Letters

Empty office blocks and housing crisis

Allocating resources

Wed Feb 14 2024 - 00:08

Sir, – Una Mullally (Opinion & Analysis, February 12th) highlights how people have to resort to sleeping on side streets in cardboard boxes and sleeping bags because the free market underallocates resources to their needs while empty office blocks and other buildings indicate an overallocation of resources. This highlights the fact that sometimes markets misallocates resources and therefore, sometimes, markets fail. She correctly points out that “this betrays the complete absence of any kind of cohesive planning . . . especially regarding housing”.

But there are no short-term solutions to this misallocation of resources because of construction time-lags (legislation restrictions, planning requirements, land acquisitions, transportation requirements, educational services, etc). There will always be time-lags in construction. Government policy must be to narrow the time-lag between supply and demand. In the absence of a cohesive long-term plan, a plethora of short-term solutions exist, leading to unintended consequences, with winners and losers arising from this misallocation of resources. – Yours, etc,

THOMAS POWER,

Lecturer in Economics,

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Faculty of Built Environment,

Technological University Dublin,

Dublin 1.

Sir, – One wonders why we bother with census enumeration every five years as no one with responsibility for governance of construction planning seems to use the data.

The oversupply of commercial property in a time of dire residential housing shortage speaks of a calamitous absence of interdepartmental planning and communication.

We deserve better than this from our elected representatives and officials. – Yours, etc,

AILBHE MURRAY,

Cabinteely,

Dublin 18.