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What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

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Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem. That's nonsense. Larger Munich is the most expensive place to live in Germany (except for the island of Sylt), and has been for many years, but is still nowhere near London, NYC, or SF. In contrast, you can purchase entire houses in abandoned (but well connected) places in east Germany for as little as 10k EUR.

Why is the area around Dresden so affordable compared to others? I've seen ready to move in single family houses for 70k.

A lot of people leave the east in general, while a lot of people come to Munich. Tech is an exception here.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#502
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to change the income tax code to massively incentivize people to get married and have kids. I’d support increasing the tax rate pretty massively and then introducing a tax deduction of like $20k per kid. For instance a couple with 3 kids and a home would have around $70k-$100k in deductions (60k kids, 10k-40k in state/local taxes etc). If they had an income of $120k it would be adjusted to like $30k a…

Why stop there? Since you believe that human reproduction is a de-facto property of the state, simply calculate how many women should have babies, for optimal society , and force them to? No need to muck around with some tax incentives. Redistribute the true source "commodity". As a bonus, if you're high up enough, you might even get to choose who mates with whom.

There might be a pretty huge gap between incentivizing responsible people to create families and own property (these are very good things for a country and society) and forcing women to reproduce and with whomever the government assigns to them.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really attracts people to those places? Cuisine? Night life? Tinder opportunities?

I want my kids to be around a variety of perspectives. The groupthink and pressure to conform in rural areas and small towns can be extreme.

Bigger cities are the same. Politically they are very homogeneous. If you want want you kids to be near variety of perspectives, you should move to a smaller city or near one.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right but I'm guessing a huge percentage is baby boomers or Gen X'ers who bought a house 10 or more years ago. I'm curious to see a graph of home ownership rate history for people between 25 and 39 years old, I'm guessing it is lower now than 30 years ago.

A majority of millennials are homeowners. It's maybe two or three points behind where the boomers were at their age.

The only numbers I could find about this disagree with you:

> Just 47.9% of U.S. millennials owned homes in 2020, according to Apartment List analysis of census data. At age 30, millennial home ownership hit 42%, compared with 48% for Gen Xers and 51% for baby boomers.

https://archive.is/P5EKj#selection-3963.136-3971.67 - Bloomberg: Don’t Blame Avocado Toast. Here’s Why Millennials Don’t Own Homes

Maybe you have access to more recent numbers that show that the majority of millennials are homeowners?

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#505

It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany. I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even…

Germany confuses me a lot here because the population is actually _declining_. Granted, more in rural area than rich urban areas, but even then.

The overall population of Germany is not declining yet, in fact last year the German population has never been as high. In general, if Germany wants to keep its economy the population has to continue increasing until the boomers are dead. So yes, counter intuitively, for now there is going to be a major pressure on the housing market at least until the peak. Germany is a major immigration target inside the EU so it's not met with the same fate as poorer european economies like Russia, Ukraine, or Italy.

The high rents in places like Munich are due to the urban areas seeing a major boom: that's where the jobs are, that's where the immigrants are going, that's where the young people from the countryside are going.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#506

It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany. I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even…

If you are able to work remotely, Spain is fantastic at the moment. Relatively low real estate rent/purchase prices. You can still get a nice 3 bedroom house with a pool under 200k by the Mediterranean sea (of course well, not in Marbella). There are some surprisingly high-tech jobs locally as well, the space industry is booming right now. Lots of programming jobs in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia even if you don't s…

The flip-side of this is that all the "expats" (not immigrants :)) and "digital nomads" are outbidding the locals and pushing up prices for them.

If you think it's bad renting a house in Munich on a German salary, imagine renting a house in Lisbon (similar or higher prices) on a Portuguese salary.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#507

It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany. I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even…

Germany confuses me a lot here because the population is actually _declining_. Granted, more in rural area than rich urban areas, but even then.

It’s not (anymore), due to immigration: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2023/01/PE23_026_124.html

There was a slight decline in the late aughts.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#508
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your GF gets rejected on a financial basis while making 75k euros? How expensive are the places she's trying to rent? > We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories It seems like if you want to live anywhere that's desirable you have to pay an arm and a leg for rent, no matter wh…

75K is a good salary in Germany, well above the average of 49K: https://housinganywhere.com/Germany/average-salaries-in-germ...

You are not competing with the nationwide average when trying to rent in munich.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#509
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it collapse? There’s insatiable demand for extreme limited property. Interest rate hikes may lower the price of property but the interest will rise proportionately. Do people really think at sone point no one will want premium property and I’ll finally get it cheap? Of course that will never happen.

If it doesn't collapse, then society may collapse? Like the sibling comment mentioned, you can only push this too far, and I think it's pushed too far to be very alarming. And housing is expensive by design and not by constraint. I'm staying in KL, a comparatively cheap place by Western standards. The housing market is crap here from a seller perspective as you have an over-supply of condos. That, despite the large a…

An answer could be land trusts. A land trust that is sufficiently capitalized would be a capital partner to help buyers buy at current market rates. When these new buyers sell, the land trust stipulates the price they can sell at. We have these to a limited extent in New England, and they may exist elsewhere. The problem is, at this point, only a currency producing entity like the Fed would seem to have the wherewithal to capitalize such an endeavor at a scale needed to substantially change things.

Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

#510
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want my kids to be around a variety of perspectives. The groupthink and pressure to conform in rural areas and small towns can be extreme.

Bigger cities are the same. Politically they are very homogeneous. If you want want you kids to be near variety of perspectives, you should move to a smaller city or near one.

That hasn't been my experience. Maybe I'm just tired of being around people who feel the existence of cities is a personal affront.
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