[HN Gopher] The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
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The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
Author : nateb2022
Score : 260 points
Date : 2022-09-01 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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.
| marcodiego wrote:
| For people asking about the salary: yes it is per month. Also
| compare it to Brazilian reality: median programmer salary here
| is, according to a quick google search: "The estimated salary
| for a computer programmer is $62,420 per year in Brazil, IN.",
| which comes to around 10-12K euros a year. My experience when I
| was a developer is really around that value. Getting 1.6K euros
| a month is a VERY good initial salary in Brazil, specially if
| you live in low cost of living areas like Northeastern
| backlands.
| mikestew wrote:
| _" The estimated salary for a computer programmer is $62,420
| per year in Brazil, IN."_
|
| As sibling has stated, Brazil (properly pronounced "BRAY-
| zil") is a small town in the U. S. state of Indiana. What
| amazes me though, as one that grew up probably 20 miles from
| the town, is that anyone in Brazil, IN is paying $62K/year.
| But it's been 30 years since I lived anywhere near there,
| looks like it's grown a little.
| brotherjerky wrote:
| > The estimated salary for a computer programmer is $62,420
| per year in Brazil, IN
|
| Uh, this is almost certainly data for the US city of Brazil,
| Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil,_Indiana -- not
| the country of Brazil
| joshlemer wrote:
| 1.6k euros per... month?
| joao_lopes wrote:
| Also, in Portugal you receive 14 months per year instead of
| 12 (one extra on summer holiday and another on Christmas).
| outworlder wrote:
| Yeah. It's a decent salary for a junior, when converted to
| BRL. Heck, even for senior positions outside tech.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yeah, that would be the kind of money you'd get as a junior
| "anything", even outside tech.
| [deleted]
| outworlder wrote:
| The article seems odd and is all over the place.
|
| > The government has taken desirable measures for foreigners,
| making it easier for them to get golden visas if someone invests
| a certain amount of money. My husband, who works in real estate,
| tells me countless stories of flats left uninhabited by some rich
| person who arrived at the building, bought two flats so that he
| could get a visa, and doesn't even live there.
|
| There are a bunch of restrictions on where and what types of
| properties qualify. You can no longer buy property in large
| cities and get the 'golden visa'.
|
| I do not think that is the main driver in large cities. _IF_
| these price hikes are indeed driven by foreigners, it 's probably
| other European Union residents.
|
| > Nowadays, flats are being rented in Lisbon for four thousand
| euros
|
| Yeap. Rented. So why did they bring up the visa thing? You can't
| qualify if you rent.
|
| Also, housing prices have been increasing all around the globe at
| the same time economies are screwed up and inflation is rampant
| everywhere. Blaming foreigners seem... xenophobic? I didn't know
| Portugal was like that.
|
| For starters, is there enough new construction to satisfy demand?
| If not, there's the answer.
|
| > (...) And if Brazilians, who must be the largest source of
| Portuguese immigration, move here
|
| Wait. I thought the problem was rich foreigners? There are rich
| people in Brazil sure, but I seriously doubt their numbers would
| even move the needle. The overwhelming majority of expats are
| _not_ millionaires. If you are that rich, you can have a pretty
| great quality of life and would only look to live in Portugal if
| you were really into Europe or something like that. Rich
| brazilians are more likely to want to have property in Miami.
|
| > The Portuguese are becoming, nothing more and nothing less, the
| servants of big foreign millionaires
|
| Back to the foreign millionaire thing.
|
| Way back in 2012 I had the opportunity to live and work in
| Europe. I considered Portugal, but while the country is amazing
| and the food is good, the salaries were utterly terrible compared
| to the neighboring countries. It seems that things have not
| changed.
| speeder wrote:
| Indeed there is some weirdness in this article.
|
| For example, it claims Brazillians are going to Portugal in
| large numbers because Bolsonaro...
|
| Except, Brazillians are going to Portugal in large numbers,
| because the Portuguese government invited them, out of
| necessity since the country is depopulated and has low birth
| rates.
|
| I am one of the Brazilians that intend to move to Portugal, and
| part of the reason is that I am not exactly Brazilian, yes I
| was born in Brazil, but my family is from Portugal, and I was
| raised with a Portuguese culture, I just don' t feel like
| Brazil is my home and want to try going back to my family
| hometown (Leiria) to see if it is a place that clicks with me.
|
| Lisbon and other metropolises indeed are bad, but because a
| incredible amount of people want to live there despite lack of
| enough land there.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Lisbon and other metropolises indeed are bad, but because a
| incredible amount of people want to live there despite lack
| of enough land there.
|
| And infrastructure. Lisbon is incredibly dense, partly due to
| its historical neighborhoods that's impenetrable by modern
| surface traffic, and a subway network with insufficient reach
| for a growing metropolis, resulting in everyone packing
| themselves denser in the few desirable areas.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| That's what happens when you incentivize wealthy people to move
| in and buy houses in masses. Price rises and locals struggle.
| Same happens when states competes to get the next big co HQ in
| town. It's a double edged sword.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > flats with just two bedrooms going for more than half a million
| euros in the centers of Lisbon or Oporto.
|
| How is that different from other places? Houses in the center of
| big cities are always a lot more expensive than others far away
| from it. Want a small one in the center of Rome? Here you are:
| 27mq, 2nd floor and no elevator, no heating, no air conditioning,
| abysmal energy efficiency, no kitchen, renovation needed, only
| EUR600,000. What a bargain!
|
| https://www-tecnocasa-it.translate.goog/vendita/appartamenti...
|
| No thanks, I'll rather spend less than one third for the 7 times
| bigger house I'll be soon relocating to. I lived most of my life
| near the center of Rome; if you come as a tourist I concur it can
| be a wonderful experience, but after decades of traffic, noise
| and pollution, leaving for a much quieter and cleaner place with
| plenty of space for my hobbies is the best thing I could do. And
| it's also much cheaper. YMMV of course.
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm from Rome and your example is cherrypicked bs.
|
| Yes, very central touristic areas are expensive but half a
| million can get you 3 room apartments you can go to center by
| feet, even less would be enough.
|
| That's the price you would pay, e.g. in Ostiense.
| immibis wrote:
| It's not different. _Nobody_ can afford to live _anywhere_.
| Which (when homelessness is illegal) means nobody can afford to
| _live_. Market-enforced eugenics, if you will, selecting for
| generational wealth rather than specific genetic markers.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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.
| mtw wrote:
| 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.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Definitely the same sentiment in Dublin and Galway from my
| experiences over here in Ireland too. Though mostly AirBnB
| rather than golden visas.
| paxys wrote:
| I can't think of any major urban area in the world and any time
| period in history where "housing is too expensive" hasn't been
| the popular sentiment.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| In NYC in the 70s housing was literally free - Harlem
| brownstones sold for a dollar. It hasn't always been this
| way.
| ttymck wrote:
| This is interesting, because (at least in America) the
| current rhetoric is that housing was laughably affordable up
| until the 70s(?).
|
| Now, even in suburbs, housing is far more expensive than most
| wage earners could expect to afford.
|
| Maybe we are thinking of two different sides of the same
| coin, but I would genuinely be interested in reading articles
| from the ~mid-century describing what you suggest.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| The problem in the US is pretty obvious. We are the time
| period where the largest generation of Americans (the
| boomers) are at the retirement, or about to retire point,
| at the same time the Zoomers, which are a decent sized
| generation, are entering the housing market.
|
| Over the next several decades as the boomers die off or
| move to retirement homes the housing supply will increase
| substantially, and the value of properties in most of the
| US will plummet.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Europe is facing complete economic collapse in the face of hyper-
| inflation, energy shortages, the Euro collapsing in value and
| rising interest rates.
|
| It's a shame that the continent that was once the birthplace of
| democracy, the scientific method, the industrial revolution and
| socialism has been reduced to nothing more than an open-air
| museum for wealthy Americans and a refugee centre for the victims
| of their wars.
|
| We need strong leaders who will put Europe first.
| immibis wrote:
| Last time Europe had "strong leaders who will put <country>
| first" it did NOT end well.
| elforce002 wrote:
| So, they can't learn from their mistakes?
| dougmwne wrote:
| Sounds like the Portuguese government should start building flats
| as fast as possible. Other countries in the EU do it and it
| works.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| I doubt that even 30% of people would consider having
| government as a landlord good alternative. There are so many
| news of poor management that depending on the government to fix
| your plumbing in your house seems like a nightmare scenario to
| me.
| dougmwne wrote:
| This is actually a good role for government intervention. The
| exact mechanism is not important, but the concept is.
| Builders tend to be out of cycle with housing need due to the
| length time it takes to get a project to completion. After a
| bust, they get very skittish and underinvest for the first
| half of the cycle creating a shortage and boom. Government
| can provide a base level of housing builds to make sure the
| market doesn't go too deep into shortage. And it doesn't have
| to literally build them itself, just run programs that keep
| building housing. Ideally it even pays for itself.
| joaomval wrote:
| We can't even afford to pay doctors to keep the urgencies open
| cinntaile wrote:
| What EU countries? The only ones I am familiar with have
| housing prices spiraling out of control just like in Portugal.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I believe most EU countries do this in some form, but Austria
| by far has the largest and most successful public housing
| scheme. It is very effective at controlling prices.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| Austria. In Vienna, for example, 44% of the rental stock is
| public housing.
| andrepd wrote:
| Unfortunately in Portugal as in almost everywhere else the
| government has little incentive to do so: as the ruling class
| is comprised almost entirely of wealthier people with lots of
| assets, they (1) don't suffer from the insane housing prices
| and (2) indeed as proprietors _benefit_ from the surge in
| housing asset prices.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Sure that is a headwind, but it's certainly not impossible to
| get your government to work for you instead of against you.
| While there are many examples of hopelessly corrupt,
| democracy-in-name-only governments, there are also
| governments that respond to the needs of the majority to keep
| from getting thrown out in the next elections.
|
| Generally, having all these big money foreigners trying to
| come to your country is a good thing. It sure beats having no
| industry and you can crank up the tax heat on them as high as
| you want since nonresident-noncitizens don't vote. The real
| problem is that the Portuguese government is not being made
| to share the bounty of a few winners with the rest of the
| population, who are instead left to just deal with the
| externalities.
|
| There is another path that does not involve locking the doors
| and hanging up a "closed for business" sign.
| andrepd wrote:
| As a relatively poor country (for European standards) with,
| crucially, _a lot of debt_ , it is very difficult to go for
| massive public spending projects as would be construction
| of enough public housing to bring it to the aforementioned
| 20% goal (there are actually proposals to this effect in
| Parliament), even though this would (1) help control the
| housing crisis and (2) actually easily turn up a profit in
| the mid-long run.
|
| The EU could change all of this and go for true European
| cohesion with Eurobonds under the blue/red proposal... but
| that's another story ;)
|
| > Generally, having all these big money foreigners trying
| to come to your country is a good thing. It sure beats
| having no industry and you can crank up the tax heat on
| them as high as you want since nonresident-noncitizens
| don't vote.
|
| Well but do they? Where is the evidence that golden-
| visa/NHR recipients have actually helped create jobs,
| invest, create industry...? In fact, there appears to be
| evidence to the contrary:
| https://www.publico.pt/2021/12/25/economia/noticia/vistos-
| go... (translated: "Golden visa: in nine years, the program
| created 241 new jobs. Investments which led to the
| residency permits since 2012 amount to 6000 million euro,
| the vast majority of which went to real estate")
| dougmwne wrote:
| To your second point, that's a policy problem. You can
| tax these golden visa real estate investors at any rate.
| You can have a different tax rate for nonresidents and an
| extremely high rate to penalize non-occupancy.
|
| The country might be poor and in debt overall, but
| somebody is getting rich off this real estate bubble and
| it is within the government's power to make them share.
| tejohnso wrote:
| As long as governments continue to allow housing to be treated
| primarily as an asset, then housing is going to be subject to
| asset inflation.
|
| The investor class inflates the value of the assets, meanwhile
| the working class are just struggling for a place to live.
| al_mandi wrote:
| This is the natural outcome of bad economic policies. The world
| today runs on interest and usury, things that prohibited in the
| three major religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Yet,
| people refuse to learn.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| There's much truth here, but it isn't the entire picture.
|
| Lisboa and Oporto are _hideously_ overpriced, and it is indeed
| hard to see how a normal Portuguese earner can afford to live in
| either. Even Vila Nova de Gaia, which was the "cheap" side of
| Oporto, is now parlously expensive.
|
| This effect has bled along the coast, and many coastal villages
| now ask EUR200k for an unmodernised one bedroom house.
|
| But... the interior of the country is still facing depopulation,
| and property prices and rents here (between Braganca and Miranda)
| are still low. A five bedroom house in a town in decent condition
| can be had for EUR100k. There's a beautiful 16th c. T8 palazzo
| needing modernisation in our nearest town for EUR80k.
|
| People don't earn much here, but they don't spend much, either -
| a lot of food is home grown or hunted and bartered, heating is
| from firewood, and most folks drive perhaps 50km in a week, as
| they live within walking distance of where they work. Almost
| every house that's had modernisation done uses solar for hot
| water and to supplement power. They deployed a gas network four
| years ago, and shuttered it last, as nobody is using it. Property
| taxes on the above properties are about EUR100 a year.
|
| They're desperate for people to move out here - lots of
| vacancies, not enough people to fill them. They've rolled out
| gigabit fibre to the villages, which they are literally giving
| away. We're the only estrangeiros in the county, bar returning
| Brasileiros.
|
| So. The reality is that which is being played out all over the
| world. Cities are becoming unaffordable for mere mortals - and,
| in my view, that's ok, as cities are past their useful life as
| industrial hubs and have principally become destinations and
| speculative investments.
|
| I'm not advocating some sort of "return to the land", but rather
| that people are going to have to consider that perhaps they don't
| all have to live in the top 5 cities in their country.
|
| Sure, I can't get takeout here, but I can breathe fresh air, sit
| at a quiet cafe and chat with my friends in the village without
| enduring traffic whilst drinking my EUR0.60 coffee, and support
| local businesses run by local people, rather than vast corporate
| chains.
|
| Since we've moved here, particularly during the pandemic, we have
| seen quite a few young Portuguese couples move here from Oporto -
| some with family ties, some without - they're starting
| businesses, families, renovating old abandoned homes. It's
| genuinely exciting to see the beginning of something.
|
| The pendulum swings, the market speaks, the world turns. Sure, we
| may be facing down collapse - of the current way of doing things.
| Not of all things.
|
| Edit: just to demonstrate the veracity of my statements re
| property prices here: https://www.idealista.pt/comprar-
| casas/braganca/vimioso/vimi...
| dsego wrote:
| It's not just takeout, it's hospital services, repair,
| dentists, big specialty stores, cinemas, concert venues, day
| care & after-school activities and so on.
| ahepp wrote:
| > people are going to have to consider that perhaps they don't
| all have to live in the top 5 cities in their country.
|
| I think it's an interesting question: why are there only a
| handful of "top" cities? What can we do to make cities that
| aren't desirable, more desirable?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > This effect has bled along the coast, and many coastal
| villages now ask EUR200k for an unmodernised one bedroom house.
|
| Well, compared to capitals in some countries in Europe, that is
| still cheap! Try half a million for a completely empty run-down
| flat.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is what attracted us to plan to move to Portugal. I could
| get something similar (from a geography/density perspective) in
| the rural US, but the people, cultural, amenities, and costs
| would not be what you described.
|
| When I transition from tech, I hope to spend my time building
| affordable housing in Portugal and Spain.
| andrepd wrote:
| Well the problem is (1) jobs and (2) many people simply don't
| want to live in a town with 1000 people and nothing to do.
|
| (1) Bar agriculture and remote work, there are very few jobs in
| the interior of the country. I think in this forum we may have
| a skewed perspective since our sector is by far the one where
| remote work is most common. But most people simply don't have
| the option to earn 10x minimum wage from their computer while
| sitting in an idyllic mountainside village.
|
| (2) Many people like living in rural areas. That's great! But
| many people also do not. I like nature walks and mountain
| biking and clean air as much as the other guy, but I also like
| restaurants and classical music concerts and nights out. I sort
| of have that right now by living in a rural area 10m away from
| a mid-sized (150k pop) town, but I don't think I would like
| very much to live in the middle of Tras-os-Montes for more than
| a few months.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| There's more work than you might think - there's a perpetual
| shortage of white collar professionals here, from doctors to
| accountants to insurance agents. The ones who are here are
| perpetually oversubscribed, and are hiring. There's also an
| absolute dearth of trades - there is one electrician, two
| builders, two plumbers, covering a huge area, with a three
| year waiting list. The younger couples I mentioned who have
| moved here typically have one working remote, the other
| starting a business... and then the remote worker stopping
| that to work on their partner's business which is suddenly
| growing out of control. That's not even considering things
| like ecotourism, the europa grants available for doing pretty
| much _anything_ here, and public sector jobs, which they are
| filling with literally anyone who applies.
|
| There's also the whole virtuous cycle thing - more people
| move here, bring more commerce, more demand, secondary and
| tertiary industries develop.
|
| I hear you on lifestyle, however - this wouldn't have been
| for me when I was in my 20's, but at nearly 40, and finally
| wanting to start a family, it's ideal - and many of the
| younger folks moving here are in the same boat.
|
| That said, there are restaurants, some really good, and
| transport around here has improved such that Braganca is only
| 30 minutes from Vimioso now, rather than 1hr+ it was 10 years
| ago, and it has all the amenities of a secondary city. Oh,
| and we had an excellent concert a few weeks ago - after the
| bullfighting. But I agree, it isn't for everyone - but it's
| perhaps for more people than might realise it.
| pelasaco wrote:
| The issue is that the Government should bring the
| infrastructure to the outback, as other European countries
| do. In another hand, I love the almost rustic Alentejo.. I
| guess having unstable regions like South America, Asia,
| Middle east and Africa is one factor, among other factors
| already described in this thread, raising housing prices...
| outworlder wrote:
| > But... the interior of the country is still facing
| depopulation, and property prices and rents here (between
| Braganca and Miranda) are still low. A five bedroom house in a
| town in decent condition can be had for EUR100k. There's a
| beautiful 16th c. T8 palazzo needing modernisation in our
| nearest town for EUR80k.
|
| That's exactly what I saw when I was looking at properties
| there. And honestly the towns where some of the cheap
| properties were, were not half bad. They looked like they had
| all necessary amenities. I can't speak for their job markets
| though, which could be the main reason for the issue.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > But... the interior of the country is still facing
| depopulation, and property prices and rents here are still low.
|
| Some people just don't think very highly of "flyover country".
| The culture is not what they're used to. Return to the land
| makes a whole lot of sense though, now that the basic
| infrastructure for hybrid remote working is pretty much
| ubiquitous (courtesy of COVID).
