When Nirvana first moved from their small Washington town to Seattle, they were able to pay their rent + everything else from working minimum wage jobs for 2 weeks a month. They had time to practice music and pursue their art.
In an era where working a full time job is not enough to pay the cost of living, arts and culture no longer exist except as hobbies for rich kids. Seattle successfully exterminated their entire arts, music, and culture scene by raising the cost of living sky high.
> In an era where working a full time job is not enough to pay the cost of living, arts and culture no longer exist except as hobbies for rich kids.
In Ireland _today_, we are in an era where working as a nurse, paramedic, firefighter, teacher, etc have become unable to pay the cost of living, leaving them to exist only as hobbies for the rich kids who can be subsidised by their parents or immigrant labour willing to be exploited to avoid deportation.
Is health not wealth? Education? Safety? Or does only the arts deserve this subsidisation?
The problem with a UBI is not the UBI itself, but the fact that landlords could just raise their price.
You need to solve the contradiction within the economy in order to make UBI works.
The current way our taxation policy work is to tax labor and capital, which is the basis of our economy, while flinching away from taxing land, which derives much of its value from the surrounding economic activity rather than an owner's effort.
By the way, the UBI is an old idea. In the 19th century, it was known as the Citizen's Dividend.
Just like in the US, there are a ton of homes in Ireland just sitting vacant. Supply isn't nearly as large a problem as affordability. Ireland introduced a vacant homes tax to try to help, but it seems they haven't gone far enough.
That's because, in the places where housing is expensive, it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there. It's a pipe dream that you can out build demand in these places. Reducing prices of housing in nice places to live (by any means, including building) will only result in more demand up until that insatiable demand is satisfied.
Nice places to live can't support all the people that want to live there.
Because demand is, for all intents and purposes, insatiable, the dollar value of housing/property isn't based on supply and demand because supply can't practically be increased to affect demand. Instead, the price is related to what a prospective buyer can afford to pay _every month_ and, thus, is related to interest rates. Interest rates go down, prices go up to the point where a prospective buyer's mortgage payment would be the same.
People who bring up the (un)affordability of housing are never talking about Oklahoma, they're talking about the Bay Area, Southern California, New York City, Seattle, Portland, etc. All places that are so desirable, they can't practically support everyone that wants to live there.
> it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there.
I can't figure out how to make the math make sense even if I were to build a house in the middle of nowhere. Time and materials is the real killer.
Some day, when AI eliminates software development as a career, maybe you will be able to hire those people to build you houses for next to nothing, but right now I don't think it matters where or how many you build. The only way the average Joe is going to be able to afford one — at least until population decline fixes the problem naturally — is for someone else to take a huge loss on construction. And, well, who is going to line up to do that?
"Built in 1954" doesn't sound like new construction. Of course you can buy used houses at a fraction of the cost. That's nothing new. Maybe you missed it, but the discussion here about building new to make homes more affordable.
It is not like I'm homeless. I would be the one upgrading. Except I don't see how the numbers make sense.
You're right: The cost of new construction anchors the used market. Used housing is so expensive because new housing is even more expensive. If new houses were cheaper I, like many others, would have already have built one and my current home would be up for grabs at a lower price than I'd expect in the current reality. However, that's repeating what was already said.
If one was freely able to move about the entire world you may have a point. Especially given current events, I am not sure the country in which that house is located would take kindly to many of us moving there. In a more practical reality you're not going to find anything for anywhere close to that price even in the middle of nowhere, never mind somewhere where everyone wants to live. That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.
Except it is not clear who can afford new construction either. It is even more expensive.
> That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.
I explained earlier why I don't think it would. The places with a housing "shortages" are the places where everyone wants to live. Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.
You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."
> Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.
If houses were able to be built freely then everyone would be able to build a house... Except, if you can't afford a used house, you most definitely cannot afford a new one. As before, time and materials are the real killer. The used housing market is merely a reflection of the cost to build new. Same reason used cars have risen so high in price in recent years: Because new cars have even higher prices.
> You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."
The trouble is that you confuse affordability with sticker price. I technically could live in that house for six months before I have to return back to my home country, but I could not legally work during that time. It is far more affordable to pay significantly higher prices in my country for a house and work all year long. The price of that house is low, but the cost is very high.
The places everyone wants to live are the places everyone wants to live because they are the most affordable places to live. If it were cheaper to move somewhere else, the people would have moved there already. Humans love to chase a good deal and carve out an advantage for themselves. However, a low price doesn't mean cheaper.
