There’s no place like home ... if you can afford one

Michael Wolsey

AUSTRALIAN schools have been recruiting Irish teachers and Australian hospitals have been luring Irish doctors and nurses.

The recruits, or potential recruits, pop up regularly on television and radio to explain the attraction of life Down Under. Better weather, some say. Better pay, claim others. The one factor they nearly all agree on is housing.

Because, they say, nobody can afford to buy a house near Dublin and there are none to lease, even if you have enough money to meet the exorbitant rents. So sunny Sydney and balmy Brisbane seem very appealing. But before you take that big step, there is something you should consider.

If housing is the main issue that troubles your young, welleducated mind, you should read the 2022-2023 report of Australia’s National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation.

It warns that Australia’s “painful rental crisis “ is going to get worse. Why? Because of “a shortage in supply of new houses and units caused by costs and constraints in construction.” Sound familiar? Housing is particularly hard to find in Sydney. “Rents are at record highs, buyers are seeing historically low listings, and increased migration is squeezing the market,” reports Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC. It says rents have increased by 20 per cent since January 2020.

So maybe Australia is not the land of milk and honey. How about New Zealand? It is only a short(ish) hop to that nation of civilised constraint. Sadly, you’ll find it shares its neighbour’s problems.

“New Zealand has some of the least affordable housing in the developed world,” according to the housing charity, Habitat for Humanity.

“As a result of unaffordable housing, overcrowding issues and a poor housing stock,

300,000 New Zealand families are living in unacceptable housing conditions,” it reports. “Rents and house prices in New Zealand have increased over the past twenty years at a much faster rate than household incomes.”

Oh dear, trouble in paradise. Would-be emigrants might look nearer home but they will find similar problems.

Le Monde reports that in Paris land reserves are running out and the French capital is trying, without much success, to convert offices, empty schools and garages into social and affordable homes .

A study of 200 cities around the world found 90% of them unaffordable to live in, according to a Euronews report on the situation in Germany.

“Even in this painfully-pricey context, Berlin’s housing crisis is especially acute,” it says In recent years, Berlin has consistently registered some of the fastest-rising housing prices in the world, Euronews says. “Rents doubled from 2009 to 2019 and haven’t stopped climbing.”

Portugal gets a good press these days as a country that shrugged off poverty and embraced technology. But prosperity brings its own problems and the threat of homelessness is one of them.

A report from Lisbon by the Associated Press (AP) personalised the issue, focusing on the plight of Georgina Simoes, a 57-year-old nursing home worker who no longer earns enough money to afford a place to live.

She earns less than €800 a month, as do about a quarter of the country’s workforce. For the last decade, she got by because she had been paying just €300 a month for her one-bedroom apartment in what AP calls “an undistinguished Lisbon neighbourhood”.

Now, with rents soaring in the capital, her landlord is evicting her.

AP says Simoes and many others, increasingly including the middle class, are being priced out of Portugal’s property market by rising rents, surging home prices and climbing mortgage rates, fueled by factors including an influx of foreign investors and tourists seeking short-term rentals.

Now where have you heard all that before?

In London maybe, where it is said that only the rich can afford housing and the exodus of working class families has led to the closure of primary schools in some areas.

Social commentator Janice Turner lamented the trend in her column in The Times. She wrote: “The city is filling up with young people who live in flat shares at astronomical rents which private landlords can jack up every year. “

The statistics everywhere paint a depressing picture and maybe not an entirely accurate one, for there are ordinary people with ordinary incomes renting and buying homes in all these cities as, indeed, there are in Dublin.

Our capital’s housing market isn’t working well, but we’re not the world’s worst.

You wouldn’t always think that, though, if you follow the media, social or traditional. The one thing we really excel at nowadays is moaning.