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| That's one of the things that always bothered me about cost of
| living arguments it always seems to be it's to expensive to
| live anywhere (inside of these several highly desirable
| locations that I want to live exclusively and are very
| expensive.) There are plenty of places to live and plenty of
| housing, just not where people want to be.
| aprdm wrote:
| Maybe it's just a matter of time? In Canada even the small
| cities got unaffordable , mainly after COVID started. With the
| interest rate raise a lot of people are hoping for a crash,
| some banks are saying it will be up to this 20-40% in some
| cities. Hopefully that helps. There's no where livable in
| Canada that is affordable to have a house right now.
| jersak wrote:
| Not gonna lie, im considering moving from BC to a farm in NS.
| With the mortgage i have on a 2 bdr apartment in the lower
| mainland i can buy up to 3 farms in NS, which is comically
| sad.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Side fact, not really criticism: When I see abbreviations
| for US states, my brain starts inserting anything that
| comes to mind and is a location. In this case:
|
| "BC? British Columbia? NS? New Jersey, no that's not with
| an 's' ... Arg, no idea!"
|
| It is not mandatory for me to understand all the
| abbreviations. Just that sometimes I would like to
| understand more, without having to guess states.
| hydrok9 wrote:
| but, BC and NS are of course Canadian provinces, not US
| states ;)
| rr888 wrote:
| Its a global problem that interest rates have been too low for
| too long. Most Americans dont realize that in most countries,
| house prices continued to go up through the 08-10 recession, so
| haven't gone down since the early 90s. Property needs a big
| global crash.
| al_mandi wrote:
| The interest is the cause of the problem in the first place.
| We've known for thousands of years that usury is bad, it's
| prohibited in the three major religions, and for good reason.
|
| We see it time and time again. Policy makers try to address the
| symptom but not the cause, then people cry when nothing gets
| fixed.
| rr888 wrote:
| You might be right. I assume lending as a regular part of the
| economy but my grandparents lived in a world where it was
| very difficult, even for a mortgage. I can't see any real
| benefit of credit cards, payday lenders.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| But if it's a global problem... where are all these rich people
| coming from? Even if the richest 10% of the global population
| were going around buying three houses a piece, that would still
| leave 70% of the housing market left over for us plebs.
| rr888 wrote:
| Its not rich people its middle class people with 500k
| mortgages that no one would take if rates were 5%. US rates
| have come back up, Europe is slowly started too but full
| impact isn't yet felt.
|
| https://www.euribor-rates.eu/en/current-euribor-
| rates/4/euri...
| hnuser847 wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning interest rates. Any time housing comes
| up on HN, the main factors people bring up are short-term
| rentals, NIMBYism, and lack of new development. However, if
| these explanations had any merit, why have home values in
| Flint, MI increased by 67% since March of 2020?
|
| Flint's population has rapidly declined over the past 40 years
| and continues to decline (its population is less than half of
| what it was at its peak), so there's not a population boom
| driving up demand. Flint is not exactly known as a tourist
| destination either. And to top off, Flint is most well known
| for its contaminated drinking water that contains lead. So why
| on Earth would such a place be experiencing a housing shortage?
|
| The obvious answer is that governments around the world have
| brought interests rate down to zero, which forces investors to
| seek out riskier and riskier assets to invest in. Instead of
| investing in traditionally safe assets like treasuries and
| bonds, investors now have no choice but to invest in stuff like
| tech startups, cryptocurrencies, personal loans, mortgage-
| backed securities, and dilapidated houses in the Midwest.
| rr888 wrote:
| And the biggest reason people buy housing is that its been
| the best investment. The wealthiest people I know are the
| people that bought houses a long time back and kept
| leveraging up into buying more.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Equities have a higher return historically. Housing is
| interesting though because mortgages offer huge leverage to
| retail investors.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| That's the path I'm on right now, not because I love being
| a landlord, but simply because it's the best investment
| available.
| megalord wrote:
| And that's exactly why are houses so damn expensive all
| over the world. Boom
| sriram_sun wrote:
| Tokyo seems to have solved this by building houses and
| transportation right? What's preventing other governments from
| duplicating this? Politics? If so what was unique about Tokyo?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| * transportation: the outlays of programs like Five Commuting
| directions in Tokyo was a direct contributor to the collapse of
| JNR, which led to the government assuming all JNR debt and
| privatizing the railways as JR Group
|
| * housing production in Tokyo is great, but to put this in
| context today's Japanese housing market essentially happened
| after the bubble pop in the '90s. Prices from 1991 to 2004 had
| declined by 64% due to the pop. In that context, deregulation
| was palatable because people were already underwater and didn't
| bother as much to fight things that would lower property
| values. (In fact, it could've raised them.)
| kranke155 wrote:
| Tokyo also bans Airbnb, period. Something most people here
| don't understand.
| Proven wrote:
| wtcactus wrote:
| Portuguese here.
|
| I think this title is a bit sensationalist. It's true that a
| middle class Portuguese, with the extremely heavy income/property
| taxes we have to pay, will find it very difficult to live in
| Lisbon's or Porto's city center in a medium-upper apartment.
|
| Lisbon (and even more Porto) do have an extensive metro line
| though, and you can rent/buy an apartment on the outskirts
| (although still served by metro line), even with the low liquid
| wages. But more than that, vast areas of the country are
| extremely deserted and housing is extremely cheap there (a
| similar house in the interior goes for about 20% of one in
| Lisbon/Porto).
|
| Also, there's the problem of the government having destroyed most
| of the middle class to embezzle the metric of the "minimum wage".
| Constant mandates to increase the minimum wage (and very heavy
| taxes on anyone that earns more than that), make so that
| companies can't discriminate between good and bad workers. Most
| workers get paid almost the same, and as such, there's no point
| in trying to be a better worker.
|
| I'm one of the "lucky ones" because I bring home about
| EUR2000/month. My company has a total cost with my salary after
| taxes and other state contributions of EUR3880/month.
|
| Now, I know that you can have the argument that we get a lot of
| "free" services in return, but, sadly, no, we don't. Decades old
| mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to
| their party members and get them nice administration positions
| for which they don't have any experience) and some outright
| corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free"
| services.
|
| The SNS is in absolute shambles. Our mortality rate is the
| highest since 1913 (ok, you can attribute that COVID). Our infant
| mortality rate, the highest since 1982 (sorry, but you can't say
| this one is due to COVID). Now, what happened to cause this? 7
| years ago, we got a center-left government into power, one of
| their first measures was to destroy a system where the hospitals
| were public, but the management was done by a private company -
| these hospitals had much better metrics for both costs and
| quality of service. They abolished that, and replaced the
| hospitals' administration by party members. This is the result.
|
| Like it happened with the SNS, similar stuff happened in a lot of
| other areas. In the end, the government's answer is always the
| same: increase taxes - which strangulates the economy and
| destroys the middle class, and, funnily enough, transforms us all
| into people dependent on "government's money" and their subsidies
| - that ensures that they keep in power because nobody can imagine
| living without those "free" services with the low liquid wages we
| have.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free"
| services to cater to their party members and get them nice
| administration positions for which they don't have any
| experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality
| of most of these "free" services.
|
| Tangential, but I recently visited lisbon and realized how
| terribly mismanaged the airport is, as well as TAP Air
| (Portugal's flag airline). Everything should be well, because
| it's a pretty big airport but yet it was a mess, and delays of
| several hours was apparently an every day experience (which I
| learnt the hard way). It did give the impression of having root
| causes in corruption and complete mismanagement of public
| funds.
| sanedigital wrote:
| We lived in Spain for 4 years and Portugal for 1. I love the
| country and the people, but from a management perspective,
| the place is a disaster. It made Spain feel like some sort of
| futuristic perfect society managed by hyper-efficient AI by
| comparison (and that's saying something).
| petre wrote:
| Sounds almost exactly like Eastern Europe, only without the
| Brazilians who speak Portugese, are Catholics and also work for
| lower income.
| outworlder wrote:
| > But more than that, vast areas of the country are extremely
| deserted and housing is extremely cheap there (a similar house
| in the interior goes for about 20% of one in Lisbon/Porto).
|
| Yeah. Given that the large cities no longer qualify for 'golden
| visas', I think the government wants external money to go to
| these areas.
|
| > Decades old mismanagement
|
| That's quite sad to hear.
|
| I was (guess I still am) thinking about moving to Portugal at
| some point, perhaps for retirement. Every single person I have
| ever spoken to... they can only sing praises to Portugal. Sure,
| sometimes they complain about bureaucracy. That's probably
| worrying, since most are brazilians and we supposedly used to
| that. If they complain, that must be bad :)
|
| I really hope Portugal will get better.
| jmyeet wrote:
| The answer, as always when it comes to housing issues in Portugal
| or anywhere else, is to treat this as a supply side problem.
|
| Portugal has an influx of foreign funds through Golden Visa and
| similar programs. It should take that money and build social
| housing that is, at least at first, only open to Portuguese
| citizens. Think Vienna.
|
| In areas where building is a problem, just use funds to buy
| properties and turn them into social housing.
|
| I don't know what restrictions there are on foreign real estate
| purchases. Personally I have no issue with owner occupiers. But
| any "investors" (including AirBnBs) should be made illegal or
| simply taxed into oblivion.
| slaw wrote:
| Inflation in Portugal is 9%, Euribor interest rate used to
| calculate mortgage is 1.483%. Housing is where you park money.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| what a smart and filled with empathy comment for an article
| about people being pushed out of their hometowns.
| slaw wrote:
| I am only stating facts not the one who is printing money and
| pushing people out of their hometowns.
| z9znz wrote:
| I sit reading this in a village in central Portugal, and I have a
| very different perspective than the OP.
|
| What I see are vast numbers of uninhabited, decaying or wholly
| uninhabitable structures. I see 50+ age men loitering around the
| town, drinking beer at 10am, and playing scratch-offs.
|
| On the roads I see absolutely bonkers drivers who have old cars
| which obviously have binary gas pedals. They go super slow for no
| reason, but at some point they flip the switch and drive like
| maniacs, blind curves be damned. These cars, by the way, are 80s
| and 90s soot-spewing diesels.
|
| They start fires more often than mother nature does. Sometimes
| it's because they are crazy, but usually it's because they want
| to clear a natural forest so they can grow fast timber like
| eucalyptus (which greatly exacerbates the fire risk since they
| are so grow fast and are highly flammable).
|
| VAT here is 23%. This thing about foreigners not paying tax is
| bs. Locals widely use a tax scheme whereby they can make tax
| claims on their purchases, getting some of it back. Without that
| tax number, you pay the full 23%.
|
| And if you want to use a visa to live and work here, you will pay
| an incredible tax rate that's even higher than Netherlands (which
| is already 20-50% higher than the US).
|
| Many of the "rich" foreigners coming in and buying property are
| Brazilians, some of whom got their riches through corruption or
| outright criminal activities.
|
| There is also still good old fashioned corruption here. The laws
| regarding many topics such as land habitation permits vary by
| jurisdiction, and the common way to deal with them is to get cozy
| with the mayor or other important figures. Take them to dinner,
| buy them some gifts, play nice. You can be completely legal, but
| if you don't play the game right you can be denied a permit.
|
| This is all pretty bad news, but that's not to say that Portugal
| is bad or Portuguese are bad. There's a lot to like here. There's
| a lot of charm, a lot of history, some great beaches and villages
| and mountainous areas. The climate can be nice, but imo it's not
| great and rapidly getting worse (many days this summer over 40C,
| and so, so many fires).
|
| My takeaway is, to put it very bluntly, that the average
| Portuguese person is quite ignorant. They either don't know a lot
| of important things, or they know a bit but don't care (because
| they don't know why it's important). It feels like time stopped
| here in the mid 1900s.
|
| Porgugal was once the king of the world. Then it had a several
| hundred year decline, reaching bottom in the latter 1900s. The
| younger generation learned it was better to move elsewhere to
| earn money, so progress ceased locally. But 10 years or so ago,
| the younger people who are now middle age began coming back,
| starting businesses, and revitalizing the country. It's going to
| take a few more decades before Portugal reaches the point where
| it is not a poor shadow of its former self. I'm not sure it will
| ever make it though.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"And if you want to use a visa to live and work here, you will
| pay an incredible tax rate that's even higher than Netherlands
| (which is already 20-50% higher than the US)."
|
| Is this the catch then with those "golden visas"? Could you or
| someone else say what those rates are? Is Spain which also
| offers "golden visas" the same then in terms of a separate tax?
| rlf_dev wrote:
| "My takeaway is, to put it very bluntly, that the average
| Portuguese person is quite ignorant. They either don't know a
| lot of important things, or they know a bit but don't care
| (because they don't know why it's important). It feels like
| time stopped here in the mid 1900s."
|
| This is quite true, we are ranked very low on things like
| financial literacy, and most people here don't care why things
| are the way they are.
| s09dfhks wrote:
| Seems fitting that this post and this other one,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32682862, are right next to
| one another on my feed
| hepinhei wrote:
| What this article does not say is that the prime Minister has 6
| houses... So he is benefiting from this
| (https://www.cmjornal.pt/politica/detalhe/antonio-costa-tem-c...)
|
| We are living more and more in a world where people work but are
| not able to live with dignity
| amelius wrote:
| And also in a world where bricks make more money than honest
| hard work.
| indiantinker wrote:
| Even us madrilenos (Madrid people) cannot. Our salaries and
| taxation cannot match the "invisible" renters driving up the
| housing market. Saying this as I pack my stuff to move outside
| the city.
| moltar wrote:
| I can't think of any major and attractive city in the world where
| majority of locals could afford to buy.
|
| I think Portugal was just late to the game, but the playbook is
| the same.
|
| All major cities in Canada, NYC, London, Hanoi, Bangkok,
| Naypyidaw, and so on and on.
|
| Every nice city is extremely overvalued.
| kaashif wrote:
| This article makes me realise how fortunate I am to be the
| children of immigrants. My parents are very family oriented and
| were somewhat upset when I left my home country (which isn't my
| parents' original home country) for greener pastures, but if
| there's one thing immigrants understand, it's that if things are
| hard, you should move to where things aren't hard!
|
| I'm sure the author has their reasons or whatever, but when they
| make statements like this:
|
| > It's not easy for anyone to emigrate, to have to deal with and
| to submited themselves to another culturee. It's all hard, but to
| live away from those we love the most its the hardest.
|
| It's just incredible to me that someone would act against their
| own economic interests so blatantly. The greatest innovation of
| the EU is free movement, and this person is unwilling to take
| advantage of it to escape economic hardship.
|
| Obviously my mindset and the author's mindset have irreconcilable
| differences.
|
| I think how the author keeps using "foreign" as an insult reveals
| something about their thought process:
|
| > policies that benefit foreigners more than their residents.
|
| > the majority are foreigners who are not there for a visit, but
| who live there.
|
| > large public companies were sold off to Chinese managers who
| now do whatever they want
|
| > The Portuguese are becoming, nothing more and nothing less, the
| servants of big foreign millionaires
| gr1zzlybe4r wrote:
| What countries aren't struggling with this sort of dynamic?
|
| I almost think that the US is doing pretty well with this in the
| sense that you can still move somewhere that's cheap relative to
| your salary, but that only holds true if you're able to do it
| with remote work. So, maybe it's not true at all.
| davidw wrote:
| The US is pretty bad from this point of view from what I
| recall, compared to other places where it's generally legal to
| build a broader variety of housing in cities. But perhaps it
| just got bad here early compared to other places.
|
| Portugal's demographics, like much of western Europe, didn't
| look like they were going to change dramatically:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Portugal - so
| getting set up to build a bunch probably wasn't a priority.
|
| It looks like immigration picked up a lot, and also there has
| been an influx of wealthier immigrants.
|
| It will be interesting to see how they handle it. Having people
| with money move to your country ought to be a positive thing,
| but you need to build housing for them so they're not competing
| with locals - and winning.
