Ireland Housing Crisis: Structuring Research from a Vague Brief

Adwita came into this project at Polysee with a broad brief: understand why housing in Ireland had remained persistently unaffordable. There was no predefined research framework, and the question was wide enough to mean almost anything.

Her first step was to decompose the problem using her economics training. She asked whether the issue was primarily a supply constraint, a planning regulation bottleneck, an infrastructure gap, or a broader financial structural problem. Breaking the question into those component parts gave her a map of what she needed to learn and who could answer each piece.

She then identified the relevant stakeholder groups: government reports, planning authorities, academics, urban planners, and developers. She pulled publicly available datasets to understand what each source could and could not tell her, building a broad foundation before identifying where the gaps were.

Secondary research alone could not answer the most important question: how the policies that existed on paper had actually translated into ground-level outcomes. Government reports described the reforms that had been introduced but could not tell her whether those reforms had met their intended effects or where they had stalled.

To fill that gap, she reached out to primary sources. Her conversations with urban economists, including Paul Cheshire, helped her understand the practical constraints on Irish housing supply, how specific policies had affected infrastructure, and how EU involvement in Irish planning law had added a further layer of complexity. Those conversations allowed her to separate structural constraints from policy design failures, a distinction that made the final conclusions significantly more precise.

Throughout the project, she treated the framework as iterative. As new evidence came in, she revised the structure rather than forcing the evidence to fit the original hypothesis. The result was a nuanced, evidence-grounded analysis that reflected the views of practitioners who had worked in the area for years.