Al, do you have the remotest idea of how many vacant new estates - not houses but whole new estates - there are here? And derelict sites of unfinished ones, where the half-constructed grey shells are rotting away in the weather and they're not even built yet? Most of this was based on speculation and greed, financed by credit & debt and not on the needs of the people. Many of whom now can't afford to buy anywhere because they're (a) out of work (b) taxed and levied to death (c) being choked by killer mortgages on properties no longer valued at what they paid for them (d) all of the above, further hiroshima'd by the budget we've just had, which pretty much axed all relief on house-buying. And NO home is "nice" when it is windowless and open to the weather on one side.
A house is only worth what the market will pay for it. We currently have a ferocious oversupply of housing per capita head of population - I can't remember what the surplus-to-requirement percentage was cited at, but it's phenomenal. Getting to the village we live in means driving miles down a narrowish, pretty-but-not-very-good road (making travelling to work difficult & expensive) and like everywhere else, we have not one but two abandoned "ghost" estates plus an additional terrace of gaping, frontless grey concrete shells behind Harris fencing, which are never going to be finished (they ran out of money) and have been sitting there for two years, slowly being destroyed by the damp and salty sea air. Who did they think they were going to sell these to?
The cost of commuting to a job - never mind the carbon footprint and the employment situation - alone would be crippling. And there's certainly no work here. Two of the village's three pubs have now shut, ditto a food shop. And what tourist wants to pay money to travel, only to look at ugly jagged concrete and For-Sale signs?
All these houses weren't build for people to live in - that's a by-product. They were built to make money. By borrowing. From funds that weren't there. Which. We. Are. Now. All. Paying. For. Even those hundreds of thousands of us who never got into debt, never lent money or speculated, worked hard and paid all their taxes & bills on time. But the people who are going to pay the worst are the kids, whose future has been sold out from under them.
Friend of mine has a son who's just done his Leaving Cert (equivalent of A-Levels/SAT's). I asked him what the boy wanted to do. He said that Plan A was to go into the Gardai (police force). But they're hugely oversubscribed with applicants already and not that easy to get into, I said, what's plan B?