| bombcar wrote:
| The US is pretty bad if you force yourself to remain in the
| same area (which, to be fair, most people do).
|
| But the US is large and there are places where housing really
| isn't the issue (but there can be other issues, too).
| gr1zzlybe4r wrote:
| That's kinda what I was saying
|
| The US has places that you can live cheaply if you're able
| to arbitrage a remote job. It doesn't look as good if
| you're not able to work remote.
| davidw wrote:
| That's changing quickly though. Most of the cheaper places
| did 'cheap' via sprawl, and that's kind of low hanging
| fruit that you need to move beyond in terms of housing
| options, sooner or later.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/housing-
| cr...
| bombcar wrote:
| Combining increased demand with reduced supply has caused
| a huge "pig in a snake" scenario, which is going to
| readjust suddenly (arguably it already has around here)
| where built supply is starting to outstrip demand.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > The US is pretty bad from this point of view from what I
| recall, compared to other places where it's generally legal
| to build a broader variety of housing in cities.
|
| It's really impossible to make generalizations about the
| legalities go building in the US, as there is no federal
| control over such things. There are some state-level laws in
| some states, but for the most part zoning is left up to
| cities and counties, leading to literally thousands of
| disparate sets of laws and regulations.
|
| My city has historically heavily restricted high density
| housing (until the state stepped in), while the city
| literally next door has added enough high density housing for
| ~20k people in the past decade.
| davidw wrote:
| People study this stuff and have written about it
| extensively. By and large, in most US cities and towns,
| it's not legal to build anything but detached single family
| units in most of the city. So while each locale may have
| its own zoning code, they're rarely all that unique. There
| are some exceptions like Houston.
|
| This is an interesting book about the history of it all: ht
| tps://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801479878/zone.
| ..
| eitally wrote:
| I don't think the US is doing a good job of this at all.
| There's a huge amount of policy-driven gate-keeping that's both
| ejecting lower income residents from tier 1 & 2 cities [due
| mostly to cost pressures], and preventing significant
| infrastructure projects that would ameliorate some of the
| increasingly pressurized (and politicized) demand signals
| (better public transport, more lower income housing,
| improvements in public education - infrastructure & programs).
| googlryas wrote:
| 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 in Lisbon you get to keep living in
| Lisbon?
|
| * Is it fair if people early in their career get to live in
| Lisbon because it will advance their career much more than if
| they lived in the countryside?
|
| * Is it fair if a rich person gets to live there because they can
| pay a lot of money to do so?
|
| Whatever policy is in place, it will be deciding the winners and
| the losers, or the people who get to live in Lisbon and those who
| don't.
| kaashif wrote:
| Using a word as subjective as "fair" allows for people to
| propose solutions you don't agree with, but that they think are
| fair.
|
| The author of the article says:
|
| > Digital nomads, retired foreigners, and millionaires
| searching for Gold visas are pushing the Portuguese to another
| place.
|
| > Is this really that fair?
|
| We are obviously supposed to say "no", but I think the answer
| is yes. I really hate this form of argument by rhetorical
| question that only works if you _already_ agree with the
| author, if my answers are different the whole article just
| doesn't work.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Everybod...
|
| If you live in any society where land values are private profit,
| expect nothing less.
|
| We're seeing this in America too, but hopefully with any luck, we
| still have enough entrepreneurial inertia that salaries (mine
| especially) remain high enough for a little while longer to make
| this palatable.
| bieh wrote:
| I moved to Lisbon in 2020, and I've become increasingly aware of
| the impact that high-income remote-worker immigrants like me are
| having on the city, and other similar places. I've been thinking
| of building something to try and help:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/PortugalExpats/comments/vy0i5r/crit...
|
| It's proved... controversial! I'd be interested to get HNs take.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| You can't solve the issue unless you build (much) more housing.
| An app to donating to charity is like nothing. You have good
| intentions but it is what it is.
|
| And even if you build housing, you somehow need to reduce the
| induced demand.
| ahepp wrote:
| I think it puts a pretty negative framing on immigration, that
| it's something you have to buy an indulgence for. Maybe that's
| true. Being a well paid tech worker who might try the expat
| lifestyle someday, I'm pretty biased. But I also wonder what it
| might look like to frame things in a more positive light. Maybe
| that could be connecting immigrants to jobs making a productive
| impact in the local economy, or showcasing local investment
| opportunities. Just from a pragmatic perspective, I feel like
| this kind of positive framing is more likely to get engagement.
| People get very defensive, very fast, if you make them feel as
| if they've done something wrong (even if they have).
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Cry me a river. The Portuguese never even apologized for what
| they did to Angolans and Mozambicans. In fact, they have great
| monuments in their cities dedicated to their "Guerra do
| Ultramar". I find it hard to feel for them.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Actually, that is something many middle-aged Portuguese are
| keenly aware of. Either because they lost relatives in that war
| or because they are still trying to figure out how to cope with
| the mistakes of that generation (most people who lived through
| that are gone - and so are their worldviews - so I don't see
| any point in demonizing the dead).
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And what does some historical injustice have to do with
| ordinary people being pushed out of their homes? Maybe you
| could try to not put them all in one caste and judge them all
| as a single entity?
|
| Really, it is not appropriate to wish them all suffering,
| because of some historical fact, which they most like did not
| have a hand in. A little empathy seems appropriate. Maybe with
| more empathy in the world, we would also see some more
| apologies for historical injustices.
| outworlder wrote:
| They did a mess in Brazil too. Extracted what they could, be it
| wood or gold and everything in between. Gold in particular was
| a pretty good shakedown. We learned about all the B.S. at
| school.
|
| I am Brazilian. I do not blame the current Portuguese people.
| Heck, I don't even blame the Portuguese back then, just their
| government. I want Portugal to prosper.
|
| Asking for an official apology is fine. Blaming ordinary people
| who are just trying to live their lives, is not fine.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Ironically, many Portuguese have moved to Angola since the
| Great Recession.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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. Most of my
| friends from high school(90%) were forced to leave due to rents
| going from $1k a month to $3k a month for a 1-2 bdrm apts. Those
| that owned houses also moved as they were fed up with crime and
| could get a way better house somewhere else. Middle class jobs
| all disappeared from the area, families also left, the
| neighborhoods I lived in San Jose (rose garden/willow glen) had
| barely any kids for my daughter to play with as there were no
| families anymore, the rose garden neighborhood had 0 kids on the
| street, the willow glen neighborhood had 1 family w/ kids who
| moved away during the pandemic.
|
| I was lucky and making really good money in tech but was
| devastated by how the area I grew up in had turned into a
| nightmare and everyone I know (even family) leaving the area. I
| too ended leaving as the cost vs. quality of life didn't make any
| sense and I couldn't see my family living in a place I didn't
| even recognize anymore. Most people don't talk about it but there
| is a huge diaspora of bay area residents due to the stuff
| mentioned above and it breaks my heart to think we will most
| likely never return and familiy/friends I expected to spend the
| rest of my life with all leaving.
| standyro wrote:
| I'm curious, where did you leave to, if I can ask?
| [deleted]
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > Those that owned houses also moved as they were fed up with
| crime and could get a way better house somewhere else.
|
| How do the criminals afford to live in the area?
| koboll wrote:
| Well, there are two classes of criminal.
|
| The petty crimes are committed by a small but very vocal
| minority of homeless people who are severely mentally ill
| and/or severely addicted to meth/opiates. They can afford to
| live here because everyone has apparently decided the most
| humane thing to do is to look the other way while they
| struggle, freeze, and eventually overdose and die on the
| street.
|
| The larger-scale thefts are committed by organized crime
| operations that essentially operate a business of stealing
| and reselling stuff because of notoriously lax law
| enforcement. Think the opening scene of Requiem for a Dream,
| except an entire crew doing that, over and over and over.
| They make a lot of money doing this -- and drive up the cost
| of basic essentials for other working class people who have
| to buy what they resell because they clear drugstores out.
| They make enough to live comfortably, despite the high cost
| of living, apparently.
| bagacrap wrote:
| and the only reason they could get a way better house
| somewhere else is bc their own home greatly appreciated in
| value... so let's not paint homeowners as victims here
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| I totally understand your pain in seeing your hometown turning
| into a hellish zone but I can't pass on calling the irony in
| your story since these same Cali exiles are one of the
| principal factors in pricing ordinary locals in Portugal out of
| their neighborhoods.
| draw_down wrote:
| samatman wrote:
| I'd love to see so much as a tiny shred of evidence of this,
| it doesn't pass the smell test.
|
| Austin? Ok, sure. How many Californians are expatriating to
| Lisbon? Is it that many? Ok, let's do Londoners next.
|
| A lot more right?
|
| Principal factors, you say. Let's see it.
| swearwolf wrote:
| As a resident, what do you think was the catalyst for these
| changes?
| [deleted]
| pkaye wrote:
| A lot of people moved into the bay area for the good jobs,
| nice weather and nature. Once housing demand pushed above
| supply, prices started shooting up. Those locals whose
| incomes didn't grow were pushed out of their homes. The bay
| area is boxed in by the hills so hard to expand out. Also a
| lot of the land was already build up with single family homes
| and other low density housing a long time ago so upgrading
| the density is harder. The public transportation is also
| limited. BART didn't expand to south bay until a few years
| ago. And the stations are far apart. Undoing all this mess
| will be much more expensive now.
| 62951413 wrote:
| Actually California natives have one good thing going for
| them. Prop 13. So if you or your parents have lived in the
| house for 30+ years you're likely to pay $2K in property
| taxes on a $1M house (annually). The lack of middle-class
| jobs is a whole different story.
| pkaye wrote:
| Not just natives. Anyone who moved here a decade back
| might benefit. I grew up here but it was still difficult
| to buy a house when young because the housing prices kept
| ahead of salaries. The drop in prices during the last
| recession is what gave me the chance.
| ghaff wrote:
| And that is the flip side to Prop 13, which a bunch of
| people like to hate on. Absent Prop 13 (for residential
| properties) a lot of long-term residents would be forced
| out by rapidly rising property taxes. Which would-be
| residents may not like but is not at all clearly a bad
| thing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The fact that proponents of Prop 13 oppose restricting it
| to primary residence or exempting commercial property
| from protection, etc. show that this is not the real
| truth for why people like Prop 13.
|
| Besides, you can simply transfer-tax it anyway. For a
| primary residence, this being the system:
|
| 1. You pay Prop 13 tax
|
| 2. You accrue true prop tax
|
| 3. You may sell the home and buy a new home and net-cap-
| gains you get the accrued tax taken out of profit
|
| So then you don't get "pushed out", you pay when you
| sell, and it only applies to your home not to your rental
| properties. But that's not what people want - they
| ultimately would prefer the "housing crisis" but that's
| politically unpopular so they'll say other things, though
| occasionally the truth will leak out.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Even if that's your angle, Prop 13 is bizarrely
| overbroad. If you just wanted to protect long-term
| residents from needing to move:
|
| * Remove its application to commercial property
|
| * Remove its application to second/vacation homes
|
| * Remove its application to inherited property
|
| * Only apply the restriction if the increase would be
| burdensome on the household's income
|
| * Only apply the restriction once someone has lived in
| the house for a significant amount of time, e.g. 5+
| years.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'm also from the bay area, and it's quite simple: demand
| skyrocketed due to tech, and supply couldn't keep up, due to
| various kinds of regulations.
|
| Zoning is the most obvious regulation that makes things hard:
| most land is zoned exclusively for single family homes on
| large lots. There's been a bit of movement on this from the
| state level to allow ADU's or duplexes, but not enough,
| there's usually various legal hurdles that make it harder.
| Missing middle housing is mostly still illegal.
|
| The other thing is all the various processes involved. CEQA
| makes things take a long time (not that I'm opposed to
| protecting the environment, but surely there's a way to do it
| that doesn't take years for an apartment complex). Community
| meetings and planning commissions can often block new
| developments for random, arbitrary reasons, like "tall
| building would cast too many shadows" or "demand on street
| parking would increase"; these are things that are so
| obviously inherent to any significant development permitted
| in areas where you _can_ build taller apartment buildings,
| and yet they 're still used to block more housing.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Very difficult to change because, in the "Pax Neoliberalia" world
| we live in, profits are Sacrosanct - and the higher the capital
| concentration, the holier so. But some straightforward fixes:
|
| 1. Flood the market with affordable state housing, Austria-style
| - with the bonus of building new, boosting the national economy.
|
| 2. Create very progressive (rapidly rising) taxes based on
| property value - making untenable the current practice of parking
| money and profit by simply buying & holding empty flats and the
| like.
|
| 3. Raise salaries - currently portuguese salaries, and their
| weight on GDP, rank the lowest in the EU.
|
| (and no, it won't create an inflation spiral: the current
| inflation spike is, first and foremost, the result of a supply
| shock, price-gouging and speculative/cartel practices - corporate
| profits being at a record high is proof of that)
|
| Unfortunately, incentives are heavily stacked on leaving things
| as they are, as the ruling class is mostly made up of the
| landlord class, and, is not sensitive to (sometimes even not
| aware of) the struggles of assetless commoners that only earn
| income from their (low) salaried labor. Or, even worse, stands to
| lose their current large gains on capital/assets if this is fixed
| - and most portuguese media outlets trumpet their - private -
| master's voice and interests. Additionally, just leaving things
| as they are, also scores brownie points with the EU by making the
| Government (even if "center-left") appear "frugal". And PM Costa
| has personal ambitions for future EU high office.
|
| (...who will be the next head of the European Commission or the
| European Council?)
| ido wrote:
| I haven't seen number 1 actually "fix" Vienna's rental market?
| I mean it's not _as_ crazy as other places, but I moved to
| Vienna in 2005 (since moved out) and it used to be _a lot_ more
| affordable to rent in than today (even adjusting for
| inflation). So it 's not that it's completely ineffective but
| it's not on it's own enough.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| How much new housing have they been adding YoY?
|
| When people suggest that adding more new housing, either
| public or private, doesn't work, this is usually left out:
| how much housing _actually_ was being added?
| jollybean wrote:
| Well #1 is not 'straightfoward' fixes at all. Massive Real
| Estate buildouts are 'gigantic' industrial projects.
|
| A 'straight forward fix' is to ban foreign ownership of homes
| and AirBnB. Poof. Now, I wouldn't support that, but it would be
| 'straight forward'.
|
| #2 is reasonable.
|
| #3 is a big glib tough. "Hey, everyone should just get a
| raise!", if it were only that easy!
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| 1. "banning foreign ownership" would result in Portugalexit
| at best, perhaps a Zairization of Portugal, or even worse -
| no thanks.
|
| What's wrong with large industrial projects?
|
| _It 's exactly what we need at this moment_ - in fact, both
| Portugal and EU-scale.
|
| This would cost a small fraction of the Quantitative Easing
| program from the European Central Bank.
|
| (and these Massive Real Estate buildouts must include the
| lessons in Urbanism learned from past such projects)
|
| 2. (y)
|
| 3. State sector raises salaries, private sector is forced to
| follow. Just raising minimum wage is positive, but not
| enough. This tends to compress people to the bottom salary
| tier and promote even more brain drain.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| (1). why not just make it painful to be a foreigner there.
| Raise taxes on rent/property if you're foreign by 3-4x (or
| whatever makes sense after an analysis of building new
| housing from foreigner tax dollars). If you don't want to
| scare off the ones already there then make it not
| retroactive. People like to make these situations tougher
| than they need to be. Mostly it's impossible because
| politicians are paid off by the 1% (foreign and domestic).
| The Portuguese have a right to enjoy their country without
| foreigners coming in and buying it off and pushing them to
| the edge of poverty. Globalism has got us in a tenuous
| situation in the West depending completely on the likes of
| China for our style of living. I can understand the
| Portuguese being angry with the situation.
| jollybean wrote:
| Large industrial projects are gigantic efforts that involve
| billions of dollars and years/decades to take effect,
| massive capital requirements. And risk.
|
| "State sector raises salaries, private sector is forced to
| follow." ... my god man, no, that's not how it works.
|
| More like: "Already inefficient state bureaucracies raise
| salaries, attracting workers from private sector who cannot
| afford to pay higher wages, requiring massive budgetary
| increase from government i.e. 'more taxes' just as economy
| goes into tailspin due to private sector layoffs.
|
| Probably the EU needs to re-think the fact that it's
| designed to send all young workers to Germany or at least
| out of Portugual/Spain/S. Italy and Greece and leave them
| as octegenarian tourist centres with illegal Turkish
| workers doing the actual work.
|
| Either 1) the EU starts massive transfer payments or 2) get
| rid of the Euro and have some limits on mobility, or it
| will just limp along. #1 might require political and fiscal
| integration which would probably just exasperate the
| problem.
|
| In the short term, they should probably raise taxes on
| foreign home ownership.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| > 1. "banning foreign ownership" would result in
| Portugalexit at best, perhaps a Zairization of Portugal, or
| even worse - no thanks.
|
| What? This makes no sense. You basically leave out a large
| chunk of the induced demand. There you have your prices
| lowering.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > Poof
|
| This has pretty much already been done in Vancouver, which
| has layers of Foreign Buyer Taxes, Speculation Taxes, Empty
| Home Taxes and strict Airbnb regulation.
|
| It absolutely did not make the problem go 'poof.'
