At Twitter’s European headquarters, surviving employees have one big problem with Elon Musk’s demand thatDublin, the Irish capital where the tech firm has an office that had about 500 employees, is in the midst of a housing crisis driven by chronic undersupply of new homes and a mass exodus of private landlords. Prices recently topped the peak they reached in 2007, shortly before an economic crash that almost bankrupted the nation.
“Even if one has the funds to rent, one cannot rent,” said Stephen Kinsella, a professor of economics at the University of Limerick. “That’s a systemic risk.”Some big international firms are taking matters into their own hands. A company associated with Goldman Sachs, which moved its European asset management business to Dublin after Brexit, is looking to build nearly 1000 apartments on a shopping centre car park in North West Dublin worth €400 million .
The number of private landlords exiting the market doubled in the second quarter from a year earlier, as rising property prices, rent caps and the prospect of higher mortgage payments made it increasingly unattractive to let a property. Globally, the tech industry shed 9587 jobs in October, the highest monthly total since November 2020. The Irish government has received notice of about 140 redundancies at Twitter so far, Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told reporters on Friday.