221–230 of 817 posts
I think Portugal was just late to the game, but the playbook is the same.
All major cities in Canada, NYC, London, Hanoi, Bangkok, Naypyidaw, and so on and on.
Every nice city is extremely overvalued.
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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...
Portuguese IT is pretty good in general, and that could easily have been part of the solution. The problem is that there was a large exodus of talent in the early 2010s (including yours truly), and that has caused some serious brain drain.
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Thank you for mentioning interest rates. Any time housing comes up on HN, the main factors people bring up are short-term rentals, NIMBYism, and lack of new development. However, if these explanations had any merit, why have home values in Flint, MI increased by 67% since March of 2020? Flint's population has rapidly declined over the past 40 years and continues to decline (its population is less than half of what it…
And the biggest reason people buy housing is that its been the best investment. The wealthiest people I know are the people that bought houses a long time back and kept leveraging up into buying more.
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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 mu…
You're conflating different values of "you". If I sell my house to a non-resident person and receive money, why should I use that money to build more housing, rather than a Ferrari? Meanwhile, the people who actually build the houses aren't the ones selling all the existing stock in the most desirable locations. They are stuck building suburban sprawl because that's where the empty space is.
The desirable locations are a renewable resource. Portugal could build new desirable areas. They could even turn this into a recurring business and sell them to international investors, too. Instead of building suburban sprawl they can build more urban clusters.
Very difficult to change because, in the "Pax Neoliberalia" world we live in, profits are Sacrosanct - and the higher the capital concentration, the holier so. But some straightforward fixes: 1. Flood the market with affordable state housing, Austria-style - with the bonus of building new, boosting the national economy. 2. Create very progressive (rapidly rising) taxes based on property value - making untenable the c…
Well #1 is not 'straightfoward' fixes at all. Massive Real Estate buildouts are 'gigantic' industrial projects. A 'straight forward fix' is to ban foreign ownership of homes and AirBnB. Poof. Now, I wouldn't support that, but it would be 'straight forward'. #2 is reasonable. #3 is a big glib tough. "Hey, everyone should just get a raise!", if it were only that easy!
What's wrong with large industrial projects?
It's exactly what we need at this moment - in fact, both Portugal and EU-scale.
This would cost a small fraction of the Quantitative Easing program from the European Central Bank.
(and these Massive Real Estate buildouts must include the lessons in Urbanism learned from past such projects)
2. (y)
3. State sector raises salaries, private sector is forced to follow. Just raising minimum wage is positive, but not enough. This tends to compress people to the bottom salary tier and promote even more brain drain.
This sounds like what happened in the SFbay area(south bay/pennisula), I grew up there and it used to be a great place to live, center left politics, lots of families and a diverse set of industries with many middle class opportunities. right around 10-15 years ago things started to change dramatically for the worse, housing and costs everywhere skyrocketed, homeless population exploded, politics veered hard left. Mo…
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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 abando…
I hope Portugal won't tackle it like my country, with a cap on rent and other market distortions. I think that only makes it worse. Fun fact: I - as a single - live in a way too big, luxurious and expensive apartment because of this. I rented it, when I was still working for the man and was making a killing. Now I live a much more modest 4-hour-workweek life. It would be better for me to move to an apartment half the…
> I hope Portugal won't tackle it like my country, with a cap on rent and other market distortions. I think that only makes it worse. That's one of the reasons why portuguese renting market is so bad. There were rent control policies for like 40 years. It has been phased out but the market still has the signs of its damages. There also other contributing policies and the policies change almost every two years. I'm on…
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> 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 > It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end. These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active…
The "ethno-" in nationalism isn't silent or implied though. Canada has been a very heterogeneous nation for over a century, Israel is also very heterogeneous where people are bound by religion and not ethnicity, France and Spain have a huge and integrated north african populations and they are French and Spanish, full stop. Brazil, also a nation with as much global diversity as is available. This trope that nations a…
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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…
Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a heavy tax on top.
Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.