I know, and dont get me wrong, i have had a ball this last 5 years living in Donabate, Skerries, Drumcondra and now D7. It has been great fun and i will miss Cobblers, Hughes, The Palace,etc, and have made many friends here, but the reality of life is the fact i want to put down roots somewhere, this isnt possible in Dublin.
The thing is though, i can come up to Dublin for the weekend now ANY time, and have the best of both worlds! 
Slainte.
My in-laws paid 1,800 quid for a D4 house in 1959. The family now figures they could get 3million Euros for the place. They will never sell but I joke that they could sell the joint, buy a chateau in France and live till the end of their days with staff. True, but they won’t go for it. Dublin is just nuts. When people who know Dublin now hear that my wife is from Sandymount, Dublin 4, they assume she’s from a rich family. Not true at all. Bizarre place. The real estate market shows no signs of a crash. I think it is a sad day when a roof over your head is an obsessive topic of conversation and when mortgages are so large the average person would have no realistic expectation of ever paying them off in a working lifetime. Yet the crazy prices remain.
When I suggested to my Dublin friends that residential towers should be built in Dublin higher than the usual 4 or 5 storeys, they freaked out on me. I responded by saying, hey look, don’t you want affordable accommodation close in a convenient location in the City. Their response was effectively, hey, we’ll do what we have to to get into the real estate market and we don’t want your filthy American/Canadian towers casting shadows over Dublin neighbourhoods. I said fine, enjoy spending half your life in traffic commuting from Wicklow.
Sorry, I’m rambling.
Maybe your friends in Dublin heard about Ballymun. An absolute disaster.
The local housing authority will never pull a stunt like that again. Never…
Slan,
D. 
Dubh beat me to it about Ballymun!
Good news though, apparently mortgage loaners are now offering “3 generation” loans, so you can buy a house that your grandkids will be paying off for you! lovely, how sweet of them!
You are quite right. I think the association with high rise buildings is with Ballymun and that is what drives the distaste for high rise residential.
At the end of the day, it is a marketing thing, associate high rise residential with 5th Ave. and you’d have a different reaction.
I’ve got to say that hearing about Dublin house prices makes prices here in the Silicon Valley area of California seem almost reasonable. ($750,000 median price - ~590,000 Euro, I believe).
Out of curiousity, once you’re away from Dublin, what’s a typical house price (I’d guess that Cork’s fairly high, too)? I know that the median US housing price is perhaps a third that of the major west coast cities - does the same hold true in Ireland outside of Dublin?
Call it morbid curiousity - I’ve got years to go before I can move away from the city. And rural Ireland ranks with coastal Oregon on my places-I’d-move-if-I-could list.
Mmmm..
5th Ave. against Ballymun.
Have you ever been anywhere near Ireland in general, or Dublin in particular.
I have heard many delightful and witty comments about Ballymun, but nobody ever gave 5th Ave. a thought.
Tell the truth now..
Ballymun..
5th Ave.
Ever been anyway near any of those places..
Slan,
D. 
Hate to tell you, but when I was up at feadogin’s wedding, the price of housing in Mountain View/Palo Alto listed in the throw-away newspper didn’t dip below $1.3M, 800,000 for a fixer-upper.
Fel - your sample was one of the most expensive communities in the Silicon Valley area (Palo Alto). Outrageous, I agree. But -
The median for Palo Alto is probably 40-50% higher than the county median. But the $750K median I quoted for Santa Clara county was correct as of last month (latest available figures) - and the local price trends are (finally!) pretty flat month-to-month. Given that the local median family income is a bit less than $50K, that means that a median house costs 15-20x their total, before-tax income.
The scary thing is that it sounds like prices in Dublin are still going up. Beautiful city, and (housing costs aside) very livable, but I can’t help but wonder how sustainable the current prices are. And I also wonder what the median income is - the sense I get is that Dublin prices are even worse compared to income than here.
I’m not terribly current on Irish salary levels, but a few years back, the company I used to work for had a development facility in Cork - coworkers there told me that engineering salaries in Cork averaged ~75% of Silicon Valley salaries, but housing costs were also less there at that time (circa 2002). Their main concern was job stability - the engineering market was small enough that one of the senior people told me he might have to move to Galway or even Dublin to change jobs.
And we arer not even talking about Atherton!!! 