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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

#471

Post by alberth »

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…

Gentrification

> 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 … Rents in the city have skyrocketed, we'd have a hard time finding anything

I know this comment won’t be received well, but aren’t you describing gentrification & how you participated (maybe unknowingly) in what has caused prices to skyrocket. And you’re now complaining because someone even more rich than you has caused prices to exceed your means, just like you did to a local person when you moved in as a foreigner.

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

#472

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#473

Post by tarakat »

MikeTheRocker wrote: post #469
tarakat wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to empathize with a belief system that thinks pricing a native population out of their own country is fair. I suppose if you hold that everything should be subordinate to economics, including community and nationhood?

Fair is generally defined to mean in accordance with established rules and without bias. Offering preferential renting rights or pricing to certain cohorts such as people of a given age, nationality, etc. would clearly not be fair under this definition.

If a nation cannot give preference to its own people, then that nation effectively does not exist. As for "established rules", the idea that nations should be reduced to economic zones is relatively novel, and not something most voters (i.e. the people nominally deciding on those rules) agree with.

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

#474

Post by jollybean »

zozbot234 wrote: post #236
jollybean wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness and home prices are actually separate problems, even though they feel linked, they are barely so. You can have a relatively affordable city like Montreal and still a lot of homelessness.

They're very closely linked problems. The easiest way to solve homelessness is to give the homeless a place they can call home. Which is a lot cheaper if housing is already in abundant supply.

About 1/2 of homelessness is not a money problem, it's a social/behavioural problem.

The homeless people in my neighbourhood are all crack addicts. They get up and urinate/shit 3ft from where they are standing instead of walking 100ft to the park. They are 'feral'.

If you gave them a 'home' it would immediately be a crack den for them and their buds. The bathroom or anything else would literally never get cleaned ever. It'd fall into disrepair quickly. There'd be no hope of them having any kind of job or anything like that.

The other 1/2 are temporary homeless, usually due to some kind of calamity. Housing prices isn't so much the problem a they need to be 'stabilized'. A 20% shift in rental costs will not affect those people very much.

Low housing costs can positively affect a huge swath of people, freeing up income for other things, but it won't change the number of crackheads on the street and probably not the % of people that 'fall out of the system' for a few weeks.

High housing costs are mostly a strain on working people. w

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

#475

Post by WalterBright »

andrekandre wrote: post #365
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 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?

Creating trillions of dollars with the stroke of a pen and then showering that onto the economy.

It's Supply&Demand at work. Create lots of money (add Supply) and the value of it goes down (Inflation).

The same thing happens to the price of refrigerators if 10 million gets dumped on the market. The price for a refrigerator goes down.

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

#476

Post by darth_avocado »

alberth wrote: post #471
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…

Gentrification > 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 … Rents in the city have skyrocketed, we'd have a hard time finding anything I know this comment won’t be received well, but aren’t you describing gentrification & how you participated (maybe unknowingly) in what has caused prices to skyrocket. And you’re now complaining because s…

Gentrification is an overblown concern. No one has the right to live in a specific area. Migration is human tendency. Just like poor people have a right to move from a rural area to a city in search of better employment opportunities, people with money have right to move to cheaper locations to get a better bang for their buck.

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

#477

Post by llanowarelves »

joshlemer wrote: post #133
marcodiego wrote: post #31

One of my students got a job offer in Portugal before the pandemic. He personally came to thank me for being his teacher; he is a good, dedicated student. Pandemic came, he stayed in Brazil doing remote work. Found him a few days ago. He told me he gave up going to Portugal and decided to stay in Brazil for now mostly because cost of living there. His initial salary would be 1.6K euros.

1.6k euros per... month?

Always bugs me that Europeans use the word "salary" to mean monthly payments when in the US it defaults to meaning yearly.

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

#478

Post by keepquestioning »

gip wrote: post #445
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…

That is an anecdotinal data point.. I live in a building with 6 units in the Mission district of SF. Until a few years ago my neighbours were people: families, (gay) couples,.. We now have 3 startups in our building. One of the startup (YC-backed!) moved out yesterday. The guys just threw what they didn't want into the street from the windows of their second floor apartment. And disappeared, leaving a filthy mess on…

You need to report them to YC

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

#479

Post by hugh-avherald »

makeitdouble wrote: post #410
jseliger wrote: post #115

Earlier 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.

It gives me pause when an obvious action is actively rejected for decades, but still is asserted as a "simple" solution. It might be the _right_ solution, but if it failed to be adopted for so long it can't be that simple, isn't it ?

In this case, it really is simple. It's just the opposition is vehement.

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

#480

Post by Mandatum »

ginja wrote: post #458
mtw wrote: post #34

This is not just Portugal. I see similar sentiment in Canada where young professionals in Vancouver or Toronto complain they can't buy their first home and Vancouver has been "sold out" to foreigners. Similar sentiment in Australian major cities as well.

Yeah, but it's much worse in Portugal, especially Lisbon. Here are some median home price to median income ratios for various cities (from Numbeo: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Lisbon and corresponding pages for other cities): - Lisbon: 18.06 - Porto: 13.55 - Sydney: 9.09 - Melbourne: 7.05 - Vancouver: 12.62 - Toronto: 11.82 - San Francisco: 7.02 - Los Angeles: 7.47 - New York: 9.99

Wow, Auckland is 12. Didn't realize they were that bad comparatively.
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