Um.

In the last few years, Dublin has become one of the world’s 10 most expensive places to rent, ahead of cities like Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore.

Deutsche Bank reported in May that typical rent for a midrange, two-bedroom apartment in Dublin was $2,018 a month, 23 percent more than in 2014 — the biggest increase of any city in the top tier.

…“You have a generation being locked out of the Irish social contract,” said Rory Hearne, a lecturer in the sociology of housing at Maynooth University.

“A lot of young people are now realizing they will never own their own home, and that is a particularly terrible outlook when you live in a country where a house is usually your main asset for retirement.”

…The Irish division of Savills, an international property company, predicts that rents will increase an additional 17 percent over the next three years.

…It now costs far more to rent than to pay off a mortgage. The property website daft.ie recently reported that the monthly mortgage payment on a two-bedroom house in the city of Cork would be about $700, but the same house would cost almost $1,300 to rent.

Home prices have rebounded since the recession, but homeownership has not, in part because people paying high rents often cannot save for down payments.

To curb dangerous lending and borrowing, the Central Bank of Ireland in 2015 capped mortgage loans at about 3.5 times the buyer’s annual income, but the median price is about 5.6 times earnings.

Housing Crisis Grips Ireland a Decade After Property Bubble Burst (New York Times)

Rollingnews