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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

#331

Post by koboll »

orthoxerox wrote: post #314
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…

> Those that owned houses also moved as they were fed up with crime and could get a way better house somewhere else. How do the criminals afford to live in the area?

Well, there are two classes of criminal.

The petty crimes are committed by a small but very vocal minority of homeless people who are severely mentally ill and/or severely addicted to meth/opiates. They can afford to live here because everyone has apparently decided the most humane thing to do is to look the other way while they struggle, freeze, and eventually overdose and die on the street.

The larger-scale thefts are committed by organized crime operations that essentially operate a business of stealing and reselling stuff because of notoriously lax law enforcement. Think the opening scene of Requiem for a Dream, except an entire crew doing that, over and over and over. They make a lot of money doing this -- and drive up the cost of basic essentials for other working class people who have to buy what they resell because they clear drugstores out. They make enough to live comfortably, despite the high cost of living, apparently.

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

#332

Post by ekkeke »

tuatoru wrote: post #317

In the long run the problem is self-correcting. If workers can't afford to live in what were the important cities, they live elsewhere. Eventually employers move to where the workers are. The formerly important cities become tourist meccas like Venice or Granada, or ghost towns. This is happening to London and Lisbon, and to a lesser extent to Amsterdam, Paris, New York and San Francisco, and other cities. It's a pit…

Don't agree with this analysis, it will end just not like that. The workers will have worse and worse living conditions until they're reduced to effective serfdom. Eventually they may rise up and force change through voting or riots, but that's quite unlikely for some time as the generations that benefitted from this still outnumber those suffering.

The sad thing is that this has been done by one generation to the following one, parents impoverishing their own children. Not intentionally perhaps, but they have created the artificial supply side restrictions through planning laws and nimbyism that have resulted in their childrens impoverishment.

One of my friends is paying half his salary in rent with his own house impossibly out of sight, while his parents own multiple properties and rent them out.

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

#333

Post by saiya-jin »

armchairhacker wrote: post #265
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…

I’ve literally seen this same exact comment many, many times except with different locations. Eastern Mass, New York, Ontario, Britain, and even starting to hear it from suburban areas. The exact same concepts: cheap grandfathered lease, hoping the landlord doesn’t cancel, can’t afford rent despite making >100k, “luxury apartments”, empty apartments, illegal renting (e.g. AirBnB) and shadiness.

Practically every single capital is like that these days. People of all nations can copy paste same rant and it would be 100% valid. This is how it is, too much buying power with new generation of higher level office workers compared to blue collar ones, on top of financial speculation with either prices skyrocketing, or airbnbs. Let's not forget there is more and more of people in general, and more and more coming for work, education etc. to bigger places and rarely going back.

Or to put it in reverse - I am not aware of any metropolis/capital where this isn't true, regardless of regime.

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

#335

Post by kaashif »

This article makes me realise how fortunate I am to be the children of immigrants. My parents are very family oriented and were somewhat upset when I left my home country (which isn't my parents' original home country) for greener pastures, but if there's one thing immigrants understand, it's that if things are hard, you should move to where things aren't hard!

I'm sure the author has their reasons or whatever, but when they make statements like this:

> It’s not easy for anyone to emigrate, to have to deal with and to submited themselves to another culturee. It’s all hard, but to live away from those we love the most its the hardest.

It's just incredible to me that someone would act against their own economic interests so blatantly. The greatest innovation of the EU is free movement, and this person is unwilling to take advantage of it to escape economic hardship.

Obviously my mindset and the author's mindset have irreconcilable differences.

I think how the author keeps using "foreign" as an insult reveals something about their thought process:

> policies that benefit foreigners more than their residents.

> the majority are foreigners who are not there for a visit, but who live there.

> large public companies were sold off to Chinese managers who now do whatever they want

> The Portuguese are becoming, nothing more and nothing less, the servants of big foreign millionaires

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

#336

Post by selectodude »

sofixa wrote: post #284
WalterBright wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure you deserve engaging, but I'll give it a try. So you're just going to ignore a war involving two of the biggest exporters of some of the main raw materials we have (foodstuffs and energy) on the planet and associated supply problems on crucial things? Not to mention a pandemic that wrecked havoc on supply lines. None of that matters, your theory goes, it's purely a monetary phenomenon, because only count…

The value of fiat currency is roughly money supply divided by economic output. If the numerator rises faster than the denominator, well...

Obviously it's a more complicated than that, especially in the context of the US Dollar, but for smaller countries it's pretty basic stuff.

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

#337

Post by hahaxdxd123 »

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Everybod...

If you live in any society where land values are private profit, expect nothing less.

We're seeing this in America too, but hopefully with any luck, we still have enough entrepreneurial inertia that salaries (mine especially) remain high enough for a little while longer to make this palatable.

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

#338

Post by pyb »

stavros wrote: post #327
TulliusCicero wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How this usually works: "I'd do anything for lower housing prices!" Build more housing. "...but I won't do that."

Greece has the exact same problem. Rents are skyrocketing and people can't afford to live in their own cities. We're building more housing, but it doesn't seem to be helping. Maybe SF doesn't want to build more housing, but this isn't universal.

It's probably not enough new housing is getting built. People don't even remember what a real large-scale housing spree looks like, because these last happened generations ago. These are transformative events. eg in Athens in the 1950s-1970s : https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191011-the-surprising-...

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

#339

Post by pharmakom »

rr888 wrote: post #132
hnuser847 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Equities have a higher return historically. Housing is interesting though because mortgages offer huge leverage to retail investors.
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