The Brittle Housing Market: Why the System Is Worse Than You Think - Part 1

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Housing is the biggest expense most of us will ever face, and across Ireland and much of the Western world, the system simply isn’t working. Is this another housing bubble, or something more dangerous? In this first episode of a special three-part series on housing, we sit down with Trinity College economist Ronan Lyons to unpack what’s really happening beneath the headlines. Lyons argues the problem isn’t a speculative bubble like the 2000s. Instead, we’re living in a “brittle” housing system, one where pressure has quietly built for years because societies simply aren’t building the right homes in the right places for the way people live today. This means young people stuck living with parents, sharing overcrowded homes, or emigrating to start their lives elsewhere. We explore how focusing only on prices and rents misses the real issue, why housing shortages are now appearing across Europe and the English-speaking world, and how demographic change is colliding with planning systems designed for a different era. Part one asks the key question: Where are we now?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:06.7	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:12.3	How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And today's podcast is going to be the first of a series of three on the housing market.
0:21.6	This is largely going to be about the Irish housing market,
0:23.6	but the housing market all over the Western world is broken.
0:27.6	Young people cannot get not only a foot on the housing island,
0:31.6	they can't get a place to rent.
0:33.6	The fact is that over the last 20 years,
0:36.6	in English-speaking countries, in particular, the housing markets have not just not operated, they are entirely broken.
0:45.8	So what we're going to do is going to do three series with the brilliant Professor Ronan Lines of Trinity College Dublin.
0:51.8	The first of our series is today.
0:55.1	And this is on what he calls the brittle rather than broken housing market.
0:59.8	Largely speaking, this is about the fact that the failure in the housing market is not
1:05.1	just a failure of price, not just affordability, but it's a failure to build appropriate
1:10.0	houses in appropriate places for the
1:13.1	demographic outline of the population. We have young people, we've middle-aged people, we've
1:17.5	old people, all of whom want different things from the housing market. And it's going to be much
1:21.6	broader than just the housing prices and the rental prices. It's going to be about the unwillingness
1:26.7	or inability of our authorities
1:29.3	to plan properly, to build properly, to price properly, and to zone properly.
1:34.5	It is a fantastic series. I think it's almost the definitive series.
1:38.9	Ronan is one of the great brains on the housing market, not just in Ireland, but worldwide.
	...

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