|
| All these things were well worth doing and helped in various
| ways, but it remains that the core underlying problem is that
| there's not enough homes for everyone and scarcity ensures
| high rents and high prices. The dull solution is that a hell
| of a lot of homes need to be built.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| I'm not sure you deserve engaging, but I'll give it a try.
|
| So you're just going to ignore a war involving two of the
| biggest exporters of some of the main raw materials we have
| (foodstuffs and energy) on the planet and associated supply
| problems on crucial things? Not to mention a pandemic that
| wrecked havoc on supply lines. None of that matters, your
| theory goes, it's purely a monetary phenomenon, because only
| countries with fiat money systems are impacted. Could you
| share some countries with alternative money systems that
| aren't impacted?
| WalterBright wrote:
| If it was _not_ caused by fiat money, I 'd expect to see
| corresponding periods of deflation. Inflation is a
| _sustained_ increase in the _general_ price level. It is
| not a temporary spike from the fluctuations in supply
| &demand of goods and services.
|
| Another way to understand it is to consider, what happens
| if the price of gas rises? Does that automatically put more
| money in your pocket to pay for it? Nope. You just have
| less money to spend on other things. But inflation (with a
| lag period) does put more money in your pocket.
|
| > Could you share some countries with alternative money
| systems that aren't impacted?
|
| Modern countries have all gone fiat. But we can look at the
| US from 1800-1914, which was not fiat money. There was zero
| _net_ inflation in that period, while we 've had endemic
| inflation ever since (aside from a brief period of
| deflation during the Depression).
|
| > I'm not sure you deserve engaging
|
| What I wrote is not the general opinion, though it is the
| opinion of economists. At least you were willing to talk
| about it, which is nice.
| selectodude wrote:
| The value of fiat currency is roughly money supply divided
| by economic output. If the numerator rises faster than the
| denominator, well...
|
| Obviously it's a more complicated than that, especially in
| the context of the US Dollar, but for smaller countries
| it's pretty basic stuff.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Inflation isn't terribly bad in countries that didn't print
| wild amounts of money.
|
| Like in India, inflation is almost back in control, and we
| didn't print much money.
|
| Same in China.
|
| I haven't run the numbers but if you were to chart
| inflation vs the money printing done by an economy, you'd
| likely find a positive correlation.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The WSJ ran a chart a few weeks ago showing inflation
| lagged money printing by about 13 months.
| andrekandre wrote:
| 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?
| rovolo wrote:
| > Inflation is not the result of profits, gouging, etc.
|
| Inflation is the measure of the price of goods
|
| > It's the result of funding the deficit by running the
| printing press
|
| Increasing the money supply indirectly increases the price of
| goods. It matters in the long run, but the price of goods can
| change in the short-term based on supply. The oil crisis of
| the 1970s caused oil prices to increase because oil supply
| was limited. This would have caused inflation even without an
| increased money supply.
|
| > creating debt backed by nothing. ... fiat money systems.
|
| This is more of a tangent, but the money supply can also
| shrink in fiat systems. Fiat currency can be shrunk via
| taxes. Debts can be defaulted. Fiat systems aren't inherently
| inflationary; but they target a low level of inflation
| because they prefer it to deflation.
| stuaxo wrote:
| So, elites in the UK and elsewhere price locals out, some of them
| in turn go to countries like Portugal and price the locals out.
| tpmx wrote:
| What's that "hostile climate" in the sub-headline about?
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| 5 years resident here (as a Brexit refugee).
|
| Central city locations in Lisbon and Porto have exploded in
| price, but this is due to AirBnB rather than rich expats.
| Portugal's tourism industry has boomed, which has put money in a
| lot of people's pockets, but has distorted local economies
| somewhat. Better management is required, for example cracking
| down on AirBnB and NOT building that new cruise liner terminal.
|
| Unfortunately the upper middle class idyll (alluded to in the
| article) of living a dilapidated (but in a cool way) apartment
| ten paces from your favourite coffee shop, while doing a socially
| respectable play job is now no more viable here than in SF,
| London or Berlin. Indeed, my own favourite 'coffee shop' got
| turned into a chain tequila bar.
|
| Outside the hot centres, things aren't as bad. Public transport
| (at least in the AML - Lisbon Metropolitan Area) is excellent by
| any standard, and decent apartments are available for sensible
| prices well within one hour public transport commute of the
| downtown. Compare with London, where people are fighting over
| each rental.
|
| > family factor weighs a lot here
|
| Yes, and this is a problem, given that Portugal only became
| democratic 48 years ago and has a large amount of cultural
| baggage from quite frankly medieval times. Also, the implication
| of this statement is that family doesn't count elsewhere - and in
| case you missed it it was spelled out a few lines later, which
| should give you an idea of the residual naivety and insularity of
| (old) Portuguese culture. Agency - the idea that _you_ can do or
| think something independently, and then take responsibility for
| it - is somewhat lacking too.
|
| But! There is much that is very good about Portugal and the
| Portuguese people, I feel that here it is ok to be kind to each
| other. Furthermore, there are good changes, new opportunities are
| arising (perhaps in a very small part to some of the more
| productive visa holders), and I see a great future for Portugal -
| even if many Portuguese often don't.
| andrepd wrote:
| (Calling yourself a "refugee" as a rich immigrant is a bit off-
| puting, imho)
|
| Why do you say that the rise in housing prices has been due to
| AirBnB but not to rich immigrants? It seems a bit odd. Both can
| outbid the average native and just push prices high. Many rich
| immigrants also buy up loads of property for
| speculative/investment purposes, not just to live in.
|
| >has a large amount of cultural baggage from quite frankly
| medieval times
|
| I wonder what exactly you mean by this.
| iostream25 wrote:
| not the op. agree that op is not refugee fleeing war on
| inflatable boat.
|
| I distilled "lack of agency" as: not rewarding initiative,
| people afraid to take initiative. the portuguese boss does
| not like the employee to take initiative, and the employee
| will not do so. copying existing British designs is "safer"
| socially speaking, than making new designs.
|
| source: I'm portuguese, I'm a weirdo and people always try to
| conform me to a box.
| sanedigital wrote:
| We lived in Lisbon for a year. While lots of city centers
| have had housing converted to Short-term Rentals, Lisbon is
| at an entirely different level. There, entire apartment
| _buildings_ (6-10 units) are converted to Airbnbs
| /hotels/hostels. There are streets in the more touristy areas
| where every other building is for STRs (buildings that were
| clearly built as long-term housing).
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Rich expats too, who are you trying to fool. Can rich expats
| outbid the average Portuguese? If the answer is yes, then
| there's not much discussion to have.
| taylorius wrote:
| "Indeed, my own favourite 'coffee shop' got turned into a chain
| tequila bar."
|
| The horror! ;-)
| paganel wrote:
| > but this is due to AirBnB
|
| Others have said it before, but mass tourism is the new Dutch
| disease [1]. Pure tourist cities like Venice are already too
| affected by it to have a chance of getting back to a normal
| economic and social life, but there are other cities that are
| still trying to fight it, like Barcelona. Not sure if there are
| any political forces in Lisbon or Porto ready to take the same
| stance.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
| epolanski wrote:
| > one hour public transport commute of the downtown.
|
| Who doesn't want to spend 15% of his woke day commuting.
| tuatoru wrote:
| In the long run the problem is self-correcting.
|
| If workers can't afford to live in what were the important
| cities, they live elsewhere.
|
| Eventually employers move to where the workers are. The formerly
| important cities become tourist meccas like Venice or Granada, or
| ghost towns.
|
| This is happening to London and Lisbon, and to a lesser extent to
| Amsterdam, Paris, New York and San Francisco, and other cities.
|
| It's a pity, because the famous cities got big early because
| they're in good places for trade. Their replacements are second
| best in this regard.
| ekkeke wrote:
| Don't agree with this analysis, it will end just not like that.
| The workers will have worse and worse living conditions until
| they're reduced to effective serfdom. Eventually they may rise
| up and force change through voting or riots, but that's quite
| unlikely for some time as the generations that benefitted from
| this still outnumber those suffering.
|
| The sad thing is that this has been done by one generation to
| the following one, parents impoverishing their own children.
| Not intentionally perhaps, but they have created the artificial
| supply side restrictions through planning laws and nimbyism
| that have resulted in their childrens impoverishment.
|
| One of my friends is paying half his salary in rent with his
| own house impossibly out of sight, while his parents own
| multiple properties and rent them out.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ... The workers will have worse and worse living conditions
| until they're reduced to effective serfdom.
|
| Both outcomes are possible; it basically depends om whether
| the high productivity of the most expensive cities is truly
| exceptional - in which case it won't benefit most workers -
| or something that can be readily replicated in the rest of
| the country. We've mostly seen examples of the former in
| places like the Bay Area: there's only a limited number of
| Big Tech unicorns around at any given time, after all. But
| the latter is a theoretical possibility, perhaps driven by
| more ubiquitous sorts of sustained technological change and
| innovation.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| The problem won't be solved until ordinary people start burning
| down luxury apartments and AirBnbs.
| asdff wrote:
| Why is the situation always "lets attempt to tax investors who
| are notorious for skirting around their full tax burden" instead
| of directly attacking the conditions that lead to this area being
| a favorable area to park money in the first place? Namely, you
| have too many jobs and not enough housing.
|
| Sometime in the last 100 years, leaders around the western world
| realized the massive real estate opportunity of strangling
| natural urban growth and price gouging on the limited supply they
| artificially created through euclidean zoning and countless
| layers of regulatory process meant to disincentivize investment
| in development. Just build more housing, and a lot of the
| economic ills of the 2020s around the world will evaporate.
| immibis wrote:
| Nobody wins elections by promising to destroy jobs.
| [deleted]
| rcarmo wrote:
| As a Portuguese living in Lisbon, I find this article to be all
| over the place. Sometimes it's realistic, often it's just
| sensationalist.
|
| Yes, real estate prices are nuts right now. I have no clue how my
| kids are going to find places to live when they want to move out,
| but I can tell you that a lot of that is just plain and simple
| greed from builders and homeowners who often refuse to maintain
| (let alone re-paint or improve) existing buildings.
|
| There are also political aspects to how zoning and development
| takes place, but those vary so much depending on region and party
| lines that I'll just call it lack of political responsibility
| (also, most people outside the extreme left or right don't want
| to get involved in politics, lobbying or economic discussions).
|
| There was a very big emphasis some 40-50 years ago on building
| thoroughfares, regional transportation, and nationalizing what
| passed for core industries, but all roads led to district
| capitals at the expense of doing actual regional development.
| Efforts to foster or sustain most industries largely failed
| (although there are echoes of those in current startup support
| programs, and some regional programs of note), so young people
| gravitated towards the shoreline (and towns, and the services
| industry) and the countryside just aged away.
|
| I have been thinking of moving out of Lisbon to a smaller town
| (property prices are tempting), but health, shopping, etc., are
| just not there, because everything of interest (brand and
| specialists stores, entertainment, etc.) is mostly only available
| in district capitals, and most large companies only have offices
| in Lisbon or the mongrel outskirts of it, in business centres
| that are only reachable by car and lack decent public
| transportation.
|
| So that makes it hard to get a decent paycheck outside Lisbon and
| Oporto, unless you're willing to become a chattel to some lobbies
| who are sponsoring local colleges hoping to get cheap tech labor
| out of new graduates, paying them just enough to stick around.
|
| A good summary of all the above is what happened in a district
| near Lisbon --- a previous mayor (who went to jail for corruption
| and actually got reelected afterwards) supported the creation of
| malls, business centers, etc., but punted on public
| transportation (leaving a local university center effectively
| stranded) and futzed about with zoning to allow premium villas to
| be built.
|
| I have been expecting the Lisbon real estate market to crash
| _hard_ for a while now, but people with college degrees are
| somehow managing to pay rent or mortgaging other family assets to
| buy flats in the city. The rest struggle, of course, and are
| pushed out to the suburbs.
|
| I wonder for how much longer things will stay this way.
| Portuguese are becoming more technically literate on average, so
| that gives me some hope, but I just don't see the overall economy
| evolving beyond the primary industry/services and tourism
| dichotomy, no matter how many tech unicorns spring up and bring
| expats here.
|
| (On that note, Portuguese wages, even in FAANG companies, are
| merely a fraction of our US, UK, German and Swiss counterparts,
| and that can't be explained solely through cost of living
| comparisons... but that's a completely different discussion)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I see three colluding factors causing a global cost-of-living
| crisis:
|
| - Increasing income inequality short-circuiting the backpressure
| role of market pricing (and, more specifically, the use of home
| ownership and immigrant-investor programs as a way to sidestep
| restrictive immigration systems)
|
| - Countries attempting to replicate the American suburban
| lifestyle, which is economically unsustainable as voters are
| incentivized to constrain supply in favor of "line go up"
|
| - The economic gravity of living in a large city.
|
| The econ 101 explanation of markets is that increasing price
| lowers demand, but this is determined by the "elasticity" of the
| supply and demand curves. The shapes of the curves determines
| what the market will do when supply or demand shifts. But if
| these curves are straight lines, or "inelastic"; then suppliers
| or buyers do not compromise on quantity and the market gouges
| people.
|
| Supply is inelastic: most cities are hostile to redevelopment and
| all the economically-viable land in the city has been used up. No
| matter how expensive housing gets, people will not be able to
| build more of it, so price goes up more. In fact, when housing
| gets more valuable, there is more political resistance to
| increasing supply, which makes prices go up more.
|
| Demand is inelastic: most housing buyers _need_ to own a house.
| Homelessness is at best inconvenient and at worst illegal. Moving
| out of a city is expensive, and will require finding new
| employment, possibly at a lower hourly rate or salary.
|
| The end result is that the housing market works less like a
| market and more like NFTs pre-a-few-months-ago. It is politically
| engineered to ensure quick and profitable exits for the vast
| majority of homeowners. However, this process cannot go on
| forever; because eventually home costs will outstrip wages, which
| puts backpressure on the whole "line go up" thing.
|
| This is where the rich and powerful come in. They do not respond
| to pricing backpressure the same way you or me do. If a flat in
| Portugal is a million euros instead of half a million, who the
| hell cares? They can afford it anyway. They represent "greatest
| fools" - people who can resolve a speculative bubble by just
| buying the asset and not caring about it.
|
| It's also kind of a mistake to say that "the Portuguese can no
| longer afford to live in Portugal". The population is not a
| monolith; it's more correct to say that _today 's middle class
| Portuguese_ cannot afford to live in their own country, but prior
| decades' middle classes absolutely could have, and the price
| inflation in the housing market is specifically to the benefit of
| those people.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > - Countries attempting to replicate the American suburban
| lifestyle
|
| Really, where? I thought only fractions of the anglosphere
| replicated this (like parts of Canada). Extremely few Europeans
| would want that lifestyle, for instance. The trend seems to be
| moving aggressively in the opposite direction, with large and
| dense cities attracting the majority of new people.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's not parts of Canada - it's all of Canada. A member of
| our extended family runs a construction firm in Western CA
| and they've been building suburban tract housing EVERYWHERE -
| from Nanaimo to Abbotsford to Edmonton. And the same kind of
| sprawly suburban tract housing thaat exissts in North America
| is a popular status symbol in India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and
| China to name a few. Drive around Chandigarh, Delhi NCR, HMC,
| or Johor sometime. Also, if talking about Europeans, it's
| probably good to specify which part of Europe. Milton Keynes,
| Amstelveen, Dublin, Aarhus, and Espoo all feel very North
| American suburban in style.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the pointers. Now that I think of
| it, I think Saudi Arabia and UAE may be added to that list.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yep! They also prefer suburban tract housing. Also in
| Ireland and UK in my experience (my coworkers in the
| London office all moved to Reading, MK, Newbury, etc once
| they started familes). Amsterdam as well after visiting
| another cousin in Amsteveel, and Aahrus and Espoo to meet
| a buddy of mine who went to Aarhus Universitet and
| started at Nokia
| prmoustache wrote:
| First the linked article would do with a bit of proofreading, it
| is painful at this point.
|
| The market is mostly driven by portuguese government offering low
| taxes to people retiring in the country.
|
| This won't be sustainable in the long run as all those people
| retiring now likely got less kids than the previous gen and will
| gonna die soon. This is a bubble that will pop in the next
| 20years when the amount of people dying and properties being put
| on sale will be much greater than people willing to retire there.
|
| Also it is not like all these properties sold didn't benefit
| portuguese people.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Actually, the market is being driven by wealthy real estate
| owners who don't want to do anything but sit back and rake in
| the profits. The government has been sponsoring visas to get
| investment in to diversify our industry and economics, but the
| people coming here to work are not really the ones buying
| luxury flats.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Remember when people talked about the impending Florida real
| estate collapse, the so-called "Silver Tsunami"?
|
| Same (theorized) dynamic. Retired people dying.
|
| The notion seems almost quaint in light of current events.
| TekMol wrote:
| I hope Portugal won't tackle it like my country, with a cap on
| rent and other market distortions. I think that only makes it
| worse.
|
| Fun fact: I - as a single - live in a way too big, luxurious and
| expensive apartment because of this. I rented it, when I was
| still working for the man and was making a killing. Now I live a
| much more modest 4-hour-workweek life. It would be better for me
| to move to an apartment half the size. Then a big family could
| live here nicely. But no way. No landlord in Germany rents to a
| freelancer who enjoys a "I'm mainly slacking off for a while"
| lifestyle.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Heavily taxing houses that stay empty and limiting short
| duration rental could be quite effective.
|
| The issue is somewhat the same in Paris. It's very hard to
| afford living there because non local use properties as an
| investment and prefer them staying empty than risking them
| degraded and people who want to rent make more money on Airbnb.
|
| It's fine if you want the city to become Disneyland but very
| depressing otherwise.
| andrepd wrote:
| This issue of speculation on empty properties would be, if
| not solved, then at least immensely alleviated with a
| Georgist LVT (Land Value Tax), a tax on properties equal to
| the rent for the undeveloped piece of land.
|
| It's easy to implement, the market exists to price that
| amount, and provides a direct incentive to either put the
| property to productive use or get rid of it.
|
| Building physical houses to sit empty as a financial
| instrument has to be one of the peaks of capitalist insanity.
| solveit wrote:
| > Building physical houses to sit empty as a financial
| instrument has to be one of the peaks of capitalist
| insanity.
|
| I quite agree, and I am therefore very suspicious that this
| is actually happening in significant volume! I have never
| seen convincing evidence that this happens, and it, at
| least superficially, makes no sense as a money-making
| scheme (Worried about degradation? That just means you
| should get insurance.) In general, it doesn't make
| financial sense to keep capital idle, and claims of such
| should be taken with a grain of salt, especially if the
| messaging is politically charged as "rich foreigners are
| screwing the common man over to make money".
|
| I agree that an LVT would be the solution if this were
| actually a problem. And that an LVT solves many other
| problems unrelated to evil foreign billionaires.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Indeed. I'm most familiar with the US market so can't
| speak for European countries which may be different, but
| here's a graph of estimated vacant units held off-market
| against total housing units in the US:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=TiNw
| abeppu wrote:
| Is this a high or a low number? On the one hand, <5% of
| units vacant sounds small. On the other hand, this is
| about 12x as many as there are estimated homeless in the
| US.
|
| https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/2020-point-in-
| time-co...
| solveit wrote:
| 4% vacancy is what you get if people live in a house for
| two years before moving, and it takes a month before a
| new family moves in. Sounds pretty normal, and with no
| obvious way of using this idle time to help the homeless.
| [deleted]
| al_mandi wrote:
| > Heavily taxing houses
|
| Two wrongs don't make a right.
| TekMol wrote:
| Are those really making a dent? What percentage of Lisbons
| apartments stay empty? What percentage is used for short
| duration rental?
|
| I would think only a small one-digit percentage?
