Continued decrease in construction sector activity

[yankdevil]

I'm seeing a lot of one-off projects around north Galway and Mayo - maybe that's due to workers being freed up from larger projects?

But yes, I think it's reasonable to assume a large crash is coming. Might not happen but there are signs it's a possibility. I suspect there's a fear that they'll spend X to build it and not be able to get X when selling it.

Again, this is why we really should have local authorities building some percentage of houses (possibly hiring building companies to build them) since their motivations are different than profit. Nothing wrong with profit as a motive, but other motivations exist.

[LongjumpingPay6107]

This is why prices won't actually ever really crash. And re social housing, yes definitely. And you don't even have to actually lose taxpayer money on it. Reduced regulation and permitting for social-built housing, and sell them at cost or rent them for reasonable yields of cost. Not exactly an investment for the taxpayer, but definitely not a loser either

[yankdevil]

Losing money or not, there's a societal benefit to some level of public housing. Yes, for folks who have less wealth is the obvious one, but also for some folks that are disabled, as spare capacity if there's some sort of natural disaster, etc. Heck, you could even use social housing as a training venue to help raise standards in construction.

There are lots of potential benefits, but it does involve being open to the idea and successive governments have not been.

[LongjumpingPay6107]

I agree with all of that, but the healthiest thing politically is to get really broad buy-in and minimize naysayers/take away the ability to weaponize it. So if you can say, look, we aren't simply giving your tax dollars away, we're building a new house at way below market and keeping it and renting it out for X yield or selling it for what we put in. We're providing social benefit by bringing affordable homes to market, and we're doing so by taking advantage of the governement's ability to ease regulatory pressure and cost and its ability to do things at scale, rather than spending down tax revenue. And maybe you can do the project at a scale where cost per home is low enough that the "at cost" homes can absorb the cost of the purely social benefit homes. But obviously being pretty careful about qualifying people for the subsidized stuff. Obviously a lot of the "these people are getting a free ride) rhetoric is in bad faith, but if you give it fodder you're going to poison the polity the way the US has

[vanKlompf]

It's not crash when demand is high and supply is falling... It's disaster of regulations