That's what happens when you incentivize wealthy people to move in and buy houses in masses. Price rises and locals struggle.
Same happens when states competes to get the next big co HQ in town. It's a double edged sword.
The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
101–110 of 817 posts
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#102Some Canadian cities responded to this with a foreign buyers tax, notably in Vancouver. Florida has a method for balancing its "snowbird" population to do with foreign buyers. Personally, I think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and very poor people whose effect in concert…
The Portuguese case is quite different, I think. Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to offer in exchange. They found something: their real estate and city center spaces. The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free. If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, on…
> The country NEEDS this foreign income.
It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real estate market making housing unafordable to the general population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median rent as the tax base.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#103The answer, as always when it comes to housing issues in Portugal or anywhere else, is to treat this as a supply side problem.
Portugal has an influx of foreign funds through Golden Visa and similar programs. It should take that money and build social housing that is, at least at first, only open to Portuguese citizens. Think Vienna.
In areas where building is a problem, just use funds to buy properties and turn them into social housing.
I don’t know what restrictions there are on foreign real estate purchases. Personally I have no issue with owner occupiers. But any “investors” (including AirBnBs) should be made illegal or simply taxed into oblivion.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#1045 years resident here (as a Brexit refugee). Central city locations in Lisbon and Porto have exploded in price, but this is due to AirBnB rather than rich expats. Portugal's tourism industry has boomed, which has put money in a lot of people's pockets, but has distorted local economies somewhat. Better management is required, for example cracking down on AirBnB and NOT building that new cruise liner terminal. Unfortu…
(Calling yourself a "refugee" as a rich immigrant is a bit off-puting, imho)
Why do you say that the rise in housing prices has been due to AirBnB but not to rich immigrants? It seems a bit odd. Both can outbid the average native and just push prices high. Many rich immigrants also buy up loads of property for speculative/investment purposes, not just to live in.
>has a large amount of cultural baggage from quite frankly medieval times
I wonder what exactly you mean by this.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Portuguese case is quite different, I think. Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to offer in exchange. They found something: their real estate and city center spaces. The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free. If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, on…
The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10 years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every country...
I think maintaining distinctiveness as a country is the best possible economic security, instead of turning it into an airport mall of fast food chains and crappy condos. France has maintained this somewhat, but not without a lot of struggle. Globalized chains create a radical monopoly in the cities they are in because they reduce the amount of risk/reward for local entrepreneurs, and require high amounts of capital to start. It's why downtown SF is such a cultural desert of basic and Times Square is just a theme park to itself. The policies that encourage globalized businesses create a homogenization that makes the desirable diversity that emerges organically impossible.
Portugal could impose a foreign buyers tax, use it's egalitarian/socialistic political culture to incentivise some small-n natalism, and leverage the unbelievable cultural resources it has as somewhere that is a respite from the blob of tourists that it has allowed to imbalance its economy.
It's not so much IT that would change the economy, but honestly - math. It's the only real social advantage that a country can organize to leverage, and the next country that triples down on its math education investment is going to be the next power base. Given what I've seen there that the article captures perfectly, it's probably their only hope.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#106Some Canadian cities responded to this with a foreign buyers tax, notably in Vancouver. Florida has a method for balancing its "snowbird" population to do with foreign buyers. Personally, I think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and very poor people whose effect in concert…
Absolutely now way that the "votes that come from importing wealthy people [...]" are going to be enough to get politicians elected - not enough wealthy people in the world. The real risk is the continued rise of populism which will result in cynical policies rather than real solutions for dealing with the increasing wealth gap.
Yeah, not to mention that people on visas can't vote. It's definitely a flaw in the causality chain, but at the same time I empathize with the frustration of the Portuguese people.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heavily taxing houses that stay empty and limiting short duration rental could be quite effective. The issue is somewhat the same in Paris. It’s very hard to afford living there because non local use properties as an investment and prefer them staying empty than risking them degraded and people who want to rent make more money on Airbnb. It’s fine if you want the city to become Disneyland but very depressing otherwis…
Are those really making a dent? What percentage of Lisbons apartments stay empty? What percentage is used for short duration rental? I would think only a small one-digit percentage?
There are tons (like, really many) of empty, closed rotting buildings in Lisbon. My assumption is the owners are waiting for prices to increase or simply demanding unreasonably inflated prices until they find a buyer. I'd like to know the reasons for it. Anyway, whole blocks are empty. Heck, there is a large empty building directly next to the German embassy (and, ironically, part of the German embassy is also abandoned and empty even though it belongs to it).
There is also a substantial number of new luxury apartment buildings in my area with apartments that appear to be empty. Whether they are owned yet or to be sold is hard to determine but you can see when nobody lives there.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#108>It’s a case of saying that Portugal has been constantly for sale. If in the recent past, large public companies were sold off to Chinese managers who now do whatever they want — like Energias de Portugal (EDP), the main electricity company, which, after making an exorbitant profit in the first semester of the year, they’re now saying that energy prices are going to go up again — now are private assets which are bein…
Blame neoliberal ghouls which, as the saying goes, "never let a good crisis go to waste". It was the perfect time to get public assets from the Portugese state, Greek state, Spanish state, etc, at a massive discount. A fire-sale of public goods, if you will. Also, by the way, a great time to push policies which made youth unemployment go to 30, 40, or even 50% (!), to get those sweet qualified youths to go work as nurses, doctors, engineers, in Germany, Netherlands, the UK, etc.
Blame also the eagerly colaborationist Portuguese government from 2011–2015.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that they have a huge proportion of their population that are totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to obtain public housing. If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship…
I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive economy in a few decades.
May want to go back and delete your comments about real estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to subsidize their housing, these tag line here would probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer Afford to Live in Singapore."
If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively open borders and free market real estate, you have to get with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's a good thing, or a bad thing.
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>Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigner
Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd claim.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#110I wonder how much Airbnb is to blame on the raising rents around the world. Why charge a "local" rate when you can charge 5x that rate for a tourist paying in $$$? Even if you don't, just knowing about Airbnb's extremely high prices will most likely put inflationary pressure on rents.
In August 2019, ~1600 places were up for rent in Dublin. In August 2020, it was double that. Mostly from tourist hotspots with AirBnB people trying to shift to long term lets. They're back on AirBnB now, and housing is even shittier than it was before. Yes, there's other issues, but AirBnB has been a known problem in Ireland since at least 2016 when I was first looking at places to rent in the country. The government…
Didn’t Ireland have a campaign against greedy landlords with rent controls, 52% tax, no deductions, no evictions?! That would explain much better the disaster in rental market…