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| There are tons (like, really many) of empty, closed rotting
| buildings in Lisbon. My assumption is the owners are
| waiting for prices to increase or simply demanding
| unreasonably inflated prices until they find a buyer. I'd
| like to know the reasons for it. Anyway, whole blocks are
| empty. Heck, there is a large empty building directly next
| to the German embassy (and, ironically, part of the German
| embassy is also abandoned and empty even though it belongs
| to it).
|
| There is also a substantial number of new luxury apartment
| buildings in my area with apartments that appear to be
| empty. Whether they are owned yet or to be sold is hard to
| determine but you can see when nobody lives there.
| stainforth wrote:
| Exactly. There should be a tax on vacancy. We've made the
| 1) mistake of turning a very special need like shelter
| into a commodity or security vehicle, and 2) this
| commodity the owner can "hold-out" on in that makes it
| violate the principles of economics that we all
| supposedly agreed upon from above that the market is the
| most fair and best solution for people.
| intrasight wrote:
| Cute, walkable cities are the original Disneyland - there's
| no changing that and in fact it will become more pronounced.
|
| taxing empty - yes
|
| limiting short duration - no, just tax it more. Limits are
| too easy to hack.
| djbebs wrote:
| Youll be happy to learn that every rental property in portugal
| is under rent control!
|
| Some have been unable to raise rents since the 1910s!
| aprdm wrote:
| Similar in Vancouver. If you've been renting for 7+ years, you
| won't move even if the place doesn't fit you anymore. You would
| be paying close to double.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I don't think Germany is a great example at all cause they
| would rather rent out to a good German girl who's dad has money
| than to a foreign professional who has a longterm work contract
| in Germany. I agree that the annoying lifestyle expats are a
| problem, but bringing up something completely unrelated with a
| whole host of its own issues is a really weird way to make a
| point.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It's a combination of things really.
|
| Lack of building when the population is still growing.
|
| Encouraging single lifestyle, both by kicking out kids early
| and shacking up later.
|
| Cases where sitting on an empty property is risk free.
|
| Infrastructure increases taking valuable space.
|
| Giving early birds great deals compared to today, making them
| sit on huge housing for a pittance and making moving out a
| terrible deal.
|
| And politically, there simply is no immediate incentive to
| solve things when the current population of homeowners does
| not contain enough people to vote in favor of those that
| don't own homes.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| > I hope Portugal won't tackle it like my country, with a cap
| on rent and other market distortions. I think that only makes
| it worse.
|
| That's one of the reasons why portuguese renting market is so
| bad. There were rent control policies for like 40 years. It has
| been phased out but the market still has the signs of its
| damages.
|
| There also other contributing policies and the policies change
| almost every two years.
|
| I'm one that could invest in the market, to bring more houses
| to be rent, but I can not risk 150 000 euros buying a house to
| rent (middle income market) and then having problems evicting
| with a non-paying renter, being forbidden to increase the rent
| due a new law or god help me if I need to use the court system
| to ask for renter damages.
| stainforth wrote:
| So either we preference your 150000 euros (and of course
| interest and margin on top) or someone having a roof over
| their head, running water, and even the ability to stay in
| the same are and building community instead of moving each
| year due to capital seeking max gains.
| epolanski wrote:
| But he said he want to do it to help a family, not his
| pockets. /s
| consp wrote:
| There are other ways to be stuck, I'm in subsidized housing
| which I would like to give to the less fortunate but buying is
| impossible and leaving would mean half the space and four times
| the rent making me have less remaining per month than the less
| fortunate in my current appartment.
| substation13 wrote:
| Indeed. Price caps turn an expensive market into a lottery.
| Hardly an improvement, in my view.
| andrepd wrote:
| Large amounts of public-built housing (and I mean large, in
| the order of at least ~20% of the market) have a track record
| of working amazingly well to lower the cost of housing to
| acceptable levels and to give everyone a chance at
| homeownership.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I wonder how much Airbnb is to blame on the raising rents around
| the world. Why charge a "local" rate when you can charge 5x that
| rate for a tourist paying in $$$? Even if you don't, just knowing
| about Airbnb's extremely high prices will most likely put
| inflationary pressure on rents.
| dorchadas wrote:
| In August 2019, ~1600 places were up for rent in Dublin. In
| August 2020, it was double that. Mostly from tourist hotspots
| with AirBnB people trying to shift to long term lets. They're
| back on AirBnB now, and housing is even shittier than it was
| before. Yes, there's other issues, but AirBnB has been a
| _known_ problem in Ireland since at least 2016 when I was first
| looking at places to rent in the country.
|
| The government has said they're going to start tackling the
| issue of short term lets this month. I'll believe it when I see
| it.
| nickpp wrote:
| Didn't Ireland have a campaign against greedy landlords with
| rent controls, 52% tax, no deductions, no evictions?! That
| would explain much better the disaster in rental market...
| davidw wrote:
| I live in a touristy place in the US, and while STR (short term
| rentals) clearly don't help, the city's own statistics show
| they're not a huge factor.
|
| More than anything, NIMBY neighbors keep killing less expensive
| forms of housing... 100's of homes, I would say, in the time
| since I started observing the situation.
|
| STR's make for a convenient bogeyman that people can point
| their finger at. It's a bit more disturbing when you realize
| it's actually your neighbors; kind, ordinary people in most
| regards.
| bombcar wrote:
| STRs almost by _definition_ can 't be the entirety of the
| problem, except in cases where there's an absolute limit on
| available units, and it's highly desirable as a tourist
| destination (Venice, for example).
|
| STRs just slipped past the NIMBYs because they weren't on the
| lookout for it; it won't happen again!
| coding123 wrote:
| The liberal enclaves of high paying jobs has been broken. These
| people decided to move to exotic or rural or destination places
| because we paid them like kings. Now we have a lot of entitled
| kings running around ruining everything yesteryear.
| fbanon wrote:
| Step 1: nearly bankrupt your country
|
| Step 2: sell out your country to wealthy foreigners to "stimulate
| the economy"
|
| Step 3: act surprised that you can't afford living in your
| country, that got sold out to wealthy foreigners
| immibis wrote:
| Step 4: say "oops, we can't afford to pay you the stuff we
| promised, but you should have known that, because you are smart
| investors and you checked our balance sheet and houseflow
| first" and then default on the investments. I wonder why these
| places are so desperate not to do that.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Because the international class that sets policy - and is
| heavily represented on this site - would lose money if they
| did so. Better to focus on idpol like ingroup/outgroup blame.
| outworlder wrote:
| In this case, the 'wealthy foreigners' are large corporations
| (and foreign governments). Not the occasional gringo that
| decides to bridge the language barrier and buy property there.
| [deleted]
| mariojv wrote:
| Related article in the WSJ today about Americans buying European
| homes due to the favorable exchange rate:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-the-u-s-dollar-surges-americ...
|
| I wonder how this will impact "golden visas." Personally, if
| moving to Europe, I would be a little concerned about short-term
| energy insecurity pretty much anywhere except perhaps the Iberian
| peninsula. I think they'll find a solution, but it'd be hard to
| make such a big bet on without certainty.
| petre wrote:
| The Iberian peninsula imports gas from Algeria. The instant
| they accept Moroccan control over Western Sahara is the instant
| the gas stops flowing from Algeria to Spain and Portugal.
| mariojv wrote:
| Do you think this is likely to happen? I don't know enough
| about the politics of the region to know if this is something
| they would do.
| petre wrote:
| Yes, it's quite possible. After Abdelaziz Bouteflika
| resigned, the current Algerian government started working
| against France and the EU. Lots of French investment in
| Algeria, so they're basically also working against
| themselves, betting most if not all of their economy on oil
| and gas. Apart from ocasional territorial disputes, Spain
| and Morrocco are on okay terms and the current Spanish
| goverment is supporting the Moroccan plan for the autonomy
| of Western Sahara, which is close to their holiday islands,
| the Canarias. This move drew hash criticism and threats
| from Algeria who's establishment unconditionally supports
| the Polisario front. They're a nationalist movement working
| against Spanish colonialism and Moroccan and Mauritanian
| irredentism. Spain is walking on quite a thin line in
| Africa. I need not remind you that virtually all of their
| gas comes from Hassi R'Mel, Algeria.
| smm11 wrote:
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Why does anyone let non-resident people buy residential housing?
| ejb999 wrote:
| not every country does allow it, but you don't have to buy to
| cause a problem for locals - just be willing to pay more rent
| than a local can afford is enough of a problem to price
| others(locals) out.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| That's the wrong question. If you sell housing to non-resident
| people, you receive money to build more housing. The question
| should be:
|
| Why does anybody limit supply of housing to the point that
| prices rise?
|
| The French did a bad job at building satellite cities, but done
| right, you could connect new housing to the city center like
| the original Los Angeles street cars.
|
| If jobs don't pay much then you also don't pay much to the
| builders of new houses which makes them affordable.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't think it is. If you can't own the property or have to
| pay extreme taxes you will definitely think twice about
| moving there or buying up real estate. Make it -hurt-. Then
| only billionaires can afford to live there. Problem solved,
| there aren't that many billionaires. Or simply outlaw it. I
| don't know why that is hard? I mean they own their country.
| No one has a right to buy property there other than the
| Portuguese if they just say no.
| immibis wrote:
| You're conflating different values of "you". If I sell my
| house to a non-resident person and receive money, why should
| I use that money to build more housing, rather than a
| Ferrari? Meanwhile, the people who actually build the houses
| aren't the ones selling all the existing stock in the most
| desirable locations. They are stuck building suburban sprawl
| because that's where the empty space is.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| 'You' was meant in a general way. Somebody sells a house,
| the money exchanges hands several times, and then somebody
| else can build a new house - unless the money ends up in
| Maranello.
|
| The desirable locations are a renewable resource. Portugal
| could build new desirable areas. They could even turn this
| into a recurring business and sell them to international
| investors, too. Instead of building suburban sprawl they
| can build more urban clusters.
| kblev wrote:
| Banning international sales is a politically damaging move
| because it would crash the market value of existing housing,
| affecting those residents who own one (or more), particularly
| if they're on a mortgage. It also reduces the tax income from
| properties and propert sales. Banks probably wouldn't be too
| happy either that the security on the loans no longer cover the
| outstanding balance.
|
| Things will probably shift when the proportion of renters
| significantly outnumber the home owners.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| To bring some facts regarding the housing market:
|
| The evolution of new housing construction over the last years
| https://www.pordata.pt/en/Portugal/Completed+dwellings+in+ne...
|
| The number of conventional family houses in Portugal
| https://www.pordata.pt/en/Portugal/Conventional+family+housi...
|
| My opinions: The housing market has been stagnant since 2010
| while at the same time interest rates have been low. The
| population might not have risen a lot since 2010 but the usual
| trends of moving to city centers, people leaving their parents
| house (which keep the same house), people wanting new/bigger
| houses than their parents are still pressures present.
|
| This means there's a big pressure in demand for housing which is
| not being met by supply which increases the prices. My
| speculation is that foreign investment has a very low impact in
| the housing prices, but it's just my speculation. Even if it's a
| considerable impact, the fix is always to increase supply of
| houses so that prices drop and we also get foreign investment.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Oh yeah, there's the problem right there. They stopped building
| houses in 2010!
| iostream25 wrote:
| You could say the same about <countryname> where <countryname> is
| a popular tourist destination that has over 15% of it's economy
| based in tourism. Czechs were the minority property owners in
| Prague some 20 years ago, already.
|
| Inflation is occurring at higher rates in some countries than
| others (cough Estonia, Turkey for example) and Portugal is not
| exceptional in this respect. The starting salaries for doctors in
| the Portuguese SNS are terrible, at around 1800 euro for doctors
| and 1200 euro for nurses. This is insufficient for living in
| Lisbon or Porto, as the author would agree.
|
| Source: I am Portuguese. I live in central Portugal.
|
| I do not like the authors apparent intentions in trying to incite
| anti-foreigner sentiments. Portugal has chosen it's own course
| here, from the Golden Visas to the over-reliance on tourism.
| Lisbon has it's own management problems that I won't dig into,
| but suffice it to say that _certain_ places like Lisbon or Porto
| have become rather expensive, while the majority of the interior
| of the country continues to be less-inhabited. Our train services
| were gutted when the public system was privatized and the
| concession given to a single company.
|
| Monopolies run rampant in Portugal.
|
| Uniquely complaining about PORTUGAL being unaffordable for the
| PORTUGUESE is such a Portuguese mentality, I can't even. The
| author needs to live abroad in some other countries for awhile
| and see how much this is a general issue relating to so-called
| NICE CITIES becoming horribly expensive. No doubt, we will stop
| being fashionable at some point, when the "next" cool place
| becomes king, so the real question is whether we will begin
| manufacturing and developing other sectors of our economy beyond
| raw-materials export (low in the capitalist pyramid) and tourism.
| Make furniture to sell, rather than exporting the timber, so to
| speak.
| parminya wrote:
| > Uniquely complaining about PORTUGAL being unaffordable for
| the PORTUGUESE is such a Portuguese mentality, I can't even.
|
| I love this complaint. It's so perfectly a demonstrations of
| itself. It's somehow as if, suffering a problem that someone
| else suffers from, means you're not allowed to even discuss it.
| It's also hardly unique to Portugal. Most countries discuss
| domestic politics in terms of the country, because they have
| say over the policy of non-domestic territories. (Usually -
| colonial empires excepted.)
| WheatM wrote:
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| This same story seems to be playing out anywhere that attracts it
| and allows it.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| There are good arguments that foreigners should only be allowed
| to own real estate only in specific places and that citizenship
| should be by blood only for small countries - let's say under
| 100000 sq km and 50 million people. Too easy for them to be
| overtaken by global elite otherwise.
| outworlder wrote:
| > There are good arguments that foreigners should only be
| allowed to own real estate only in specific places
|
| In the context of receiving visas, that's exactly what
| already happens in Portugal.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| No. They can buy everywhere in Portugal. The idea is that
| you forbid them to buy near the desirable coast and force
| them into the heartland.
| foogazi wrote:
| > There are good arguments that foreigners should only be
| allowed to own real estate only in specific places
|
| What are the good arguments ?
|
| Do you think the "global elite" is invading Portugal ?
| [deleted]
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The poorer part. The richer are busy fucking up London, New
| York and Vancouver and other desirable places.
| notch656a wrote:
| Citizenship-by-investment programs are dominated by small
| nations. Seems like smaller nations actually
| disproportionately favor absorbing richer foreigners.
|
| The most extreme example is probably Comoros, which up until
| a few years ago you could become a citizen for $45k over-the-
| counter.
| cpach wrote:
| Unless you have really crappy weather, like here in Sweden :-p
| cinntaile wrote:
| What do you mean. Sweden has hugely inflated housing prices.
| jmauritz wrote:
| Tourists / foreigners buying houses i guess, although i
| predict that in the coming 10-20 years we'll be seeing
| mediterraneans escaping the summer heat in the north.
