#ghost estates

Hello, friends! Until recently, I had no idea there were even McMansions in Ireland. I admit, I am not an expert on Irish architecture in the least, so, Irish compatriots, feel free to correct any mistakes I make. I’m also proud to say that this post is completely free of jokes about Bono. 

Irish McMansions (called “muck mansions” there) are particularly interesting because of their links to Irish economic and housing phenomena, as explained below.

The “Celtic Tiger”

During a period lasting from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the Irish GDP growth rate ranged between 7.8 and 11.5% (slowing to 4.4 - 6.5% in 2001-2007). This was known as the “Celtic Tiger” era. 

Reasons for this growth are as follows:

Low corporate tax rate and industrial subsidies drew foreign companies (especially tech companies such as Dell) to Ireland.

These corporate taxes favored non-tradable goods and services such as construction projects.

Low European Central Bank interest rates led to to inexpensive borrowing by Irish banks. 

Poor supervision and regulation of banking activities led to the growth of illicit trading and hidden loans, resulting in a controversy that ousted the director of the Anglo Irish Bank in 2008. 

The Housing Bubble

Table Source: Wikipedia Data Source

During the Celtic Tiger era, construction employed a large number of unskilled laborers. From 2000-2006, housing prices doubled as tax incentives drove speculative development, especially in the areas immediately surrounding Dublin. 

In 2008, foreign borrowings by Irish banks reached €110 billion. Most of this money was borrowed to fund speculative building projects that wouldn’t go on the market for a considerable amount of time (because, well, speculation.) This led to an oversupply of houses, causing (in simplistic terms) a fall in demand. 

As a result, house prices deflated and projects were left unfinished, unoccupied, or abandoned. Other contributing roles to the housing crisis were subprime mortgages similar to the US, and a disproportionate percentage of the population (12.5%) being employed in the construction industry. When the bubble burst, this same population became unemployed.

“Ghost Estates”

The National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis defines a ghost estate as developments of "ten or more houses where 50% of the properties are either vacant or under-construction". 

Ghost Estate in County Wexford, 2012. Public Domain.

As prices inflated in Dublin, tax incentives were offered to build heavily in rural areas outside of the city limits, leading to enormous speculation and development. In the aftermath of the 2008 collapse, bankrupt developers who had borrowed heavily from foreign and domestic banks alike began to abandon housing starts. 

In 2010, there were 300,000 vacant homes in 621 ghost estates. By 2015, these numbers, through efforts of the Irish government, were cut by 75%.

What is so upsetting about the ghost estates is that they were built mostly in rural communities with little economic development or access to infrastructure such as hospitals and schools. Despite the large homeless population in Ireland, the estates cannot be adapted for reuse as affordable housing stock because they are too far from employment, education, and health care. In addition, Ireland imports the majority of its fossil fuels from foreign agents, and as such, the cost of commuting or owning a car is much higher than in other countries, thus leaving these communities stranded. 

The Ugliest Muck Mansions in Ireland

Throughout the week, I searched through over 200 pages of Irish real estate sites in order to really get an idea of what a Muck Mansion looks like. Often, they look rather similar to a McMansion, as we will see. 

County Kerry

It turns out that even Ireland cannot escape the phenomenon that is the Beigehaus. I’m quite partial to the random bench on the right, helplessly trying to conceal the fact that the developer forgot a window. 

Dude, even if you EQ the heck out of everything below 500Hz, it DOESN’T EVEN MATTER BECAUSE YOU’RE PLAYING YOUR MUSIC THROUGH YOUR TINY MACBOOK SPEAKERS. Acoustics rage! 

How that mass with the shed roof got there is one of Ireland’s greatest mysteries. 

County Louth

To be fair, munch_the_scream.jpg is how I feel pretty much all the time these days. 

County Waterford

(Obligatory Rest in Peace beloved postmodern dining hall from my alma mater. #GoneButNotForgotten)

Addendum: the detached garage is def a mythic rare McMansion Hell trading card. 

County Offaly

What an emotional transatlantic journey that turret must have made. Rest easy, brave soul.

County Clare

Persian architecture reference: The building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bagh-e Melli (The National Garden, Tehran, Iran)

Photo by blondinrikard (CC-BY-2.0)

There’s precedence for everything, friends!

