The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

But blaming the poor young people priced out of their own country for not breeding, and just bringing third world immigrants with no living standards, is much easier than improving the living standards of your own population.

As long as you treat housing like a speculative investment that is squeezing the young to get a much larger return for the older owners, instead of treating it like shelter and a basic necessity for any family, why are you surprised young people don't breed anymore? The precarious job market isn't doing them any favors either.

Mass migration that puts more pressure on affordable housing and on the low-end jobs market is not the solution here. That breeds long term instability, segregation, distrust, and leads to political extremism. The solution is fixing housing, which nobody actually wants to do, because "housing prices must go UP", and the ruling asset owning class is making a killing from it.

This goes back a long time. The stockbroker belt/home counties as where commuters into London live has been a thing for more than a century, since railways then automobiles made this practical.

The attitude klabb3 mentioned of "Europeans don't want American suburbs" is, as I think he is realizing, nonsense. No matter where, no matter who, the majority of people prefer detached homes with lawns if they can afford them. (I speak as among the minority who prefers dense living.)

I agree that buying housing stock and leaving it empty is an issue. But they're not the cause of all the housing issues, in most cases they're a tiny fraction of the problem. Most cities have vacancy rates of just a couple percent. Given the average person in a big city moves every 4 years and a home is empty for 1 month inbetween tenants/owners, you'd already have 2% permanent vacancy rates. Most cities have vacancy rates of 3-4%, Lisbon has 5%. It's definitely stupid to allow high vacancy rates and most cities have laws against them (here in Amsterdam you get fined for leaving your house empty), but even shaving off 1 or 2% off the vacancy rates isn't solving the housing problem. It very often features in newspaper articles because it's a clickbait story: rich person buys home and leaves it empty. Again, it's stupid and we should expand laws against it, but solving it still keeps 99% of the issues with housing which have nothing to do with this phenomenon.

And this phenomenon is limited precisely because housing is a market, and from a financial perspective it's a stupid idea to buy an asset and forgo its use or its returns.

Beyond that, nothing that I noted about assets has a disconnect because everyone else owning housing simply rents it out at the market rate, which is both the most expensive but also the cheapest marginal price to provide an extra unit of housing, which is the same for any asset and there's no real disconnect here.

Additionally, Portugal is suffering from high taxes (because everyone tries to avoid paying them, it's a vicious circle), and low productivity (they are working a lot, but ineffectively and in the wrong industries).

Almost 10% of the population have emigrated to the rest of Europe and they have every right to do so, just like all Europeans have the right to live in Lisbon.

And for the Brazilians being picked on in the article - Portugal could never finance its completely unsustainable social security system were it not for the influx of foreigners working there.

What's really needed is to address government corruption, fighting tax avoidance, lowering the taxes and increasing social housing projects. But this is very difficult to do.