‘Khế ước xã hội đã bị phá vỡ hoàn toàn’: Khủng hoảng nhà ở tại Ireland

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Before sunrise each day, Aoife Diver, a teacher in Dublin, gets into her car and drives for up to 90 minutes from her uncle’s house to the opposite side of the Irish capital.

It was not always like this. She used to share a house with five friends close to the school where she works in South Dublin. But when her rent and bills reached almost half of her monthly salary last year, she knew she had to move back in with family.

The skyrocketing cost (chi phí tăng vọt) of private rentals (cho thuê tư nhân) has left many people struggling (chật vật) to afford (chi trả) housing in Dublin and other Irish cities, pushing some to move abroad and others to commute long distances. The crunch has left teachers and social workers priced out of the communities they serve, professional couples unable to buy homes and people on lower incomes fearing homelessness.

The biggest cause, analysts say, is a failure (thất bại) by successive governments to invest in social housing (nhà ở xã hội), which local authorities once built for those who could not afford to rent privately. During the Celtic Tiger period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as Ireland’s economy boomed, private construction exploded and landlords were encouraged to scoop up rental properties (thu thập tài sản cho thuê) as investments, squeezing out less affluent buyers (vắt kiệt những người mua ít giàu có hơn).

For years even before the crash, there had been a shift away from social housing built by local authorities and more of a reliance on the market (sự phụ thuộc vào thị trường). As building restarted in recent years, it has been more focused on short-term rental development or luxury builds.

source: nytimes,