| beebeepka wrote:
| With global warming, the north is going to have the best
| weather in a few decades, maybe less.
|
| You guys are going to have it all.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| It will still be over half of the year, I don't thinking
| climate change will change that.
| [deleted]
| foogazi wrote:
| Lots of contradictions in tfa
|
| Does Portugal have US style NIMBYs ? Why not build more housing
|
| Sounds like Golden visas worked at attracting foreigners, raising
| Portugal's land value, and incentivized citizens to move to
| depopulated areas
| outworlder wrote:
| The rules have changed so you can no longer qualify if you buy
| property at large cities. Now, you have to buy property in
| smaller communities. There's a special incentive if you buy an
| old property with the intent to restore it.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| 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 the city have
| skyrocketed, we'd have a hard time finding _anything_ , even
| though we both work full-time and have salaries above average.
| It's crazy because all new homes and apartments are "luxury
| apartments" with insanely high pricing both for buying and
| renting. They're mostly empty or are (often illegally) rented out
| as holiday apartments. It's incomprehensible to me how ordinary
| Portuguese families survive in Lisbon. I guess most of them have
| inherited property.
|
| Quite honestly, apart from the generally increasing gap between
| rich and the poor, one big problem in societies nowadays is that
| you can simply get richer and richer just from owning property.
| For example, if you own three ordinary apartments in Lisbon, you
| can live in one of them and easily make a good living by renting
| out the other two as holiday apartments. Because cleaning
| services, guys who do repairs, etc., are cheap in Portugal, this
| involves almost no work. Moreover, the net worth of your property
| will continually increase while you do (almost) nothing. I'm not
| saying I blame these people, I would do the same if I had the
| opportunity, but this is a huge structural problem in my opinion.
| citilife wrote:
| Many dislike the idea, but this is why people turn to
| "nationalism".
|
| If you want to decrease unemployment, you add tariffs for
| imports enabling more businesses to open domestically (i.e.
| tariffs effectively increase import costs).
|
| Similarly, you can loosen building codes to increase production
| of homes, limit visa duration, require citizenship for home
| ownership, etc. Those are some obvious fixes, why is the
| government not doing it?
|
| Beyond the obvious potential fixes, all EU countries are facing
| the same issue:
|
| - supporting immigrants (high level of immigration)
|
| - no controls over ones border(s) (anyone can move between EU
| countries)
|
| - over regulation and too many social programs (reducing
| peoples willingness to work & increasing burden on the current
| tax base)
|
| - over regulation of industry and farming has left the only
| option to survive being to work in a city (as an example, see
| nitrogen reduction regulations in the Netherlands)
|
| It's all "give-and-take" you have to decide how you want to
| live... To me it sounds like the EU is hitting a critical
| state, but is there a will to make the tough calls yet?
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Check this out, this is fresh out of the oven
|
| Portugal eases visa rules to tackle labour shortage
|
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/portugal-eases-visa-rules-to-
| ta...
|
| > "Portugal's unemployment rate is at 5.7%, near a record
| low.
|
| Employers' confederations have been asking for the
| immigration rules to be streamlined, pointing to an economic
| situation close to full employment"
|
| The narrative of unemployment in Portugal driving
| dissatisfaction across the population is very tenuous in
| light of these latest developments and policies
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Europe largely isn't reproducing. It has to allow immigration
| for its survival.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| This is very simplistic reasoning. For instance:
|
| > If you want to decrease unemployment, you add tariffs for
| imports enabling more businesses to open domestically (i.e.
| tariffs effectively increase import costs).
|
| Unless your domestic business requires imported goods to run
| its business. Then you've just increased costs for your
| domestic industry.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Many dislike the idea, but this is why people turn to
| "nationalism"._
|
| I have to call Grade-A bullshit on your comment.
|
| At best, nationalist political movements take advantage of
| sticking points with their highly opportunistic,
| ideologically incoherent and empty promises hoping to buy
| arguments while pinning the blame of everything on whoever is
| the incumbent at the time.
| sofixa wrote:
| Basically all of what you said is empty populist propaganda
| that doesn't pass a basic sniff test. You're painting the EU
| as the bad guy with a broad brush and it's just total
| nonsense.
|
| * depends on how you define "high" levels of migration, but
| few EU countries fit that. Portugal does, because they
| explicitly encourage it. Why? Nothing to do with the EU,
| they're trying to fight negative population growth.
|
| * social programs aren't an EU thing, they're purely local.
| And the "too much social spending makes people not want to
| work" ia such bullshit.
|
| * there are more local regulations than EU regulations. Which
| ones _specifically_ are you referring to as too much?
|
| * farming is explicitly subsidised to make it profitable.
| What are you talking about?
|
| * not everyone can move between EU countries, you need to be
| a citizen. Like the Portuguese that have moved all around
| (e.g. there are probably millions of people of Portuguese
| descent in France)
|
| It's annoying how popular empty nationalistic populists have
| gotten. Can't nobody bother to fact check their bullshit?
| groby_b wrote:
| Nationalist populists really have never bothered with
| facts. People fact-check, but that's too late - the message
| is out, and it makes people feel better about themselves.
| That's all that matters. Truth doesn't enter.
|
| (We could now add the Satre quote, or Hannah Arendt, or any
| number of people who've written about this. The popularity
| of the feel-good lie is well-inspected.)
| tuatoru wrote:
| Yeah, facts. Demographics explains most of what's going on.
|
| Portugal's working age population is declining[1] while its
| 60-plus population is increasing.[2]
|
| Old people own most of the real estate and don't care much
| about workers. They also tend not to like change, which
| immigrants bring. So they dislike immigrants despite
| depending on them.
|
| (//TODO: find papers supporting these assertions: they're
| factoids of the "everyone knows" type.)
|
| 1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/1
| 5-64...
|
| 2. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/6
| 0plu...
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Old people own most of the real estate and don 't care
| much about workers._
|
| Lisbon's local government is renowned for being the
| largest property owner in the country, with over 60% of
| Lisbon's real estate owned by the city.
| zizee wrote:
| I'm struggling to follow your arguments.
|
| "Boomers don't like immigrants/workers, therefore life is
| getting really expensive" doesn't really sound like good
| reasoning.
|
| If the population is shrinking, demographics doesn't
| explain it by itself. Housing should be getting cheaper
| if there are less people competing for it. There must be
| another factor here.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| You're forgetting household size.
|
| As with all wealthy countries, household size has fallen
| in Portugal over the past few decades, so the same amount
| of people needs more house. This is especially true in
| the context of empty nest retirees.
| [deleted]
| andrekandre wrote:
| none of those things gets rid of the root causes: too much
| financialization and speculation
|
| alot of these things used to be regulated, discouraged or
| prohibited, but with deregulation of much of finance more and
| more wealth is generated from speculation, rents and
| leverage... if people can make money passively from doing
| nothing but owning something (real or virtual) there is less
| motivation for "real productive work" and squeezes out the
| rest of the economy.
|
| this compounds over time and get the results you see today:
| high land costs, rents, inflation etc.
|
| blocking immigration or adding tariffs etc will do nothing to
| stop any that....
| epolanski wrote:
| Nitrogen reduction was the very least dutch government could
| do and most people in netherlands support the law.
|
| We should vastly reduce cattle numbers globally actually.
| googlryas wrote:
| You do have the opportunity though. I bet you could find, say,
| 10 likeminded people and pool your resources and get those 2
| apartments. Yes, you only get 1/10th of the cut, but if it
| really is easy money like that, then why not do it?
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Exactly, an informal REIT targeting Portuguese properties and
| with the rental income paying for the mortgage for your
| apartment.
| rcpt wrote:
| Your comment is almost the Henry George sign
|
| https://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/how-to-fight-weal...
| screye wrote:
| Airbnb and uber for all their benefits have taken away a lot of
| urban planning capabilities of local govts. At the same time,
| they expose the general unwillingness of local govts to
| accomodate the need of the population or those who bring in
| economic value (tourists, transplants).
|
| If you are becoming a tourist hub, then create an off-town
| tourist area and add a convenient transit line/people mover to
| the central parts of town. Tourists get reasonable housing,
| locals don't get displaced and the influx of population does
| not destroy the cultural vibe of your town.
|
| Prohibition never works, and piracy is a reflection of an unmet
| need. Banning things merely airs out open wounds, and leads to
| grey-markets such as shady uber/airbnb equivalents within the
| city. If you want to reduce abortions, banning merely leads to
| riskier abortions. Examples of this are dime a dozen.
|
| When demand arrives, the cities MUST adjust to incoming demand.
| Couple examples of working uncomfortable compromises are: 1.
| Paris - Choose a small district and allow it to go full
| skyscraper. The rest of the town maintains its architectural
| identity. 2. Barcelona - Go full superblock. Means that tourist
| activity gets neatly distributed across the city (removing
| bottlenecks) and tourists do not lead to increase in car
| traffic.
|
| I could go on and on, but 1 fundamental truth stays.
| Bottlenecks only help those who control access to it. The key
| is to eliminate the bottleneck (more housing). Band-aids (rent-
| control) or equitable distribution of bottleneck gains (no-
| renters->only-homeowners/ more single-family-housing) never
| works. It only leads to the situation festering (see Bay Area /
| SF), and makes for an even harder problem in the future.
|
| I'm not sure if my comment conveys any cohesive point, but I
| hope folks get something out of it.
|
| p.s: fuck NIMBYs
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Practically every single capital is like that these days.
| People of all nations can copy paste same rant and it would
| be 100% valid. This is how it is, too much buying power with
| new generation of higher level office workers compared to
| blue collar ones, on top of financial speculation with either
| prices skyrocketing, or airbnbs. Let's not forget there is
| more and more of people in general, and more and more coming
| for work, education etc. to bigger places and rarely going
| back.
|
| Or to put it in reverse - I am not aware of any
| metropolis/capital where this isn't true, regardless of
| regime.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I would argue the Canadian one of Ottawa. Ottawa isn't
| cheap, but it is not anywhere near Toronto or Vancouver.
| mcspiff wrote:
| Right, it really should say anchor cities and not capital
| IMO. Those may coincide sometimes, but not always.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't think I've ever heard the absurd levels of this
| blog post and I've lived in few expensive cities from
| italy, poland and switzerland, where it is impossible for
| middle class locals to live there.
| kitten_mittens_ wrote:
| You leave out Western Mass though.
| personalidea wrote:
| Germany is working to make its spot on the list. At least in
| the cities.
| jseliger wrote:
| _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.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that
| straightforward, California (which has much more space and
| money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be
| moving to Portugal.
| lthornberry wrote:
| For many decades, California has had extremely restrictive
| building regulations, especially in the most desirable
| areas. That is slowly changing, but the actual building has
| always been straightforward. It is getting the permission
| to do so that is complicated, expensive, and often just
| impossible.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| Agreed on all counts, but that doesn't make the problem
| of politics any less real. People problems are always the
| hardest to solve, especially when deeply problematic
| policies like Prop 13 are written into the state
| constitution.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| You could say that it's technically simple but
| politically complex, sure.
|
| But what that amounts to is, "we _could_ do it, but
| collectively don 't feel like it."
| epolanski wrote:
| The most desirable areas aren't filled with buildings at
| every corner.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The lack of housing in gigantic states like California is
| baffling to me as someone who comes from an incredibly
| densely populated country.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| I find it hugely frustrating, but it's not that
| complicated. Ever since prop 13 passed in 1978,
| homeowners' property tax has been pegged to the purchase
| price rather than the assessed value, creating a huge
| disincentive to sell. In a place like LA, most or all of
| the habitable land has been developed. The lots that are
| undeveloped (at least those in my neighborhood) are
| sketchy--steep grades and sandy soil, which will
| eventually crumble either due to a megastorm or
| earthquake. No one wants to sell to developers, and why
| would they? They live in nice houses that get more
| valuable every year, in a nice part of the country with
| nice weather. Beyond that, they oppose every housing
| development imaginable, usually by arguing that "luxury
| condos" are replacing "rare green spaces." (There's a
| whole "Save Poppy Peak" campaign near me, which is
| infuriating, because it's a bunch of people with $1.5
| million+ houses who don't want apartments to get in the
| way of their view.)
|
| There are all sorts of obvious political fixes to this
| (repeal prop 13, end single-family zoning, incentivize
| building mixed-use, mixed-income residences, whatever),
| but I can't imagine any passing any time soon. Homeowners
| have all the power, fight all these changes tooth and
| nail (often through lawsuits against developers on
| environmental protection grounds) at the local level.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It's very _technically_ simple. Humans have been building
| housing, dense housing even, for millennia. Yes, standards
| are higher now, but we also have technological
| improvements.
|
| The challenge is nearly always _political_ in nature: a lot
| of vested interests want to go out of their way to make it
| harder to build more housing.
| [deleted]
| _dain_ wrote:
| we somehow managed to build houses for thousands of years,
| so it can't be that hard, can it? the scarcity is entirely
| artificial.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Historically most people didn't live in single family
| homes. They lived in very crowded, multi-generational and
| small dwellings connected to many neighbors. Shared
| public spaces were used for getting together, etc. Most
| dwellings did not have kitchens, etc. Our idea of a home
| for "regular people" is radically different than what
| people have lived in.
|
| People need to probably drastically limit what they think
| of when they think of affordable housing. Think multi-
| family homes where each dwelling supports 4 people and is
| < 800 sq-feet. 1 bathroom, 1 communal area (w/ small
| range + table) and 2 bedrooms.
|
| Look to the disposable homes of Japan I guess.
| _dain_ wrote:
| or you could just legalize building anything other than
| single family dwellings. there's a lot of room in between
| quarter acre lot suburbia, and a crowded favela! look up
| "missing middle housing". the problem is purely a matter
| of restrictive zoning.
| notch656a wrote:
| The physical building of houses and even raising the
| capital to buy the materials and labor to build some sort
| of house capable of housing people, is not anywhere near
| the choke point in California. Eliminate the zoning and
| building inspectors and associated enforcement mechanisms
| and the houses would pop up.
|
| I guarantee if California said tomorrow, "build what you
| like on your land, there will be no permits required!"
| People would flock to build on the land. Whether the
| dangers of that outweighs the dangers of homelessness and
| high price families spend on rent that makes healthcare,
| healthy food, and education less affordable, is an exercise
| for the reader.
| [deleted]
| samatman wrote:
| Ah yes, California, where a developer in Berkeley spent 12
| years fighting the city to build a six-story apartment
| building, which was then built in
|
| six weeks. People were moving in three months after
| breaking ground.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Nope. Zoning and licensing is in the hands of politicians and
| construction lobbies vying for the best places to build high-
| value housing, which is where they get the most return.
| WheatM wrote:
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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 increase the density of services (public
| and private) and utilities, which also comes with its own
| problem.
| epolanski wrote:
| Even outside it.
|
| Took a train to Sintra, there were endless and endless 6
| story-miles long buildings forever. Portugal seems insanely
| dense.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Have you been to San Francisco?
|
| Lisbon: 100.05 km^2 , 544k people
|
| San Francisco: 121.48 km^2, 873k people
|
| 20% more room than Lisbon, 60% more people.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Why does everyone want to live in Lisbon?
|
| There are other decent metropolises in Portugal and other
| fun spots around the country not to get crammed in the
| capital.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| That's where job opportunities are, and that's why more
| housing will increase the opportunities, and then the
| price of housing...
| asah wrote:
| lol Lisbon is crowded.
|
| Lisbon: 6,452/km2
|
| Barcelona: 16,000/km2
|
| NYC: 25,000+/km2 (depends on the source)
|
| Lower East Side NYC: 33,600/km2 - due to zoning regs, there
| are very few buildings over 9 stories... but _every_
| building is 9 stories!
|
| Lower East Side NYC 1910: 144,000+/km2 - visit
| https://www.tenement.org/ to learn more.
|
| Kowloon Walled City, 1970s: ~2M/km2 !!! - inspiring 1000s
| of dystopian Sci Fi stories from Akira to Blade Runner.
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Kowloon+Walled+City
|
| http://demographia.com/db-nyc-sector1800.htm
| jahnu wrote:
| District I live in Vienna, Austria
|
| 25,000/km2
|
| It's pretty quiet too! :)
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| You can induce demand too. Somehow they'll have to limit that
| demand.
| ephbit wrote:
| Yeah, Portugal should simply tear down all the old mouldy
| buildings of Lisbon and replace them with shiny skyscrapers,
| so each and every Portuguese can have their very own flat in
| Lisbon.
|
| Or if they're crazy enough to want to keep these old
| buildings they could just build all the skycrapers in the
| park surrounding peak Monsanto, easy.
|
| /s
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The purpose of housing is to house people.
|
| Historical buildings are nice, but for apartment blocks at
| least, yes, the priority has to be actually housing people.
| You can always require historical-looking facades if looks
| are a concern.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| How this usually works:
|
| "I'd do anything for lower housing prices!"
|
| Build more housing.
|
| "...but I won't do that."
| stavros wrote:
| Greece has the exact same problem. Rents are skyrocketing
| and people can't afford to live in their own cities. We're
| building more housing, but it doesn't seem to be helping.
|
| Maybe SF doesn't want to build more housing, but this isn't
| universal.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| My experience with most people saying "we _are_ building
| more housing " is that they drastically overestimate how
| much housing is getting built, especially relative to
| yesteryear. If you look at net increase in units YoY,
| it's usually quite modest even for booming, "in-demand"
| areas.
|
| The other part is that the same things that make it
| slower to build more housing also make it more expensive,
| all the various bureaucratic processes.
| pyb wrote:
| It's probably not enough new housing is getting built.
| People don't even remember what a real large-scale
| housing spree looks like, because these last happened
| generations ago. These are transformative events. eg in
| Athens in the 1950s-1970s :
| https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191011-the-
| surprising-...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Meatloaf as an authoritarian city councillor. Seems legit.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| This seems to be a problem everywhere around the world in big
| cities.
|
| What's propping all of these property prices up? Supply and
| demand rules don't seem to apply at all. You might have
| thousands of empty apartments in a city yet the price only
| keeps going up.
|
| Everything is broken, but housing is particularly broken.
| woodpanel wrote:
| > What's propping all of these property prices up?
|
| Money printing, first and foremost
| pyb wrote:
| The problem is always not allowing more housing to get built.
| andrekandre wrote:
| what would happen to land prices if they did that?