County Cork

If you type two spaces after a period you are wrong. Don’t send me emails defending yourself. This is a religious belief of mine and it will not change as long as I walk this earth. 

Malahide, County Dublin

Someone write a sick guitar solo for that sick roofline. 

County Dublin

It wouldn’t be MMH without at least 1 one-liner. Also, has anyone done a The Big Short x Lord of the Rings Crossover fic yet? I’d 10,000% read that. 

County Silgo

This could equally be in New Jersey for sure. 

And, finally:

County Tipperary 

Standard Wannabe Emo Band Track List™:

The Edge of My World Zombie Love Vampires are Inside of Me Like Blood On My Lips Erase the Sun

Well, that does it for Ireland! I hope you’ve enjoyed this somewhat educational (if depressing) tidbit! Stay tuned for Wednesday’s Certified Dank™ Connecticut special, which I can guarantee will be rather painful. 

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OCTOBER from Ghost Estates’ 2012 stonking eponymous debut album

http://breakingtunes.com/ghostestates

https://twitter.com/ghostestates

WATCH: Music video for 'In Your Dreams' by .@GHOSTESTATES

Dublin based alternative-rock outfit Ghost Estates recently unveiled their latest music video for the single ‘In Your Dreams’.

Created by Second Frame Films, and taking on the grindhouse and exploitation cinema aesthetic of the 70’s, the video for ‘In Your Dreams’ has a grainy grime laden quality to it that stylistically matches…

Neither here nor there – The ‘Nearly Places’

Valérie Anex, Ghost Estates, Ireland

A ‘ghost estate’ refers to an unoccupied housing estate. The term has been used, and seen, widely in Ireland. The ‘Celtic Tiger’ years from 1995 to 2008 saw a huge amount of economic growth in Ireland. This led to a housing surplus, made much worse with the global economic downturn from 2008 on. There were a lot of houses, and nobody willing or able to buy…

CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO SEE INSIDE

Valérie Anex - Ghost Estates published by Les Éditions d'Uqbar (2013)

Over the course of a few weeks, Valérie traveled around the Irish countryside photographing over 200 of these abandoned estates. Abandoned by the building companies who had put them there. All at various stages of completion. The most interesting ones to me are the ones that have been completed. There's something unsettling about an entire estate of brand new homes, left empty. The first thing you do is begin to wonder why? Turns out the answer isn't as (traditionally) scary as you might think.

It wasn't a famine or some sort of natural disaster. It's all about the money. When the economy crashed a few years ago, Ireland housing market was hit pretty hard. Prior to the crash, ambitious developers started building housing estates on the outskirts of cities and towns in hopes of spreading growth beyond city limits but then the proverbial 'shit hit the fan'. New homeowners to-be could no longer afford their new homes. Companies were going bankrupt. Building ceased. Then the land, estates and all, were abandoned.

Ireland now has a new kind of ruin scattered across the countryside. Not the more touristy, classical ruins we're familiar with, but these ghostly estates. The question now seems to be what to do with them? Many of the more unstable, unfinished sites have and will be torn down. The government has spent millions on their demolition and the number of estates still standing appears to be constantly dropping. The suggestion was made to use the completed estates as social housing, but due to their remote locations, that would be disastrous; with no employment opportunities, school, or public transportation it could lead to the creation of segregated ghettos outside the cities.

By Suzanne Daley, NY Times, December 21, 2013

ATHLONE, Ireland--The demolition getting underway here recently was in a housing complex where a 2-year-old, probably chasing a dog, had climbed through a fence last year and drowned in a pool of water behind a dozen partly constructed homes.

John Burke, hired to do the job, marveled that the half-built houses he was about to bulldoze once carried a price tag of more than $450,000. He estimated that he was about to grind about $500,000 worth of abandoned construction into gravel.

"You can't do anything with these houses," he said, as his workers made neat piles of the billboard posters surrounding the complex that once promised idyllic living. "The cost to finish them would be too high. There is no market like that here. There are no jobs. And leaving them unattended is dangerous."

Nothing more typified Ireland's roaring economy a decade ago than its housing market, which saw prices and construction surge. And nothing better illustrates the costs and complexities of cleaning up after the bursting of that bubble than what to do with the thousands of homes that were never finished or if they were occupied, have proved to be substandard.

Other countries with similar problems, like Spain, are also dealing with the issue, but none have gone as far as Ireland, which is aiming to tear down about 40 troubled developments by the end of next year, with more demolitions possible in the future, officials say.

