite grown up enough for the property ladder – is no longer a brief interlude, but an entire act.

Short stint

For those of us who dipped our toes into adult life in the late 1990s, the gap between leaving home and buying a home was a short, enjoyable stint, spent in shared flats or bedsits in sprawling rundown period houses, or newer city-centre apartments in what were then edgier locations. It was enjoyable partly because it was short. When the day came that we had enough or wanting something more permanent – generally around the time of our 30th birthday – we strolled into a broker’s office and emerged with a mortgage.

For today's young professionals, that period is neither brief nor pleasurable, as they have made abundantly clear in the pages of this newspaper and elsewhere in recent weeks. The decent flats in slightly shabby period homes are mostly gone, reclaimed on a tide of Farrow and Ball paint.

The rental properties that have come along in their place are overpriced and designed for short-term living. They can forget about buying, too. Lending rules have tightened, so that even the mortgages available to people on good incomes are frequently hopelessly inadequate to the task of securing a home.

Knowing you did nicely out of the property market is not much solace when your adult children are still rattling around the house in their 30s

The default housing model for successive governments – the suburban three-bed semi with a garden front and back – is out of reach or just unsuitable for many. It’s true there are more apartments than houses being built – 26,000 apartments were granted permission last year, compared with 18,000 houses. But these are reliant on financing by investment funds and generally designed as build-to-let.

This leaves one critical question the Government needs to answer. Where are 30-somethings supposed to live? Are they meant to continue renting overpriced apartments, moving every two to three years indefinitely? That seems to pretty much be the extent of the plan.

Developers

Recent utterances suggest the Government sees "individual household purchasers" as the kind of people who buy nice three-bed semis in the suburbs, settle down, start a family and hopefully vote Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. People who would like to buy an apartment don't appear to factor at all.

The Cabinet was warned against extending the new, 10 per cent stamp duty rate on bulk purchases of houses to apartment developments in case private developers scarpered as a result. Never mind scaring them off; the really terrifying thought is that we might be entirely beholden to them forever.

Much of the focus in the run-up to the last general election was on the likely voting intentions of Generation Rent, who can make the dubious claim to being the first to have lower living standards than their parents, according to ESRI research. But the future voting trends of those relatively fortunate parents may be even more interesting.

Knowing you did nicely out of the property market is not much solace when your adult children are still rattling around the house in their 30s. Some of those wealthy older parents are now doling out the cash to help their children get on the property ladder, another factor skewing the market. But what happens if the bank of mum and dad is low on lending capacity?

The scientific research on wellbeing shows that having a child makes you happier for about two years, before your levels of contentment revert to previous levels. By their 60s and 70s, parents tend to be happier overall than non-parents – with one important caveat. "Provided the children have left home," says Prof Brendan Kelly of Trinity College. Adult children at home or dependent "is not good for the wellbeing of older adults. The research on this is very clear." So too, you might say, are the implications for a Government that doesn't start coming up with creative solutions soon.