801–810 of 817 posts
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My observation is, that it is about child care. Guarantee all parents affordable child care close to their work or home and many people settling for one kid will have two.
Guarantee all parents affordable child care close to their work or home Sweden has that (and generous parental leave policies) and still has both low and declining birth rates.
I bought a large house for peanuts this year in PT, just not in Lisbon. Really about the cheapest m2 with land I could get in Europe. Not everyone wants or needs to live in a city.
Where did you buy, how was your overall experience?
People are hardworking and friendly, there is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit among the young, even though they are not in lisboa.
The house we got is so cheap I didn’t even know you could get actual liveable places for that in the the west of the eu still.
It’s close enough to lisboa and Porto to just have a weekend there regularly.
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…
Come on, it's nowhere near dire - it's expensive yes, like just about every other capital city - Lisbon is still way cheaper than Paris or London. This poorly written rambling rant of an article has some valid points but no insight. I moved to Cascais near Lisbon 5 years ago because of Brexit and yes property has boomed, like in many other countries but money printing QE is not just a Portuguese phenomena. 10 Years a…
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I truly agree with most of what you say. This famous article discusses why housing is becoming a huge problem everywhere and why that's super bad for the economy: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e... . It's been discussed here a few times, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025 . The compromise Barcelona made is not enough. Sadly, that beautiful city is IMHO the prototypical ca…
Rent control usually causes rents to go up in the non-rent controlled areas. It just accelerates the unaffordability of all housing.
In practice, it's a free market and landlords have by no means been discouraged to offer flats.
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Tokyo also bans Airbnb, period. Something most people here don’t understand.
So Airbnb is facilitating illegal renting of properties? https://www.airbnb.com/s/Tokyo--Japan/homes?adults=2&refinem... Why wouldn't the government crack down on this?
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No, no, no, we don't need a "new type of town" built around some pre-fab gimmick. Literally you just need to lift zoning restrictions (and related bureaucratic crap like discretionary design review) and legalize building things that are slightly-to-moderately more dense than single family home suburban houses. That doesn't mean "dense towers". Suppose you see a man strangling himself, and he wants to know how to get…
Housing is only “affordable” if it’s subsidized. This is because construction and maintenance are out of reach for most people. New housing stock is expensive. Even if you use cheap materials, they need to be replaced in 10 years. So even if you build multi-family dwellings, the crisis isn’t resolved because the cost of construction, maintenance, and property taxes are out of reach. Unless it is subsidized. The UK is…
>So even if you build multi-family dwellings, the crisis isn’t resolved because the cost of construction, maintenance, and property taxes are out of reach. Unless it is subsidized. The UK is evidence of this. Almost all their housing is multi-family and dense and unit size is small even by European standards. But it’s expensive still. And they keep building.
No, this is totally, completely wrong, the housing crisis here is not because of materials or labour costs. It is a policy failure: a sluggish, capricious planning system, entrenched NIMBYism and politicians that cave to it, massive legal restrictions on supply, and subsidies to demand. We aren't building enough, there is a massive shortfall in housing supply.
See this thread: https://nitter.net/AntBreach/status/1121362679367598080
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Last time Europe had "strong leaders who will put first" it did NOT end well.
> Last time Europe had "strong leaders who will put first" it did NOT end well. If the leaders of a country won't put their own citizens first, who should they put first? I mean, for a country, which group of people are more important to that country than the citizens?
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> What’s propping all of these property prices up? Money printing, first and foremost
Via the process of federal-reserve style banks, mostly. They are allowed to create money. They don't lend out money of the depositors. They create it out of thin air by the authority of the government who has allocated these banks a special position, thus making these banks unfathomably wealthy. Unbelievably corrupt.
The alternative of a mineral backed currency that can’t adjust with population levels and is inherently deflationary we know to be far worse.
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> In 2020, the share of foreigners in the fair market value of homes was almost zero. a) What is the precise meaning of "foreigners" in this context? How is it measured? When the identity is hidden behind a numbered company, does our expert source disclose that? b) If someone who has gained citizenship then accepts a wire transfer of $10M+ (from someone who is not a citizen) and then proceeds to buy 10 houses (overbi…
When you buy a property your citizenship is now recorded. Previously it wasn't. We're now seeing the amount of people without Canadian citizenship has plunged. Before the tax was introduced in some areas of Metro Vancouver the amount of foreign buyers was relatively low, but in some areas the amount of foreigners was in the high teens, approaching 20%. As the amount of foreign buyers is now explicitly recorded in all…
Canada is oddly one of the places in the world wherein it's difficult to discover who owns what.
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> More houses means more houses for foreigners. Locals would never be able to afford them How do you arrive to that conclusion? - If you built 100 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 10 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 1 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 100k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 10k new houses…
Interestingly, building new houses won't necessarily make prices go down, as we'll all just compete for the more desirable ones, and pay whatever we can afford to 'get ahead of the Jones'. It might mean that the quality of what we end up living in is better though as the rubbish houses get left unfilled. Anyway, the problems is not so much that there is not enough housing, but that it is on the wrong place .