Land is more or less worth the same whether it has a used house on it or if you build a new house on it. The trouble remains that the high cost of new construction anchors the cost of used houses.
Construction costs should really have been driven down by the march of technology, but that really hadn't been the case. It's mostly stagnant IIRC. But construction costs doesn't really explain the housing crisis well.
> What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening
The part where people see their money burning away paying maintenance and tax on deteriorating assets.
Why are people holding assets unused?
Because they don't believe that the city will allow sufficient development to allow them to purchase like-assets in the future if they chose to reinvest and the carrying cost is minimal because council taxes are trivial relative to the value of the asset. If my research is correct, Kensington council taxes are under 10k USD per year.
No, it’s not that we can only afford one. It’s that we’re choosing to ring fence funding for one while allowing the others to erode in real terms.
Ireland already greatly subsidises health, just not to a level that keeps pace with the cost of living. That’s why nurses and doctors are emigrating, and why recruitment and retention are constant crises.
The arts scheme isn’t the problem in isolation, but when the State recognises that market income alone isn’t sufficient for artists to live, but doesn’t apply the same logic to other socially critical professions, it's definitely a questionable policy.
Ireland’s affordability problems are almost exclusively centered around its housing crisis and they need to just commit themselves to over-supply induced wealth destruction for the landlord class and older generations. Thankfully, there demographics also support such a move.
Baby steps. Everyone deserves it, but getting there in one step is politically impossible almost everywhere in the world. Nobody’s saying only the arts deserve subsidies. It’s just easier to justify. But if we want everyone to have basic income, we need to applaud whenever it happens, even if it’s a small subset, and argue they deserve it and that we should have more of it. Complaining about the unfairness of artists being subsidized demonstrates and adds to the political difficultly. If we accept that it’s unfair for a subset, then we might never get basic income since the rich don’t need it and many don’t want it.
Why do you say that? Isn’t the fact that it got approved evidence that it was easier to justify subsidies for artists?
I don’t know what you mean at all, why is this “so polarizing”? A lot of the art world already runs on subsidies, and it’s well known that it’s more difficult to make a living as an artist than your examples of jobs that come with steady pay, even if it’s low. Solo artists don’t get any steady income at all, and many have to take other jobs in order to support their art work. The general public where I live (in the US) is absolutely more willing to fund the arts than to fund generally low paying steady-income jobs, especially steady-income jobs that are already funded via taxes like teachers and firefighters. This is why I claim it’s easier to justify subsidizing artists. What is the reason you claim it’s not easier to justify, and where is the evidence your claim is true?
Good question. The public consultation was 97% in favour, although half the respondents were receiving the pilot payment at the time.
Following the announcement of Budget 2026 last October, I think this expenditure came into sharp focus, as the budget was considered to be almost hostile to workers and families, and anecdotally I think it has become more controversial since.
There definitely isn't overwhelming consensus the above figure suggests, as the public consultations always heavily lean towards interested parties (I didn't learn of the consultation until after it closed), but any topic that sharply divides opinion can be polarising.
The cohorts at each pole don't have to be equal size, and for now, there are definitely more in favour than against in Ireland.
Far more in favor than against completely supports my speculation that basic income for artists is easier to publicly justify than basic income for all. You argued sharply with that, but have so far provided only evidence in support of what I said. I would love to hear why, exactly, you claimed this issue would somehow poison the idea of basic income, and why you don’t agree with the idea of getting it approved for small groups in stages.
Citation needed. "Cobain thought Seattle was too expensive a place to live. He couldn’t even afford his Olympia apartment, and was evicted for not paying rent while he was recording Nevermind.”[1] "They supported themselves through food stamps, sleeping on porches."[2]
I live in a fairly expensive city in the UK. Working minimum wage for 2 weeks will pay for a room in a flat share, plus my households food and required bills.
It’s not much of a life but the same still stands in many cities.
£1100/mo is about the minimum I could get by on in Edinburgh, yeah. It’s a room in a flat share with bills, £60/week on food, and £150/mo for “everything else”. It’s about as low as I think you could do. The person I replied to was talking about Nirvana in the 90s - when they were working part timeminimum wage jobs that’s roughly the life they’re living.
If you go to Liverpool (which significantly punches for musical history), it’s actually manageable on 20hr/weeek minimum wage.
You’re not talking sustaining a family or anything, but that life has been gone for 40 years at this point.
In an era where working a full time job is not enough to pay the cost of living, arts and culture no longer exist except as hobbies for rich kids. Seattle successfully exterminated their entire arts, music, and culture scene by raising the cost of living sky high.