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Oct 18Liked by Michael Byrne

“Affordability challenges, it seems, are concentrated among middle-income, market-price renters, who on average pay more for housing than either mortgaged households or supported renters, and who spend more on housing costs than their European peers.”

This is dead right.

There is a kind of middle-income trap where your income is too low to allow you to buy but too high for you to qualify you for housing supports. You’re stuck in the PRS and it’s particularly pronounced in and around Dublin.

Maybe I am cynical but a lot of people in Ireland’s NGOs and media are in this cohort which is why it gets a lot of bandwidth .

It’s not clear whether the above cohort is stuck renting for life or whether it’s just a lifecycle phase, perhaps a prolonged one. You would really need good longitudinal analysis for this and no one carries it out to my knowledge.

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