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I've been thinking about this I think it is the end result of
| globalization. First we could ship stuff overseas, then we
| could ship jobs overseas, now people are realizing they can
| ship their house overseas, and Portugal has a much nicer
| climate and weather than Shanghai so why not move there.
| Basically with the advent of the internet and the rise in
| remote work there's no more reason people really feel tied to
| a place, so in the most desirable places in the world you are
| no longer just competing against the people in your state or
| country, that real estate is now on the global market against
| 7 billion other people.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Feels that way too. America's increasingly tough stance on
| exports to China are a sign of things to come.
|
| I'm not even sure if this Globalization was worth all that
| much. It's made some people very wealthy, some people well-
| off, but its also made lots of people very poor and very
| angry.
|
| I'm okay with living in a world with fewer millionaires but
| also fewer people sleeping on the streets.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Actually I listened to an interesting talk yesterday by
| Peter Zeihan, just discovered he has some interesting
| ideas. One of his theories is that the reason we have
| globalization isn't economic but it was rather America's
| attempt to win and keep allies during the cold war. You
| could participate in a global world trade network and
| economy (kept safe and maintained by American military
| might) as long as you were willing to work within the US
| framework. After the end of the Cold War the original
| purpose for globalization has disappeared and now we have
| to figure out what is next.
|
| It was an interesting argument that globalization was an
| American security development not an international
| economic development.
| epolanski wrote:
| In Rome, Italy, we have an estimated 150k empty apartments in
| a 2.9 millions people city...that we know of..yet they build
| and build and prices keep going up.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Where does this end?
|
| A planet full of empty "luxury apartments" and most of us
| homeless?
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| > or example, if you own three ordinary apartments in Lisbon,
| you can live in one of them and easily make a good living by
| renting out the other two as holiday apartments. Because
| cleaning services, guys who do repairs, etc., are cheap in
| Portugal, this involves almost no work. Moreover, the net worth
| of your property will continually increase while you do
| (almost) nothing.
|
| I'm a bit conflicted on this. I definitely see what you're
| saying (and often repeat it myself).
|
| But it should be noted: property is simply an asset like any
| other. If there's easy and outsized returns to be had, the
| demand for this asset would increase, pushing up the price to
| the point that the returns on the asset are in line with
| returns of other assets which have similar risk/effort
| profiles.
|
| To say that one can make money 'doing nothing' owning any asset
| (that has a positive return) is true. But that's not per se
| some kind of economic or political problem, it's a normal
| feature.
|
| Of course to absolutely do nothing and still earn enough to
| live off of, means you must have earned enough money to
| purchase a large amount of assets. Supposing rental income of
| 5%, and supposing rent is 25% of someone's wages, and supposing
| a 20% tax rate on your returns, you'd essentially need to
| purchase assets worth 100 times what someone spends on rent.
|
| (ex: if you need 40k to live on, spend 25% or 10k on rent,
| you'd need 100x that or 1 million returning a 5% return that's
| taxed 20%, leaving 40k in net income.)
|
| Amassing 100x your rent is no easy feat, and in fact it means
| that someway, somehow, you've provided 100x your rent in value,
| without spending a penny of it, and saved it all, then poured
| it into an asset (incurring risk and requiring some level of
| commercial effort), and then, yes, you could start to approach
| doing 'nothing'.
|
| For many that's a life's worth of work. Buying such assets is
| really no different from putting in an equivalent amount of
| money into a retirement fund, and that fund in turn buying
| assets like companies. Whether it's companies that buy and rent
| out cars, or real estate, or produce and sell, the people
| owning these enterprises through their retirement fund are
| 'doing nothing' while others are working.
|
| But the important part to note is that anyone has access to
| this system. Every person can, proportionate to their income
| (based on their economic value to society) buy assets.
|
| In fact, I'm able with a click of the button not to just buy a
| part of a in Portugal, but rather the biggest and most
| successful company on the planet: Apple. I can buy a small part
| in it, and profit when many of the planet's smartest and most
| educated people build & sell some of the most cutting edge
| consumer technology day in day out. Whilst doing: nothing.
|
| So I don't really see a structural problem with this system.
| What is problematic is the stuff around it. For example, in
| some countries real estate goes untaxed and is subsidised, and
| is bailed out when things go bad. Subsidised private profits,
| and socialised public losses. It's unfair and a failure of
| markets and governance. Another example is that swathes of
| people indeed inherit value to the point they've never done any
| contribution to the world to get into a position to 'do
| nothing', rather than work to retire off of the fruits of their
| labour, they could in effect retire from work before ever even
| starting. This is where the system breaks down and must be
| balanced, again by e.g. taxing inheritance and balancing things
| out.
|
| Finally, markets work when price & profit signals can balance
| supply & demand. If there is a shortage of bread, demand
| outpaces supply, the price rises, and overnight new bakeries
| will pop up bringing down the price. In real estate high prices
| often do not trigger new supply in many countries, either due
| to geographical limitations (e.g. the mountains of Taiwan
| limiting buildable space, or simply the fact physically there
| is a limited area we consider to be 'downtown new york' for
| example), but more often due to political limitations
| (NIMBYism). Because in real estate markets in many areas do not
| naturally solve the problem, government intervention is needed
| to ensure more equitable and fair outcomes moreso than in other
| types of markets. Again here I see a role for stronger taxation
| on outsized profits and some income support for groups
| otherwised pushed out of neighbourhoods.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| What a nonsense article ; this applies to every country in the
| most popular cities.
| Victerius wrote:
| Unsustainable. If you're a wealthy individual living in an
| expensive residence surrounded by other wealthy individuals
| living in expensive residences, you still need garbagemen to
| collect your garbage. You still need food. Whether you order from
| local restaurants staffed by employees, or buy your groceries at
| the supermarket, staffed by employees, janitorial personnel,
| security guards, and managers, you're still relying on the labor
| of ordinary people.
|
| If your power goes out or there is a water leak in your home, you
| need an electrician or a plumber. Preferably one who doesn't have
| to live five hours away. If you need an ambulance and medical
| attention, you need doctors, nurses, and medical personnel.
| Hopefully they didn't get priced out of a 50 mile radius of your
| home.
|
| And if the world consisted of only millionaires and an army of
| robots, if everyone is a millionaire, no one is. A carton of milk
| would just cost $700 and a lower end house $30M.
|
| Be a YIMBY. Embrace looser zoning regulations and more and denser
| housing where you live. And don't jack up the rent to market
| rates if you're already turning a profit.
| josefresco wrote:
| Apparently the wealthy with vacation homes on Cape Cod didn't
| get your memo. Our local businesses don't have enough workers
| due to unattainable housing. Enjoy your long lines, reduced
| hours and hollow communities! At least there will be lots of
| pickleball courts!
| foogazi wrote:
| > Our local businesses don't have enough workers due to
| unattainable housing.
|
| due to not paying enough
| josefresco wrote:
| There is no workforce. It's not a matter of paying more,
| it's a lack of workers aka families. The average age of
| someone living on Cape Cod has increased every year for
| decades. The cost of housing after COVID went from
| "unreasonable" to "insane".
|
| Local businesses and towns are _throwing_ money at the few
| young people still here in an attempt to recruit workers
| but there just isn 't enough to handle the scale up for
| summer volume. The band-aid for years was J1 workers but
| it's no longer enough.
|
| The wealthy don't think about Cape Cod for 1 second once
| they cross the canal, or leave the runway in
| Hyannis/MV/Nantucket. They seemingly don't realize that
| their "tax dollars" which they claim are a gift to the
| local region, aren't helping or solving any of these
| problems.
|
| What we're seeing now is consolidation of businesses, and
| the construction of worker "dormitory" housing. That's the
| future for our region. Multi-million dollar trophy homes,
| and worker dormitories.
| [deleted]
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| If California urban centers like SF and LA are any example -
| the "sustainable" limit is somewhere around two-three hours
| away.
| frenchy wrote:
| That's only sustainable for now because car fuel is cheap.
| It's not guaranteed to stay that way.
| consp wrote:
| In Europe it isn't, so that 2h number goes down very
| rapidly.
| gregoriol wrote:
| If a place has only millionaires, prices for many basic things
| will be very high compared to other places, like for plumbers:
| there will be less plumbers and those willing to go there will
| be able to raise prices, a lot. Same for groceries, cleanup,
| ...
| notch656a wrote:
| San Francisco solved it with homeless camps and effectively
| decriminalizing theft under $950.
| elforce002 wrote:
| My God. Really?!
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Of course, all those people can live 50 miles away and commute
| in and out every day...
| andrepd wrote:
| > Be a YIMBY. Embrace looser zoning regulations and more and
| denser housing where you live. And don't jack up the rent to
| market rates if you're already turning a profit.
|
| Eh. Waiting for people to forgo short-term profit from the
| goodness of their hearts under capitalism is a losing battle.
| The _system_ must be built to prevent such behaviours and
| outcomes, rather than relying on individual good-will.
| bhupy wrote:
| I mean, by that logic, waiting for people to choose to vote
| in such a manner that changes _the system_ (from the goodness
| of their hearts, no less) is a losing battle also. Remember,
| changing _the system_ (whatever that means) involves the same
| democratic buy-in as loosening zoning regulations.
|
| Ultimately, the only way to change to change things under a
| democratic process is to win hearts and minds, and in either
| approach, people will have to make hard decisions. Either
| it's forgoing short-term profit by loosening zoning
| regulations or forgoing even long term profit by enacting
| whatever large scale systemic change one envisions will solve
| the problem (strict price controls, rationing, expropriation,
| etc).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not really unsustainable - Switzerland and other wealthy
| microstates show us the long-term outcome, which is quite
| desirable. In fact, the "ordinary people" will eventually
| benefit the most, since their wages will grow to match the
| prevalent cost of living. Transition can of course be
| difficult.
| aprdm wrote:
| How big is Switzerland population?
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| The same as Portugal's, very roughly. (Or the same as the
| greater Bay Area if you wish.) So the point is applicable.
| polotics wrote:
| Switzerland does not qualify as a microstate at all. You're
| looking at a population that would fill Los Angeles, twice
| over... The one thing that is sure is public transportation
| is night and day, and this helps a lot fight the mad-commute
| effect for non-millionaires.
| joshlemer wrote:
| Not twice over, Swiss population is 8-9 million. 10 million
| live in LA.
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| Some Canadian cities responded to this with a foreign buyers tax,
| notably in Vancouver. Florida has a method for balancing its
| "snowbird" population to do with foreign buyers. Personally, I
| think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer
| believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them,
| and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and
| very poor people whose effect in concert squeezes out the middle
| who made the country desirable. The cynicism comes from the 90's
| where multinationals globalized and just became financial rails
| for stateless revenue flows, and now governments saw the
| opportunities and are globalizing their constituencies, where if
| they want to stay in power, all they need is money and votes that
| come from importing wealthy people in exchange for buying Gold
| visas and "donations," and poor people to depend on their
| extractive policies. What we're watching is the intentional
| dissolution of the nation state and replacement of relatively
| equal populations with polarized ones. It's barely right/left at
| all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end.
| danans wrote:
| > Personally, I think this is the effect of governments
| themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a
| responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized
| populations of both very rich and very poor people
|
| > It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as
| its own end.
|
| These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of
| nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active
| element back, it's very much a left/right difference.
|
| The left's solution to the problems brought about by
| globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-
| industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market -
| evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and
| assembly location requirements, and income limits of the
| recently passed EV tax credits.
|
| The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a
| purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income
| countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial
| claim to make about the right, but today's right openly
| proclaims those ideas.
|
| Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a
| nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many
| people alive today remember living under that. In my travel
| there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote
| heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic
| left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist
| dictatorship.
|
| Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the
| world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful
| cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of
| trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while
| shutting down immigration.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The "ethno-" in nationalism isn't silent or implied though.
| Canada has been a very heterogeneous nation for over a
| century, Israel is also very heterogeneous where people are
| bound by religion and not ethnicity, France and Spain have a
| huge and integrated north african populations and they are
| French and Spanish, full stop. Brazil, also a nation with as
| much global diversity as is available. This trope that
| nations as entities are somehow racist is more an artifact of
| the critical theory that calls everything racist by default,
| and not of how people actually live together.
| danans wrote:
| > This trope that nations as entities are somehow racist is
| more an artifact of the critical theory that calls
| everything racist by default
|
| The existence and electoral success of major ethno-
| nationalist political organizations like Front National in
| France, the US Republican party, and Fidesz in Hungary are
| hard evidence that the "ethno" is essential to contemporary
| nationalism, just as it was to nationalism during the first
| half of the 20th century. These are all countries with very
| fraught recent histories of internal ethnic conflict
| between their own citizens.
|
| Stoking grievances over the increased diversity of those
| countries in recent decades is precisely what their ethno-
| nationalists run on, and even the few who claim to separate
| the "ethno" from the nationalism still support ethno-
| nationalist candidates and leaders because they get votes,
| so it's a distinction without a practical difference.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ... Stoking grievances over the increased diversity of
| those countries ...
|
| The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased
| diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in
| civic attitudes. The progressive left expresses the exact
| same concerns in a different wording, by decrying the
| increased "marginalization and exclusion" that's
| seemingly entailed by such diversity. Guess what: they're
| all looking at pretty much the same thing.
| danans wrote:
| > The underlying grievance is of course not over
| "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term
| decline in civic attitudes.
|
| I fail to see how the previous US president's complaints
| about people coming from "s*hole countries" and the
| exhortations from the Charlottesville rioters about how
| "Jews will not replace us" are grievances about "decline
| in civic attitudes". Try as one may to dissociate them,
| but these are the faces, words, and animating motivation
| of nationalism today.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The sad truth is that Jews have always been used as a
| convenient scapegoat for grievances of all kinds, and
| this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist
| right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of
| bourgeois capitalism on the Jews, and this casual anti-
| Semitism was picked up by many on the left.
| danans wrote:
| > this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist
| right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of
| bourgeois capitalism on the Jews
|
| Your argument is intentionally mixing "is" with "was".
|
| Marx died 140 years ago, and there are no ethno-
| nationalist voices of significance on the left today. In
| the US context, after the civil rights movement of the
| 20th century those people left the Democratic party as
| the parties realigned themselves.
|
| Today it is largely a right wing phenomenon, carrying
| forward the tradition of right wing ethno-nationalism
| that persisted from the previous century.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Whether or not Jewishness is completely an ethnicity is
| debatable, but a very large number of Israelis (and Jews
| across the world in general) aren't religious at all --
| they see their Jewishness as being defined by their
| ancestors who were practicing Jews rather than by their own
| beliefs.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| jdmg94 wrote:
| Vancouver is a disaster in housing affordability, economic
| opportunities (outside of real estate), and they have a very
| big and public homeless crisis.
| jollybean wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Just build more. If foreigners want to buy overseas property,
| then just increase the supply.
|
| Oh, and tax the unimproved value of land and give the proceeds
| to the Portuguese citizens. This will dampen the effect while
| supply of housing matches demand.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Absolutely now way that the "votes that come from importing
| wealthy people [...]" are going to be enough to get politicians
| elected - not enough wealthy people in the world. The real risk
| is the continued rise of populism which will result in cynical
| policies rather than real solutions for dealing with the
| increasing wealth gap.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yeah, not to mention that people on visas can't vote. It's
| definitely a flaw in the causality chain, but at the same
| time I empathize with the frustration of the Portuguese
| people.
| kipchak wrote:
| Not directly, but a extremely wealthy person without a vote
| who can make campaign donations directly or indirectly
| arguably has a larger impact than the average voter. For
| example 90% of house seats go to the person who spent the
| most, though causation isn't necessarily always the case.[1]
|
| [1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-
| a-c...
| bengalister wrote:
| Truly agree.
|
| There are also countries like France which only imported cheap
| and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich
| people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared
| to our neighbors and other western world countries). For
| instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani
| investors who made London their residence, not the case for
| Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent
| residency.
|
| And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote
| economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any
| form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| The Portuguese case is quite different, I think.
|
| Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal
| needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to
| offer in exchange.
|
| They found something: their real estate and city center spaces.
|
| The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-
| sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free.
| If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, one way is to study
| what else could they develop internally that would be
| attractive in the world trade market.
