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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

#811

Post by Tiktaalik »

jollybean wrote: post #809
Tiktaalik wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's trivial to incorporate a business to buy property, I wonder how easy that circumvention is. Canada is oddly one of the places in the world wherein it's difficult to discover who owns what.

British Columbia is introducing a "beneficial ownership registry" as part of the foreign buyer tax stuff that would identify who actually owns what regardless of the numbered company that techncially owns it. Canada is bringing in one too.

"B.C.’s beneficial ownership registry being used in tax cases, visa applications"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

BC is certainly the first place in Canada to do this and they haven't even finished the registry yet. Seems like it's quite tricky to sort out.

"B.C.’s land registry aimed at finding hidden owners bogged down by concerns over clarity, confidentiality" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

Even though the thing isn't fully up and running yet, the government has been so clear years ago that they will do this that it probably would have had a chilling effect on future purchases.

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

#812

Post by TulliusCicero »

electriclove wrote: post #798
TulliusCicero wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that? The way I look at it, if the purpose is to protect people from needing to move because they can't afford property taxes, restrictions should be narrowly tailored to only apply in that case.

You lost me when you bring up burdensome and household income. Who gets to decide what burdensome is? An owner occupied home should be protected - regardless of how long they have been there or how much money they earn. I do not believe in penalizing this group. The other groups are all doing business and making money off others and I find that to be more justified for being taxed at market.

> Who gets to decide what burdensome is?

The same entity creating the regulations, I imagine. Who else would?

Set it at some threshold, if the property tax goes beyond some % of annual income then it gets capped.

> I do not believe in penalizing this group.

Letting people pay property taxes proportional to their property value is not "punishment", any more than people paying income taxes proportional to their income is "punishment".

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

#813

Post by lr4444lr »

42e6e8c8-f7b8-4 wrote: post #415
lr4444lr wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe largely isn't reproducing. It has to allow immigration for its survival.

It can also put in place policies to increase native population growth.

The Nordic countries have the best social safety nets in the world and their native birthrate is still dismal. What short of significant financial incentives would you do? The correlation is women's right to control their reproductive timing and access to the highest levels of the workforce. In almost every country where women aren't second class citizens, birth rate plummets.

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

#814

Post by Valakas_ »

Aeolun wrote: post #454
capableweb wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The nice thing about indoor space is that we can make pretty much as much of it as we'd like. What? Have you ever been in Lisbon? The city is pretty dense as it is. You could mostly just build higher, and that has its limits too, depending on the structure and foundation. Adding more housing outside the core of the city might not be attractive enough. And increasing the density of people also means you need to incr…

40 story skyscrapers with apartments in the city center should solve the issue.

Yep. Gotta love even more cars and people / m2, as if traffic wasn't bad enough as it is. Some people really just think the solution is to cram more people into an already overflowing place. And please don't compare with SF or NY. Those are definitely not models. Everyone knows how shit the traffic is there. A good urban planning will limit population density by, among others, limiting height of buildings.

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

#815

Post by Valakas_ »

googlryas wrote: post #288

Isn't it more accurate to say the Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Lisbon(or Porto, or some other desirable city)? If you have a city with X housing units, but 5X people from within the city + all over the country/world want to live there, and for whatever reason no one wants to/can build 4X more housing units, how do you fairly determine who gets to live there and who doesn't? * Is it fair if you were born…

Too bad for people "all over the world that want to live in it" when said country has sovereignty and can vote to prevent locals to be displaced by them. People of each country decide what is fair or not, not people outside of it.

Is it fair that someone, by sheer accident, was born in SF, is SWE and now wants to take advantage of that stupidly high income and dislodge people who have lived their whole lives in a certain place? Probably worked much harder and for longer? Where all their family and friends live and always lived for more than a century? Their culture and life? You seem to forget Portugal is not the US. They have more than 3 times your history and with it each place has a markedly different personality and much deeper roots not only culturally but also relationally.

Maybe you're used to a capitalistic emotionless everything-is-replaceable view and that in life all is fair and square, the ends justify the means, but perhaps you should rethink it.

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

#816

Post by ricardobayes »

bamboozled wrote: post #781
tbdenney wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBnB already is limited in Amsterdam: "According to Dutch regulations, you can only rent out your entire home in Amsterdam for a maximum of 30 nights per year, unless you have a specific permit that allows you to rent out your home for more nights, such as a short term stay license." https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/860/amsterdam

Lived in Amsterdam a few years back, the AirBNBs made it freaking torture during summer. The old wooden buildings where one could hear everything, people arriving and talking loudly in the stairwells then banging their suitcases up the stairs etc. We left, couldn't deal wit it.

I feel your pain, it's definitely a big problem in many places in Europe. Bad construction + overcrowded = Noisy. That said I grew up in a concrete high-rise 'high density' building in Eastern Europe, and I can't recall that I ever heard any neighbor.

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

#817

Post by ricardobayes »

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.

I wonder how many more software unicorns will we produce that start out promising but end up (possibly) being net-negative on the society as a whole?
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