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The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

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Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are good arguments that foreigners should only be allowed to own real estate only in specific places and that citizenship should be by blood only for small countries - let's say under 100000 sq km and 50 million people. Too easy for them to be overtaken by global elite otherwise.

> There are good arguments that foreigners should only be allowed to own real estate only in specific places In the context of receiving visas, that's exactly what already happens in Portugal.

No. They can buy everywhere in Portugal. The idea is that you forbid them to buy near the desirable coast and force them into the heartland.

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#182
post #73

Its a global problem that interest rates have been too low for too long. Most Americans dont realize that in most countries, house prices continued to go up through the 08-10 recession, so haven't gone down since the early 90s. Property needs a big global crash.

The interest is the cause of the problem in the first place. We've known for thousands of years that usury is bad, it's prohibited in the three major religions, and for good reason.

We see it time and time again. Policy makers try to address the symptom but not the cause, then people cry when nothing gets fixed.

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#184

Quoted post unavailable.

They did a mess in Brazil too. Extracted what they could, be it wood or gold and everything in between. Gold in particular was a pretty good shakedown. We learned about all the B.S. at school.

I am Brazilian. I do not blame the current Portuguese people. Heck, I don't even blame the Portuguese back then, just their government. I want Portugal to prosper.

Asking for an official apology is fine. Blaming ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives, is not fine.

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#185
post #90

Some 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.

Not directly, but a extremely wealthy person without a vote who can make campaign donations directly or indirectly arguably has a larger impact than the average voter. For example 90% of house seats go to the person who spent the most, though causation isn't necessarily always the case.[1]

[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#186
post #77
post #62

Earlier 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...

Good drug policy, car-less urbanity, and a good tech scene. With California weather and 1/5 the cost? Sounds great. When can I move?

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#187

Why does anyone let non-resident people buy residential housing?

That's the wrong question. If you sell housing to non-resident people, you receive money to build more housing. The question should be:

Why does anybody limit supply of housing to the point that prices rise?

The French did a bad job at building satellite cities, but done right, you could connect new housing to the city center like the original Los Angeles street cars.

If jobs don't pay much then you also don't pay much to the builders of new houses which makes them affordable.

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are foreigners kept there against their will? I bet they're happy to live there, despite the housing costs. Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigners. I'd love to have a Singaporean passport and be able to live there if I could afford. May want to keep your comment deletion considerations to yourself.

The situation in Singapore is different. The foreigners are not high-income people who chose to live there. Only about 28% are skilled labor. The foreigners _may_ be happy to live there but I wouldn't make that assumption without checking. Just because it's better than their alternative doesn't mean it's good, or even acceptable.

Source:

> [immigrants population is] 1.23 million, out of which about 351 thousand were classified as skilled labor. Most of the foreign workforce [...is employed...] in construction and the service industry, or as domestic help.

-- https://www.statista.com/statistics/698035/singapore-number-...

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#189
post #165

Portuguese here. I think this title is a bit sensationalist. It's true that a middle class Portuguese, with the extremely heavy income/property taxes we have to pay, will find it very difficult to live in Lisbon's or Porto's city center in a medium-upper apartment. Lisbon (and even more Porto) do have an extensive metro line though, and you can rent/buy an apartment on the outskirts (although still served by metro li…

> Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to their party members and get them nice administration positions for which they don't have any experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free" services. Tangential, but I recently visited lisbon and realized how terribly mismanaged the airport is, as well as TAP Air (Portugal's flag airline). Everythin…

We lived in Spain for 4 years and Portugal for 1. I love the country and the people, but from a management perspective, the place is a disaster. It made Spain feel like some sort of futuristic perfect society managed by hyper-efficient AI by comparison (and that's saying something).

Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

#190
You could say the same about where is a popular tourist destination that has over 15% of it's economy based in tourism. Czechs were the minority property owners in Prague some 20 years ago, already.

Inflation is occurring at higher rates in some countries than others (cough Estonia, Turkey for example) and Portugal is not exceptional in this respect. The starting salaries for doctors in the Portuguese SNS are terrible, at around 1800 euro for doctors and 1200 euro for nurses. This is insufficient for living in Lisbon or Porto, as the author would agree.

Source: I am Portuguese. I live in central Portugal.

I do not like the authors apparent intentions in trying to incite anti-foreigner sentiments. Portugal has chosen it's own course here, from the Golden Visas to the over-reliance on tourism. Lisbon has it's own management problems that I won't dig into, but suffice it to say that certain places like Lisbon or Porto have become rather expensive, while the majority of the interior of the country continues to be less-inhabited. Our train services were gutted when the public system was privatized and the concession given to a single company.

Monopolies run rampant in Portugal.

Uniquely complaining about PORTUGAL being unaffordable for the PORTUGUESE is such a Portuguese mentality, I can't even. The author needs to live abroad in some other countries for awhile and see how much this is a general issue relating to so-called NICE CITIES becoming horribly expensive. No doubt, we will stop being fashionable at some point, when the "next" cool place becomes king, so the real question is whether we will begin manufacturing and developing other sectors of our economy beyond raw-materials export (low in the capitalist pyramid) and tourism. Make furniture to sell, rather than exporting the timber, so to speak.

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