Dear Taylor, we need to talk about real estate.
Dear Taylor,
We’ve been hanging out now for, what, 16 years now? I know that it’s mostly a one-sided relationship, but I’m okay with that. You’re busy, and you’ve got a lot more friends than I do. Relationships are, after all, about the quality of the time you spend together.
Remember that first summer we got to know each other? I moved to New York — with little money and no air-conditioning — and you kept me company, singing a love story as I danced around the room, looking at the views of Manhattan that made each bead of sweat worth it.
Then, just a few years later, you ventured into pop at the same time as I ventured into a long-distance relationship. Little did we know, we were both starting lifelong love affairs — you with synth and me with the boy from Dublin.
As we entered our mid-20s, problems arrived. You had all that stuff go down with Kim, and my mom got sick. We had each other’s backs, of course. I knew that the truth about the phone call would reveal itself eventually, and after mom died, you sent me some catharsis, singing about how you too knew the value of nicer nurses and making the best of a bad deal.
The last couple of years have been full of big changes for both of us. You dropped Midnights just before I found out I was pregnant, ensuring that my daughter would recognise three voices when she was born. While I decided to give parenting a whirl, you decided to conquer the world — racking up Grammys, re-recording your masters, boosting economies.
I’m so proud of your success, but there comes a time in every relationship for some serious talk. And we need to talk. About real estate.
Since you made the Forbes’ billionaires list, journalists have been paying a lot more attention to — and praising — your real estate portfolio. Hey, I get it: if you spend a lot of time in LA and New York, then it makes sense to have a home in both.
The problem, however, is when a brilliant musician like yourself becomes celebrated as a real estate mogul with a property empire, it sends the message that investing in real estate is an achievement equal in stature to that of being a once-in-a-generation songwriter. In reality, your music brings joy to billions of people whereas investors who treat houses as profit mechanisms cause immense damage to individuals and societies.
This investment trend began during the Great Recession when speculative investors bought millions of family homes at depressed prices. For years, this trend was slowly lurching towards cities around the world until the ripple effects of the coronavirus pandemic transformed a rising problem into a full-blown crisis. By 2021, investors were purchasing a fourth of the single-family homes on the US market.
The use of property as an investment vehicle has painful implications for society-at-large, and it widens the gap between rich and poor. Many of your fellow millennials can’t purchase a home because we’re competing against investors who see houses as returns-generating assets that can diversify their pots. Realistically, we aren’t in the market to buy a mansion or a holiday house sitting quietly on a beach. However, those of us who want to buy a single-family house and make it a home are often in direct competition with those who want to buy a single-family house and turn it into an investment vehicle.
In my city of Dublin, the decades-old housing crisis has reached a level unimaginable by inhabitants of other cities. It bleeds into every aspect of life, crippling the city and suffocating its residents. The average house price is now more than 10 times the average wage. In a market where the demand for homes far outstrips the supply, young adults are competing against both individual investors who can make sellers cash offers way above their asking prices and investment funds that can scoop up vast amounts of newly built housing stock and turn it into rental properties.
Unable to buy, tenants remain locked into a distorted rental market with astronomical accommodation costs. Landlords can evict them at any time, resulting in lives plagued by fear and instability since the scarcity of accommodation makes re-entering the market at reasonable cost a near impossibility.
With many tenants spending nearly half of their take-home pay on rent, they can’t afford to save — turning the once reasonable concept of a 10 percent housing deposit into a far-fetched dream. In an attempt to reach this dream, huge numbers of young adults have moved back in with their parents. In fact, despite working full-time jobs, nearly 70 percent of Irish adults age 25 to 29 are living with their parents, missing out on valuable life experiences and delaying having families of their own. Or, they’re opting out of the problem entirely by emigrating, meaning that the housing crisis is simultaneously fueling a country-wide brain drain while preventing foreign students and talent from relocating here.
The knock-on effects don’t end there: they slither insidiously through society, snapping at its social fabric and squeezing the most vulnerable populations until homelessness skyrockets and refugees become scapegoats.
Long story short, it’s a bad time.
Is any of this nightmare your fault?
No. I know all too well that you can’t control what people write about you, and I’m certain you’d rather be celebrated as a brilliant businesswoman and musician than a savvy real-estate investor.
It’s governments that should be taking aggressive steps towards solving the problem of affordable housing and creating public policies that put would-be home owners first and investors second. They could implement meaningful vacant property taxes to prevent home hoarding and encourage land use. They could introduce a minimum residency requirement to keep so-called holiday homes from sitting empty for 10 months of the year. They could revamp planning processes to work for the collective good rather to the benefit of individual NIMBYists.
However, the years pass, and the ruling political classes continue to fail to take any significant action. Their reputations have never been worse, but they still can’t seem to make any promises to help Generation Rent. Perhaps they just don’t really care that most of our generation will never be able to purchase a home.
But I thought if we had this chance to talk, then you might. And perhaps you could use your tremendous influence to help fix this untenable situation.
After all, if you can’t do it, then maybe no one can.
See you Sunday,
Emily