|
| Also, foreigners are looking for the European passport, not for
| Portugal per se. If Portugal were to follow UK's path, demand
| for their Golden Visa would drop dramatically.
|
| It doesn't benefit the rich, only. By raising real estate
| prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor
| intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire
| economy of the country.
| jollybean wrote:
| Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a
| heavy tax on top.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Foreigners buying land there are because it gives them a
| path to European passport or at very least nearly instant
| permanent residency. Not because they want to live in
| Portugal. Portugal requirement is "just" EUR280,000 which
| is extremely low - their neighbor's, Spain, requirement is
| EUR500,000.
|
| Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden
| visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.
| petre wrote:
| > The country NEEDS this foreign income.
|
| It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist
| country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real
| estate market making housing unafordable to the general
| population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has
| kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is
| renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median
| rent as the tax base.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If parking money is the problem, I guess an indirect
| solution would be to give people other places to park their
| money.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and
| raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple
| to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual
| taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real
| estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners
| from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone
| wins.
| petre wrote:
| Not really, they're either retired or buying property to
| park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver
| and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real
| estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect
| time to extract taxes from them.
|
| The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I
| fully understand why a group of youths was protesting
| against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city
| like it's a theme park.
| vannevar wrote:
| >By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the
| construction business, which is labor intensive and has a
| long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the
| country.
|
| Maybe, but only if the increase in wages paid keeps up with
| the rising rents. And remember that in unregulated
| capitalism, most of the income from increased economic
| activity is captured by the wealthiest tiers, with only
| negligible increases for the vast majority. The rising tide
| indeed raises all boats, but it raises some boats far more
| than most. If rent rises 10% but median wages rise only 2%,
| most people will be losing ground, not gaining.
| caycep wrote:
| The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal
| grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to
| ameliorate this situation?
|
| Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the
| IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10
| years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the
| war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every
| country...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not just Ukraine. Central and Eastern Europe in
| general has seen plenty of sustained growth. You just need
| the right policy attitude for it, which has historically
| been quite problematic in places like Portugal (see "The
| incredible shrinking Portuguese firm" for one especially
| clear example).
| andrepd wrote:
| Unfortunately education in Portugal is one of the worst in
| Europe. It would need a massive investment with a visionary
| direction to start to see results 15 years later. 4-year
| terms do not lend themselves well to long-term national
| projects like that.
|
| Ironically, excellent education might be one of the most
| positive legacies the Communist regimes left to Eastern
| European countries, and part of why countries like Estonia
| or Poland will be better poised in the near future.
| park777 wrote:
| Incorrect. Education in Portugal was one of the worst in
| Europe.
|
| Portugal is the only country in the OECD that has
| consistently risen in PISA scores since their inception
| in 2000.
|
| Portugal was bottom of the table in 2000, and now it's at
| middle. Not the best, but not the worst either.
|
| Source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-0
| 30-59031-4_...
| asdff wrote:
| They could start building housing
| prmoustache wrote:
| I read somewhere that there was a raise in bicycle
| factories in Portugal. Some euro companies are attractee by
| the idea of being able to put a made/assembled in europe
| label while keeping labour cost low, avoid asian supply
| issues and portugal provides that.
| pdpi wrote:
| Portuguese IT is pretty good in general, and that could
| easily have been part of the solution. The problem is that
| there was a large exodus of talent in the early 2010s
| (including yours truly), and that has caused some serious
| brain drain.
| brabel wrote:
| The company I work for has 3 devs in Portugal, working
| remotely... good people, very skilled, and it's much more
| affordable to pay them well compared to their local
| market than trying to hire locally, even if locally (more
| expensive European country), salaries are still a far cry
| from those of the USA, let alone Silicon Valley. With
| remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon
| Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for
| devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous
| other countries with high education and infrastructure,
| but much, much lower salaries.
| pkaye wrote:
| > With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe
| Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money
| for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and
| numerous other countries with high education and
| infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries.
|
| In the US there are 50 states to choose from for remote
| workers. And then outside that is the rest of North/South
| America all within a narrow time zone band.
| iostream25 wrote:
| I remember Passos Coelho suggesting that the young will
| need to emigrate for work, circa the time of the
| crisis/austerity.
| pdpi wrote:
| Yup. So I did.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I think maintaining distinctiveness as a country is the
| best possible economic security, instead of turning it into
| an airport mall of fast food chains and crappy condos.
| France has maintained this somewhat, but not without a lot
| of struggle. Globalized chains create a radical monopoly in
| the cities they are in because they reduce the amount of
| risk/reward for local entrepreneurs, and require high
| amounts of capital to start. It's why downtown SF is such a
| cultural desert of basic and Times Square is just a theme
| park to itself. The policies that encourage globalized
| businesses create a homogenization that makes the desirable
| diversity that emerges organically impossible.
|
| Portugal could impose a foreign buyers tax, use it's
| egalitarian/socialistic political culture to incentivise
| some small-n natalism, and leverage the unbelievable
| cultural resources it has as somewhere that is a respite
| from the blob of tourists that it has allowed to imbalance
| its economy.
|
| It's not so much IT that would change the economy, but
| honestly - math. It's the only real social advantage that a
| country can organize to leverage, and the next country that
| triples down on its math education investment is going to
| be the next power base. Given what I've seen there that the
| article captures perfectly, it's probably their only hope.
| outworlder wrote:
| > The question in my mind is how can a country like
| Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise
| to ameliorate this situation?
|
| They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They
| might have a credible claim to it.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Look at Singapore, for example. Its situation was orders of
| magnitude worse than Portugal decades ago. Now they are
| probably twice as better.
|
| The key is: stop complaining about "the rich is this, the
| rich is that" and start thinking about how to be
| competitive in the 21st century. There are many
| opportunities, but are Portuguese citizens interested in
| taking the effort and sacrifice to explore them? The answer
| to this question is the real explanation for the hard time
| they're going through, not "rich-blaming".
| notch656a wrote:
| Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that
| they have a huge proportion of their population that are
| totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support
| it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the
| citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to
| obtain public housing.
|
| If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some
| lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship,
| we would have a comparable public housing tax base.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but
| how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive
| economy in a few decades.
| [deleted]
| notch656a wrote:
| May want to go back and delete your comments about real
| estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to
| subsidize their housing, these tag line here would
| probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer
| Afford to Live in Singapore."
|
| If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively
| open borders and free market real estate, you have to get
| with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's
| a good thing, or a bad thing.
|
| -------------
|
| >Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot
| of positive things to foreigner
|
| Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that
| something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be
| exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd
| claim.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Are foreigners kept there against their will?
|
| I bet they're happy to live there, despite the housing
| costs.
|
| Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot
| of positive things to foreigners. I'd love to have a
| Singaporean passport and be able to live there if I could
| afford.
|
| May want to keep your comment deletion considerations to
| yourself.
| fn-mote wrote:
| The situation in Singapore is different. The foreigners
| are not high-income people who chose to live there. Only
| about 28% are skilled labor. The foreigners _may_ be
| happy to live there but I wouldn't make that assumption
| without checking. Just because it's better than their
| alternative doesn't mean it's good, or even acceptable.
|
| Source:
|
| > [immigrants population is] 1.23 million, out of which
| about 351 thousand were classified as skilled labor. Most
| of the foreign workforce [...is employed...] in
| construction and the service industry, or as domestic
| help.
|
| -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/698035/singapore-
| number-...
| speakfreely wrote:
| > If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some
| lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship,
| we would have a comparable public housing tax base.
|
| The US is already working on this, albeit
| unintentionally.
|
| Undocumented immigrants were at 3.3% of the population in
| 2016 and the numbers have absolutely exploded since the
| beginning of the Biden administration, with 2 million
| apprehensions _so far_ for in 2022 [0]. The cumulative
| effect of this over just a single term of the Biden
| administration will completely reshape the demographics
| of most of the border states (and most major cities of
| the country), as the majority of immigrants are arriving
| with very little means, extremely limited ability to
| speak English, and will be mostly restricted from
| accessing the US financial system without legal residence
| status, hobbling them financially and forcing them into
| informal work arrangements.
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-
| arrests-hit...
| lovich wrote:
| A record number of arrests can mean there is a record
| number of immigrants but does not guarantee that is the
| cause. Increased enforcement of the border would also
| lead to higher arrests and subsequently reduce the inflow
| of immigration
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| MAGAs are blaming this on Biden rather than on
| deteriorating political situations all through Mexico,
| Central, and South America lol. It's a lot easier to
| blame the president tho.
| notch656a wrote:
| Undocumented immigrants _tend_ to be an overall good for
| the citizen economy since we can exploit them, charge
| them sales tax etc, and then not offer them public
| services in return. Hopefully the cheap construction
| labor will improve the housing situation in the US.
| rootos wrote:
| Undocumented immigrants have the same access to public
| services such as public education, medical care at
| hospitals, access to court systems, police, fire, etc.
| lovich wrote:
| Undocumented immigrants have access to the court system
| and police that will arrest them the moment they are
| found to be undocumented? Even if they ostensibly could
| use it they would avoid taking the risk
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Good drug policy, car-less urbanity, and a good tech scene.
| With California weather and 1/5 the cost? Sounds great.
| When can I move?
| jseliger wrote:
| Portugal should just do what the U.S. and Canada should also
| do: built more housing:
| https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-
| service....
|
| It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a
| particular parcel a hundred years ago.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I remember travelling to Portugal in the early 2000's and
| our host describing Portugal's national bird as the
| (construction) crane. Not sure if the pun translates well
| to other languages. Are they not still doing that?
| tffcccdredf wrote:
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| I disagree, Portugal does offer something interesting:
|
| Cheap labor.
|
| In fact, some of the cheapest in the EU - both qualified and
| non. It even can be said that the current Portuguese Economic
| Model is intra-EU salary dumping.
|
| (and a lot of rent-seeking)
| blfr wrote:
| I do think that a state should exist primarily for the benefit of
| its citizens but this view had long been decried xenophobic at
| best.
|
| However, you can't have it both ways. If
|
| > countless stories of flats left uninhabited by some rich person
| who arrived at the building, bought two flats so that he could
| get a visa, and doesn't even live there
|
| then clearly not
|
| > wealthy foreigners from all over the world, to whom we offer a
| paradise where they enjoy the same services but where they don't
| pay or pay less tax than the general population
|
| Either they live there and use services or not.
| outworlder wrote:
| Yeah, the article wants to argue both sides of every issue.
|
| However,
|
| > countless stories of flats left uninhabited by some rich
| person who arrived at the building, bought two flats so that he
| could get a visa, and doesn't even live there
|
| So, the way it works is, as a golden visa applicant, you have
| to spend 7 days in the first year. The next 2 years, a combined
| 15 days (which can be spread whichever way you like).
| Subsequent renewals are different (21 days / 3 years). You can
| already live there when you apply, but you are not _required_
| to.
|
| You have to maintain your investment for at least 5 years (or
| until you become a permanent resident) and renew the golden
| visa twice. Then you can apply for permanent residency (or
| citizenship if you qualify), if you want to.
|
| It's entirely conceivable that people would buy property and
| only vacation there. Which, if we are honest, is not a problem,
| given that large cities are excluded from the program. And
| cheaper housing does not qualify, either. So you would be
| taking property that's pretty expensive already (EUR500,000,
| EUR400,000 for low density areas) - OR requires the property to
| be older than 30 years old, and a minimum of EUR350,000 (or
| EUR280,000 in low density areas).
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Not contradictory at all - they buy property, sit on it, and
| vacation there
| iostream25 wrote:
| No mention of the vast holdings the church or bombeiros have
| in Lisbon and the insane amount of empty un-renovated
| buildings that are essentially just place-holders until the
| right CML-connected developers show-up with lots of money?
| fsckboy wrote:
| "Misery distributes itself throughout a system."
|
| High rents mean that a lot of people like a place enough that
| they'll fight (economically) to live there. The fact that you've
| lived in a place since before other people might feel like that
| should entitle you to low rent, but it doesn't, that's not how
| markets set prices.
|
| High rents are just once aspect of "unpleasantness", and people
| will move around till the misery is equally distributed.
| Economies ebb and flow and shift from place to place, so it the
| process never ends, but don't be fooled, there is nothing broken
| about systems of market real estate prices, in a sense they're
| the final leveling of a system, the equalizer of all other
| desires.
|
| It's like currency exchange rates, whichever way they go, there's
| good an bad, can afford more foreign goods but nobody wants to
| buy your goods, or can't afford foreign goods but can sell
| exports. But there's nothing to "do" about exchange rates, accept
| them as given and plan accordingly.
|
| Bad transportation problem in your city? Think the new public
| works project is going to fix it? Think again, better
| transportation makes for more efficient redistribution of misery.
|
| Now, I don't mean to sound negative: the redistribution of misery
| is a leveling, like stock prices going up and down with every
| trade, there is still a buyer who wants in and a seller who wants
| out. The redistribution of misery always entails some people
| getting less miserable.
| epolanski wrote:
| All your comment reminds me how disgusted I am at capitalism
| and free market economy.
| dogman144 wrote:
| I don't know what's the correct approach with this.
|
| I'm a globe trotting engineer who understands globalism and what
| access tech is opening up to it. I don't mean being a digital
| nomad. Rather, tech is collapsing or expanding concepts of
| borders, nationalism and so on in very meaningful ways. That's a
| hugely compelling area to work in vs chasing an OKR for Google
| ads. I don't think it's reversible, and I find a lot of value
| personally and professionally from being in that space because
| this is the rare moment where the world is changing and I'm in a
| field directly involved with it.
|
| The other aspect is it's locals selling to the foreigners, and a
| personally compelling reason to go there is urban areas of the
| USA have screwed themselves up with the cost of living. I want to
| participate in problems, not pay $5k/mo for a 2bdr in NYC or soon
| Austin or Nashville so I can go to bars with other techies. So if
| locals weren't selling at hugely inflated prices, I'd be firmly
| in favor of that. So, look to the Portuguese neighbors selling
| apartments first.
|
| But, no excuses - I see $500k 2 bdr in Lisbon and think that's a
| chance to live in a world that is way too expensive and
| commercialized in NYC. A local in Lisbon is getting hosed by that
| and my mobility, no way around it.
|
| In short - am I part of the problem, what responsibilities do I
| have vs the locals and govt policies about foreign purchases, do
| my motivations matter at all vs the outcomes.
|
| I don't know yet, Hard to say, although it's good to face hard
| facts via articles like this. Networked-globalism won't reverse,
| and I think it's more likely the quiet parts of the world (rural
| America, cheap Europe) are just going to go through some
| transformations that can't be stopped and the symptoms look like
| this article.
| kipchak wrote:
| I think the fundamental question is by what right does someone
| have "right" to something like land or the buildings on it, by
| the open market and wealth or by already living there? Neither
| is really fair or equitable. But I worry what will happen as
| more people start to feel (justifiably so) they're getting a
| raw deal on both fronts.
| dougmwne wrote:
| The answer to your question is sovereignty and it is quite
| settled by this point in global governance. Who has it and
| who they gave it up to. As a republic, the citizens of
| Portugal are sovereign and they have the right to decide who
| gets to live where and for how much. The citizens can also
| choose to give up their sovereignty to others (the EU,
| globalism) or not exercise it (don't vote or don't hold their
| officials accountable).
| jollybean wrote:
| It's the same everywhere.
|
| Vancouver, Toronto.
|
| Surpluses are being gathered by the global elite and they are
| coming back to buy property the locals cannot afford and leave
| the spaces underutilized and empty.
|
| How on god's green earth we allow our 'land' in urban areas - a
| very valuable resource to be 'exported' while owners pay nary any
| taxes ... is completely insane.
|
| We should basically ban foreign ownership, or, tax it heavily and
| especially require domiciles to be either occupied or to have a
| tax so that it 'gets occupied' at some rate.
| haunter wrote:
| >It's a case of saying that Portugal has been constantly for
| sale. If in the recent past, large public companies were sold off
| to Chinese managers who now do whatever they want -- like
| Energias de Portugal (EDP), the main electricity company, which,
| after making an exorbitant profit in the first semester of the
| year, they're now saying that energy prices are going to go up
| again -- now are private assets which are being bought out
|
| What a fucking disaster. Selling off national assets to foreign
| investment groups.
|
| >China Three Gorges Corporation, a SOE, won in December 2011 the
| bidding for the Portuguese government's 21.35% interest in the
| company. The transaction is expected to be concluded by April
| 2012. As of February 2014, just under 45% of the ownership of EDP
| was controlled by five institutional shareholders. Amongst the
| others were the Qatar Investment Authority and BlackRock.
|
| Qatar, China, BlackRock. Can't find a better bunch.
| andrepd wrote:
| Blame neoliberal ghouls which, as the saying goes, "never let a
| good crisis go to waste". It was the perfect time to get public
| assets from the Portugese state, Greek state, Spanish state,
| etc, at a massive discount. A fire-sale of public goods, if you
| will. Also, by the way, a great time to push policies which
| made youth unemployment go to 30, 40, or even 50% (!), to get
| those sweet qualified youths to go work as nurses, doctors,
| engineers, in Germany, Netherlands, the UK, etc.
|
| Blame also the eagerly colaborationist Portuguese government
| from 2011-2015.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| That explains why they are building one generic luxury
| apartment block after the other - and hostels, hostels,
| hostels. It's insane.
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