Soaring rents have left many struggling to afford homes in Dublin and have created a generational divide. Two-thirds of younger adults in the city live with their parents.
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.
After school, it is back in the car for the reverse commute. On a recent evening, Ms. Diver, 25, sat in stop-and-go traffic, the red of the brake lights in front glowing through the windshield, as dusk turned to darkness.
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.
“There’s very little housing available, and what is available is way out of my reach,” she said. “Eventually, I probably will have to move somewhere else because I’m never going to be able to afford a house or an apartment on my own up in Dublin.”
This is total bullshit. This is a problem we face because of shitty zoning laws and capitalism, not population. Besides that, UN projections indicate population topping off at 15 billion before pulling back and eventually reaching replacement rate around 12 billion. Without any technological advancement, and only advancement of logistics and society, the earth has plenty of space to feed and house that many humans.
*to feed and house that many humans to a high standard of living, housing, and nutrition — with public/shared transport fulfilling all their transportation needs — and nobody having to work more than 30 hours a week.