So there’s a ton of countries that I’ve heard have had truly unaffordable housing for decades, like:
- The UK
- Ireland
- The Netherlands
And I’ve heard of a ton of countries where the cost of houses was until recently quite affordable where it’s also started getting worse:
- Germany
- Poland
- Czechia
- Hungary
- The US
- Australia
- Canada
- And I’m sure plenty others
- It seems to be a pan-Western bloc thing. Is the cause in all these countries the same?
- We’ve heard of success stories in cities like Vienna where much of the housing stock is municipally owned – but those cities have had it that way for decades. Would their system alleviate the current crisis if established in the aforementioned countries?
- What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again? Is there any silver bullet? Has any country demonstrably managed to reverse this crisis yet?
Finland only has approximately 1000 willfully homeless people. I’d call that solving the crisis.
As a Finn, please stop talking about us as some kind of utopia. We haven’t solved shit and our government is infested with fascists. I’m preeetty sure there are a lot more than that out there, unless a quarter of those 1000 happen to be around my morning commute.
As a non-Finn, can you stop being some utopia despite your fascist-invested government?
You still have better educational system.
They also have a relatively small monocultural population and really cold winters.
True, but they could just decide to ignore homeless people like most of the US and other capitalist countries have, but they didn’t.
If they did ignore it, by spring there would be less homelessness.
How does having a monocultural population make housing easier?
one of the main reasons people are against state housing is because people with the wrong skin color might get it
I was going to let him say something obtusely racist and then roast him, but this works too.
EDIT: He did it anyway.
They literally can’t help themselves
Removed by mod
Shut uppppp. I live in a building that has a lot of immigrants (mostly students) and we get along just fine. That “oh I’m not racist, different cultures just can’t fit together” argument is bullshit, and even if people from different cultures don’t get along too well, it’s still better than them being outside when it’s -20 degrees.
Also as if people of the “same culture” aren’t equally as hard to live around.
I’m sorry, food choices? Are you literally making a “but they smell” argument?
Hot take: blatant racism and veiled racism are equally bad reasons for a country to have poor housing policy.
I’m pretty sure ALL reasons are bad reasons? It doesn’t stop humans from generally being racist when it comes to housing. Which is a shame; you grow a lot more as a person when you live next to people from other cultures.
Right. So in other words, we should just implement Finland’s social housing model everywhere.
Do you often find yourself having to be “actively tolerant” of people’s differences?
Funny how so many people took that. Pointing out that people are, as a whole, racist, and that it influences how they think about the homeless gets turned into a “here’s my bigotry coming out to tell you why it won’t work.”
I guess I could have framed it more clearly, but once the mods removed it, I figured people would just move on.
It doesn’t, that’s just a bullshit, half baked “argument” people like to use when someone points out to them that Scandinavian nations have figured most of this shit out already.
But Finland only has like 2000 people. /s
That’s good to hear, although it’s kinda beyond the scope of my question. I’m asking more about how to stop prices rising when they’ve suddenly started quickly rising and people don’t know why.
Yeah I was going to say Finland. Their public housing system should be an example for other nations to follow.
They won’t, of course…
What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again?
- Ban corporate ownership and excessive individual ownership (ex: > 10) of homes.
- Remove most barriers to building lots of new and higher density housing (ex: four-story multi-unit buildings) except legitimate safety and ecological concerns.
In my own Portugal, which is a very turistic country and also towards the bottom of the GDP-per-capita scale in the EU, things that would likely work very well would also be:
- Crack down on AirBnB
- Forbid ownership for non-residents.
Portugal currently has a massive house inflation problem (extra massive, because of how low average incomes are here) and a lot of it has to do with residential housing being removed from the housing market and turned into short term turist lets (for example, over 10% of housing in Lisbon has been turned into AirBnB lets) and foreign investors (not just big companies but also individuals, such as well off pensioneers from places like France) pulling prices up by being far less price sensitive than the locals as they’re buying residential housing as investments having far more money available than the average Portuguese.
Having lived in both Britain and Portugal during housing bubbles, what I’ve observed was that the politicians themselves purposefully inflate those bubbles, partly because they themselves are part of the upper middle class or even above (especially in the UK) who can afford to and have Realestate “investments” and hence stand to gain personally (as do their mates) from Realestate prices going up and partly because the way Official GDP (which is supposedly the Real GDP, which has Inflation effects removed) is calculated nowadays means that house price inflation appears as GDP “growth” since the effects of house price increases come in via the “inputted rent” mechanism but the Inflation Indexes used to create that GDP do not include house price inflation, so by sacrificing the lives of many if not most people in the country (especially the young, for example the average age for them to leave their parent’s home in Portugal is now above 34 years old and at this point half of all University graduates leave the country as soon as they graduate) they both enrich themselves and can harp in the news all about how they made the GDP go up.
All this has knock on effects on the rest of the Economy, from the braindrain as highly educated young adults leave and the even faster population aging as people can’t afford to have kids, to shops closing because most people have less money left over after paying rent or mortgage so spend less, plus the commercial realestate market is also in a bubble so shops too suffer from higher rents. However all this is slow to fully manifest itself plus those who bought their houses before when they were cheaper don’t feel directly like the rest, and they generally don’t really mentally link the more visible effects (such as more and more empty storefronts) to realestate inflation, much less do more complex analysis of predictable effects, such as how the braindrain and fall in birthrates will impact their pensions in a decade or two.
Crack down on AirBnB Forbid ownership for non-residents.
Ah, yes, I forgot to mention AirBnB! Those are both good calls.
The AirBnb issue is a little complicated because I’ve seen some good arguments that it can help people afford to keep their homes. But I think that could easily be addressed by a single, simple rule: you are only allowed to rent your primary residence as determined by tax records.
that it can help people afford to keep their homes
This is actually a good argument but I believe it’s only valid when people sub-let empty rooms, and don’t buy whole new houses to rent out as is now more commonly the case.
In addition to only renting out single rooms, I also thought of the scenario where someone goes to visit a relative and rents their whole apartment while they’re away, perhaps when there is some major event in their town that causes all hotels to be sold out. Both of those scenarios would be addressed by the rule I proposed to only allow renting out the primary residence on AirBnB.
Agreed
only allow renting out the primary residence on AirBnB.
Yes this sounds like a good (and importantly very simple) rule
I think I had heard of the idea before, so I didn’t come up with it. I just did a quick search and one of the first results says LA does this. There are probably other cities too…
https://www.steadily.com/blog/airbnb-short-term-rental-laws-regulations-los-angeles
Primary Residence: Hosts can only list their primary residence—the home where they live for at least six months of the year—as a short-term rental. Registration: A mandatory registration process with the city includes obtaining a Home-sharing permit and paying an annual $89 fee. Hosts must renew this permit and provide evidence of continuous compliance. Annual Cap: Short-term rentals are subject to a 120-day annual cap.
Actually, this is impressive. LA seems to have it’s shit together on this issue. Do you know if house prices are still a problem there?
I see, yes I definitely agree that AirBnB is part of the problem (it’s happening too here in Prague), although I think it can’t be the main cause because the price rise is also being felt in other parts of the country where there are practically no tourists…
Whilst I would be wary of saying AirBnB is the main cause (more likely it’s a big one but not the only one), keep in mind that when realestate prices go up in major cities, that pushes out people who go to cheaper places, pushing prices up in those places which in turn might push some out from those places and into even cheaper places.
So housing bubbles centered in main cities do naturally spread out from there to places were the original causes of the bubble are not present.
That is certainly a good point
Free
Social
Housing
Stop making it more complicated