But in a nation that by the government's estimate still has 1,300 so-called ghost estates and possibly hundreds of thousands of unoccupied new homes, the razing program is only nibbling at the problem. The pace of development was so huge in the 2000s that at one point, per capita housing completions were four times as high as in the United States.

During that time, Ireland allowed a kind of honor code building inspection. The result is that many people paid high prices for houses that are fire hazards or sinking in bogs or are built with faulty foundations or missing drainage systems, a problem that is even harder and more expensive to solve.

In nearby Ballymahon, Debbie Cox paid about $255,000 for her semidetached house in 2005. But when it rains hard, the smell of sewage outside her home has sometimes been overwhelming. She gave away her garden furniture because it kept sinking into the mud in her backyard. Her water pipes, buried too close to the surface, have frozen in very cold weather.

Mrs. Cox doubts she could get more than $95,000 for her property today. Most of the other homes in her housing complex, Hawthorn Meadows, about two hours by car from Dublin, have been rented for about $500 a month, while she pays about $1,100 a month just for her mortgage.

Over all, Irish property prices remain nearly 50 percent below their peak in 2007. Even on the outskirts of Dublin it is easy to find housing developments with many vacancies. Most of those who do live in them are renters. In many cases, they have views of half-built houses surrounded by chain-link fences.

Not all the news about Ireland's real estate market is bad. As Ireland becomes the first euro zone country to officially emerge from an international bailout program later this month, experts say that demand for homes is up in Dublin, particularly for houses in certain neighborhoods.

But most of the ghost estates are in western or central counties including Cavan, Donegal, Roscommon, and Longford, often in the countryside where developers received tax incentives to build and where the aftereffects of the economic crisis are still plain to see. Village main streets are full of boarded-up stores. And the local authorities are frustrated.

County Longford, where Mrs. Cox lives, received about $1.4 million from the central government to make repairs in developments like hers last year. But Brian Ross, the county's senior executive engineer who is in charge of troubled housing complexes, says he needs at least 10 times that much to "sort out half of it." The county's jurisdiction is only over the public spaces. And there is no money for issues inside the homes, like a lack of insulation.

An estimated 12,500 homeowners are also dealing with pyrite damage, a substance that creates destabilizing cracks and deep fissures in foundations, walls and ceilings and was widely used during the boom. The bill for the 1,000 worst cases is expected to be about $70 million.

The National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth concluded in 2010 that there were more than 300,000 vacant new homes in Ireland, and 621 housing developments with more than 12 houses that were either unoccupied or not fully built.

More recently, government officials identified about 2,000 unoccupied or incomplete developments. Since then, officials said, remedial measures have reduced the number to about 1,300. About 40,000 households live in them. But even when housing complexes have been identified as unlikely to ever be completed or inhabited, tearing them down may not be so easy. Many of them are tangled in lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings.

At the height of the boom, only 12 percent to 15 percent of new developments were ever visited by inspectors, experts say, compared with 100 percent in the United States and most of Europe. Most experts believe the cost of clearing up the problems will most likely fall to the taxpayers. "The developers are not going to tear these things down," said Rob Kitchin, the director of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis. "They are bust or they probably would have finished them."

In Longford, troubled housing complexes abound, Mr. Ross said. One part of a development sinking into a bog has already been torn down. But nearby, the rest of it looks in sorry shape. Even from the outside, the houses of Gleann Riada show signs of mold. Tall weeds are growing in some of the gutters.

One homeowner there said that the local authorities had recently paved the road and put in surveillance cameras. But for a time, he said, the sewage system was in such a bad state that methane gas was collecting under the houses. There were two explosions, and residents were told not to close their windows, even in winter, and not to light any fires.

Experts say some owners of substandard homes may eventually stop paying their mortgages, causing more problems for the country's troubled banks. The number of people falling behind in the mortgage payments on their homes continued to grow last quarter, to 99,189, up 1,315 during the three months ending in September, according to Ireland's Central Bank.

Some Irish homeowners have moved to Britain to take advantage of easier bankruptcy laws there. Recently, Ireland made its bankruptcy laws easier as well, though still not as easy as Britain's. Jan O'Sullivan, Ireland's housing minister, said that in many cases the banks were simply going to have to offer debt forgiveness to homeowners.