The statistics in this piece on Ireland are quite incredible - "About 553,000 houses were built in the 10 years through 2005 in the country of about 4.5 million people, as home-building expanded at twice the pace of the rest of Europe. About 294,000 homes now lie empty, as prices halved. In Dublin, prices have dropped 64 percent from the 2007 market peak.."
In Spain, of all the houses built there from 2001-2007 apparently some 28% are unoccupied and in the US the foreclosure crisis is causing similar problems - it isn't just that the housing market has been a key component of the global economic crisis, the networks of 'ghost debris' of this mass of unoccupied housing itself comprises a massive drag on any kind of recovery. The numbers of people unable to buy or afford housing because their credit records are trashed, the levels of unemployment created by the crash that now preclude purchase or price recovery and the sheer, awful deadweight of that mass of empty, pointless urbanization dragging the economy down...
(Ireland Bulldozes Ghost Estate in Life After Real Estate Bubble - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/ireland-bulldozes-ghost-estate-in-life-after-real-estate-bubble.html)
Dr Jon Cloke
LCEDN/MEGS Research Associate
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU
Office: 01509 228193
Mob: 07984 813681
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