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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

#251

Post by zozbot234 »

danans wrote: post #241
zozbot234 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... Stoking grievances over the increased diversity of those countries ... The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in civic attitudes. The progressive left expresses the exact same concerns in a different wording, by decrying the increased "marginalization and exclusion" that's seemingly entailed by such diversity. Guess what: they're all looking…

> The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in civic attitudes. I fail to see how the previous US president's complaints about people coming from "s*hole countries" and the exhortations from the Charlottesville rioters about how "Jews will not replace us" are grievances about "decline in civic attitudes". Try as one may to dissociate them, but these a…

The sad truth is that Jews have always been used as a convenient scapegoat for grievances of all kinds, and this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of bourgeois capitalism on the Jews, and this casual anti-Semitism was picked up by many on the left.

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

#252

Post by stjohnswarts »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #225
jollybean wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

1. "banning foreign ownership" would result in Portugalexit at best, perhaps a Zairization of Portugal, or even worse - no thanks. 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 lesson…

(1). why not just make it painful to be a foreigner there. Raise taxes on rent/property if you're foreign by 3-4x (or whatever makes sense after an analysis of building new housing from foreigner tax dollars). If you don't want to scare off the ones already there then make it not retroactive. People like to make these situations tougher than they need to be. Mostly it's impossible because politicians are paid off by the 1% (foreign and domestic). The Portuguese have a right to enjoy their country without foreigners coming in and buying it off and pushing them to the edge of poverty. Globalism has got us in a tenuous situation in the West depending completely on the likes of China for our style of living. I can understand the Portuguese being angry with the situation.

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

#253

Post by [deleted] »

ryukafalz wrote: post #131
solveit wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building physical houses to sit empty as a financial instrument has to be one of the peaks of capitalist insanity. I quite agree, and I am therefore very suspicious that this is actually happening in significant volume! I have never seen convincing evidence that this happens, and it, at least superficially, makes no sense as a money-making scheme (Worried about degradation? That just means you should get insurance.…

Indeed. I'm most familiar with the US market so can't speak for European countries which may be different, but here's a graph of estimated vacant units held off-market against total housing units in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=TiNw

[deleted]

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

#254

Post by pdpi »

iostream25 wrote: post #191
pdpi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember Passos Coelho suggesting that the young will need to emigrate for work, circa the time of the crisis/austerity.

Yup. So I did.

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

#255

Post by stjohnswarts »

closedloop129 wrote: post #187
humanwhosits wrote: post #142

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 mu…

I don't think it is. If you can't own the property or have to pay extreme taxes you will definitely think twice about moving there or buying up real estate. Make it -hurt-. Then only billionaires can afford to live there. Problem solved, there aren't that many billionaires. Or simply outlaw it. I don't know why that is hard? I mean they own their country. No one has a right to buy property there other than the Portuguese if they just say no.

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

#256

Post by danans »

zozbot234 wrote: post #251
danans wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in civic attitudes. I fail to see how the previous US president's complaints about people coming from "s*hole countries" and the exhortations from the Charlottesville rioters about how "Jews will not replace us" are grievances about "decline in civic attitudes". Try as one may to dissociate them, but these a…

The sad truth is that Jews have always been used as a convenient scapegoat for grievances of all kinds, and this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of bourgeois capitalism on the Jews, and this casual anti-Semitism was picked up by many on the left.

> this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of bourgeois capitalism on the Jews

Your argument is intentionally mixing "is" with "was".

Marx died 140 years ago, and there are no ethno-nationalist voices of significance on the left today. In the US context, after the civil rights movement of the 20th century those people left the Democratic party as the parties realigned themselves.

Today it is largely a right wing phenomenon, carrying forward the tradition of right wing ethno-nationalism that persisted from the previous century.

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

#257

Post by pkaye »

swearwolf wrote: post #248
subsubzero wrote: post #171

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…

As a resident, what do you think was the catalyst for these changes?

A lot of people moved into the bay area for the good jobs, nice weather and nature. Once housing demand pushed above supply, prices started shooting up. Those locals whose incomes didn't grow were pushed out of their homes. The bay area is boxed in by the hills so hard to expand out. Also a lot of the land was already build up with single family homes and other low density housing a long time ago so upgrading the density is harder. The public transportation is also limited. BART didn't expand to south bay until a few years ago. And the stations are far apart. Undoing all this mess will be much more expensive now.

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

#258

Post by spaniard89277 »

jseliger wrote: post #115
jonathanstrange wrote: post #97

Yes, the situation is dire. I live in Lisbon as a foreigner for more than 12 years now. We pay a rent for a small flat that used to be very expensive and now is on the cheap side in our quarter of the city. Luckily, we have an older contract that cannot be changed as easily as newer ones. I'm not thrilled by the possibility that our landlord might cancel it some day, however, e.g. for relatives to move in. Rents in t…

We pay a rent for a small flat that used to be very expensive and now is on the cheap side in our quarter of the city Portugal should build more housing, which is a simple, effective solution if the rent is too damn high: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/the-ren... . The nice thing about indoor space is that we can make pretty much as much of it as we'd like.

You can induce demand too. Somehow they'll have to limit that demand.

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

#259

Post by petre »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #247
petre wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone wins.

Not really, they're either retired or buying property to park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect time to extract taxes from them.

The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I fully understand why a group of youths was protesting against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city like it's a theme park.

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

#260

Post by WalterBright »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #199

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…

Inflation is not the result of profits, gouging, etc. It's the result of funding the deficit by running the printing press. (Or the modern equivalent, creating debt backed by nothing.)

The proof is the observation that endemic inflation only happens in countries with fiat money systems.

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