Silicon Valley executives are more prone to spouting aspirational nonsense about revolutions than the cast of Les Misérables. The latest disruptions supposedly coming our way are revolutions in travel and housing, according to Airbnb's co-founder Brian Chesky. Apparently oblivious – or determinedly ignoring – the whole net-zero-by-2050 thing, he declared: "People aren't just travelling on Airbnb, they're now living on Airbnb." Thanks to Zoom, he said, "travel, life, and work are blurring together again."
The data point informing this alarming declaration is that one in five bookings on Airbnb are for 28 days or longer, which is currently its fastest growing segment. He didn’t say if this is because all the other segments have collapsed. Now, he announced, “people can work from many homes if they want.”
In Ireland and across swathes of the globe, the young are unable to access secure, affordable long-term housing
The idea that you can do your job from an apartment in Tenerife or Croatia has some appeal, especially in the dark days of an Irish November. And for the privileged employees of a few companies – tech companies, mainly – it seems to already be happening.
Excited babble about digital nomads hopping on planes to escape winter aside, the truth is more prosaic. If people are working from "many homes", it's often because they can't afford one home. In Ireland and across swathes of the globe, the young are unable to access secure, affordable long-term housing. The European Central Bank (ECB) warned on Friday that house prices across the EU increased 7.3 per cent year on year in the second quarter. Rents are soaring too in many cities. Housing has become a political issue in countries from Germany – where the leader of one union called rent "the 21st-century equivalent of the bread price" – to South Korea, Canada, China, Sweden and the US, where nominal house prices are 30 per cent above previous peaks. There's a particular irony in Airbnb – which, maybe unfairly, has become a lightning rod for anger about housing – apparently offering a "solution" to the crisis. But it isn't the first to rebrand housing insecurity as an aspirational lifestyle choice.
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‘Generational quirk’
In Ireland, we're very familiar with attempts to position declining rates of home ownership among the young as just a natural societal evolution: a generational quirk of one segment of society, or the sensible pension plan of another, or even the personal failure of a third. Two years ago, the then minister for housing Eoghan Murphy attempted to sell paying €1,300 a month to live in a small room and share a kitchen with 40 others as "exciting", like living in a "trendy hotel". Only last month, Leo Varadkar suggested we should "balance that one person's rent is another person's income" – as though the right to a secure home is somehow equivalent to the right to earn a bit of cash on the side.
Now, on-demand housing is being sold to us as the inevitable next step in the gig economy. Welcome to life as a twenty- or thirtysomething in 2021, where not only can you have a zero-hours job, you get to have a precarious home too.
The build-to-let developments which do have availability are so eye-wateringly expensive even Government Ministers would baulk at them
People aren’t buying it – not in Ireland, and not in other countries. They mostly don’t want to “live on Airbnb”, or in a co-living development, no matter how nice the gym. Most adults, whatever their age, want stability and independence. Most people just want a home they don’t have to think about every hour of every day.
The hundreds of thousands of mostly young Irish people currently worrying these are luxuries they’ll never have are not asking themselves which country they should spend January in. They’re wondering which one they should emigrate to. Or they’re thinking about whether they’ll be able to move out of their parents’ home before they turn 40, or get off their friend’s couch by the start of the next college semester. Or they’re preoccupied by what a missed call from their landlord might mean. Or they’re reading about how they’ll need to earn €88,387 to afford an average home next year. They don’t need a mortgage calculator to figure out that no amount of forsaken avocados will close that financial gap. Or they’re terrified they’re going to have to raise their children in a hotel room. Or they’re sad that they may never be able to have children at all.
No easy solutions
There are no quick or easy solutions to the housing crisis, which is not a uniquely Irish phenomenon. But the policies of successive Irish governments have certainly helped the crisis along. Presumably no one sat down and decided – to take one recent example – that the way to tackle Dublin’s shortage of rental accommodation would be to outsource some of the city’s social housing needs to a UK arms manufacturer.
But government policies – or the failure of them – created the conditions where buying up a handful of houses in Dublin and renting them back to the council strikes international pension funds as an easy way to make a few quid. Thanks to government policies, Dublin City Council will give €73.8 million to private companies next year to lease more of those houses, instead of using the money to get on with buying or building them itself. Meanwhile, the build-to-let developments which do have availability in Dublin are so eye-wateringly expensive – rents at apartments in Capital Dock start from €3,300 – even Government Ministers would baulk at them. The European Central Bank warned on Friday that this kind of speculation – investors taking greater risks in their search for yield – has left parts of the property market "increasingly susceptible to corrections".
If there's a revolution coming, it's not going to feature digital nomads working from home in a beach shack in Goa. Do you hear the people sing? They're singing the song of angry men and women who've just read the latest Daft.ie rental report.