Tokyo seems to have solved this by building houses and transportation right? What's preventing other governments from duplicating this? Politics? If so what was unique about Tokyo?
The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
361–370 of 817 posts
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, facts. Demographics explains most of what's going on. Portugal's working age population is declining[1] while its 60-plus population is increasing.[2] Old people own most of the real estate and don't care much about workers. They also tend not to like change, which immigrants bring. So they dislike immigrants despite depending on them. (//TODO: find papers supporting these assertions: they're factoids of the "e…
I'm struggling to follow your arguments. "Boomers don't like immigrants/workers, therefore life is getting really expensive" doesn't really sound like good reasoning. If the population is shrinking, demographics doesn't explain it by itself. Housing should be getting cheaper if there are less people competing for it. There must be another factor here.
You’re forgetting household size.
As with all wealthy countries, household size has fallen in Portugal over the past few decades, so the same amount of people needs more house. This is especially true in the context of empty nest retirees.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#363Yes, 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…
Airbnb and uber for all their benefits have taken away a lot of urban planning capabilities of local govts. At the same time, they expose the general unwillingness of local govts to accomodate the need of the population or those who bring in economic value (tourists, transplants).
If you are becoming a tourist hub, then create an off-town tourist area and add a convenient transit line/people mover to the central parts of town. Tourists get reasonable housing, locals don't get displaced and the influx of population does not destroy the cultural vibe of your town.
Prohibition never works, and piracy is a reflection of an unmet need. Banning things merely airs out open wounds, and leads to grey-markets such as shady uber/airbnb equivalents within the city. If you want to reduce abortions, banning merely leads to riskier abortions. Examples of this are dime a dozen.
When demand arrives, the cities MUST adjust to incoming demand. Couple examples of working uncomfortable compromises are: 1. Paris - Choose a small district and allow it to go full skyscraper. The rest of the town maintains its architectural identity. 2. Barcelona - Go full superblock. Means that tourist activity gets neatly distributed across the city (removing bottlenecks) and tourists do not lead to increase in car traffic.
I could go on and on, but 1 fundamental truth stays. Bottlenecks only help those who control access to it. The key is to eliminate the bottleneck (more housing). Band-aids (rent-control) or equitable distribution of bottleneck gains (no-renters->only-homeowners/ more single-family-housing) never works. It only leads to the situation festering (see Bay Area / SF), and makes for an even harder problem in the future.
I'm not sure if my comment conveys any cohesive point, but I hope folks get something out of it.
p.s: fuck NIMBYs
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that straightforward, California (which has much more space and money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be moving to Portugal.
For many decades, California has had extremely restrictive building regulations, especially in the most desirable areas. That is slowly changing, but the actual building has always been straightforward. It is getting the permission to do so that is complicated, expensive, and often just impossible.
The most desirable areas aren't filled with buildings at every corner.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#365Very 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.
i think the better question to ask is, whats the bigger contributor to inflation of prices recently...?
gas prices? electronics supply issues? general supply chain issues? (expected soon) energy/food supply issues?
how does commodity money fix that?
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#366Yes, 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…
This seems to be a problem everywhere around the world in big cities. What’s propping all of these property prices up? Supply and demand rules don’t seem to apply at all. You might have thousands of empty apartments in a city yet the price only keeps going up. Everything is broken, but housing is particularly broken.
In Rome, Italy, we have an estimated 150k empty apartments in a 2.9 millions people city...that we know of..yet they build and build and prices keep going up.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that straightforward, California (which has much more space and money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be moving to Portugal.
It's very technically simple. Humans have been building housing, dense housing even, for millennia. Yes, standards are higher now, but we also have technological improvements.
The challenge is nearly always political in nature: a lot of vested interests want to go out of their way to make it harder to build more housing.
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#368Tokyo seems to have solved this by building houses and transportation right? What's preventing other governments from duplicating this? Politics? If so what was unique about Tokyo?
* transportation: the outlays of programs like Five Commuting directions in Tokyo was a direct contributor to the collapse of JNR, which led to the government assuming all JNR debt and privatizing the railways as JR Group
* housing production in Tokyo is great, but to put this in context today's Japanese housing market essentially happened after the bubble pop in the '90s. Prices from 1991 to 2004 had declined by 64% due to the pop. In that context, deregulation was palatable because people were already underwater and didn't bother as much to fight things that would lower property values. (In fact, it could've raised them.)
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many decades, California has had extremely restrictive building regulations, especially in the most desirable areas. That is slowly changing, but the actual building has always been straightforward. It is getting the permission to do so that is complicated, expensive, and often just impossible.
Agreed on all counts, but that doesn't make the problem of politics any less real. People problems are always the hardest to solve, especially when deeply problematic policies like Prop 13 are written into the state constitution.
You could say that it's technically simple but politically complex, sure.
But what that amounts to is, "we could do it, but collectively don't feel like it."
Re: The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
#370Very 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.
> Inflation is not the result of profits, gouging, etc.
Inflation is the measure of the price of goods
> It's the result of funding the deficit by running the printing press
Increasing the money supply indirectly increases the price of goods. It matters in the long run, but the price of goods can change in the short-term based on supply. The oil crisis of the 1970s caused oil prices to increase because oil supply was limited. This would have caused inflation even without an increased money supply.
> creating debt backed by nothing. ... fiat money systems.
This is more of a tangent, but the money supply can also shrink in fiat systems. Fiat currency can be shrunk via taxes. Debts can be defaulted. Fiat systems aren't inherently inflationary; but they target a low level of inflation because they prefer it to deflation.