[dijit]

I’m not entirely sure how we got to this place but it definitely feels this way in the UK too at times, though the circumstances might be different.

Housing as an absolute expense has risen faster than income in nearly every developed country that I can think of.

But, something that I always bring up when minimum wage is mentioned as a panacea: Sweden does not have a federally mandated minimum wage, but people are paid relatively handsomely.

This is because of strong union protections.

The solution could be unions but I guess the American people have a dim view of unions and companies aggressively crush them.

[mandmandam]

> I’m not entirely sure how we got to this place

Me neither, but I'm 100% sure it has a lot to do with golden circles teaming up to fuck the majority. At least it 100% for sure is in Ireland.

We have captured newspapers and TV completely reliant on government spending to stay afloat running glossy, thick, full-colour property pull-outs and programs.

At the same time our own government argues that building social housing would negatively affect the ability of property vultures to capitalise on their tax-free earnings.

We have a concrete cartel, protected by our government and courts for decades.

We have openly captured regulators, who stifle complaints and drag proceedings out for years or decades only to do nothing.

We have lawyers who are perfectly content to make bank off the above, and the tribunals that come when someone's actually caught taking bribes.

* We have > 230,000 unoccupied homes, at the same time as record-high homelessness and child deprivation. *

We have politically connected assholes making huge sums of money offering hotel rooms as emergency accommodation to homeless families.

I could go on and on. And, a huge amount of this is widely known among the population.

But what the government has here is an easy scapegoat. Every time they get caught bribing newspapers for fake news, or throwing crowded golf parties during a pandemic with vulture fund owners and judges 100 to a room, they just point the finger at Sinn Fein - a political party that has never once been in power - and talk about things that happened 40 years ago to rile up their aged base.

Oh, and our unions are weak and spineless. Not nearly as bad as American unions, but pretty bad all the same.

[strictfp]

I live in Sweden and I can tell you that it's not so clear-cut. Rent control means that people have to queue for many years for decent rental apartments.

We also have a lot of black market labour. The unions have historically had a strong grip, but are under attack by political forces that want to undermine that market with unskilled workers.

And on top of all this I think that people simply always prioritize living expenses above all else. As long as there is less supply than demand, prices are going to rise until some are out-competed.

People will have to pay, either with their time or with their money.

[skohan]

Imo some level degree of rent control is needed to prevent forces like housing speculation from causing housing prices to spike wildly in certain market conditions. Otherwise you end up with SF where it's impossible for anyone but the highest income earners to even exist.

I think the vienna model seems to have been fairly successful: if you build lots of high-quality public housing, the incentive structure is good for putting roofs over people's heads in an affordable way.

[strictfp]

Speculation is a problem for sure. I think USA is experiencing the burn for not being the number one financial power anymore. If the global market is hurting you, you'll need to protect yourselves by regulation. It's easy to be pro-globalization when you're king of the hill, but not always so great when you're getting the short end of the stick.

Oh, and I didn't know about the Vienna model, but Stockholm tried to massively expand housing in the 60s in something called the Million Program, as so many others did. Although that solved the immediate problem, it has been a catastrophy for the cityscape.

Isn't lack of housing sort of a side-effect of the very concept of a city?

[tazjin]

It should be noted that in Swedish cities, especially Stockholm, there is also a completely dysfunctional housing market.

I have personally rented long-term flats in a bunch of cities: Cologne, Stockholm, Oslo, London, Hurghada, Moscow.

Out of these the housing market in Stockholm was by far the worst experience (with the easiest being Oslo & Hurghada). There's nothing on the market because of rent control, official queues are impossibly long (O(years) for anything) and second-hand (third-, ...) apartments are an absolute mess (few tenant rights, tons of short-term contracts, lots of random small issues).

In Stockholm this hits foreigners especially hard as lots of Swedes have inherited a bostadsrätt or hyresrätt (the official equivalents of owning/renting property) and rarely deal with this directly.

In comparison megacities like Moscow and London are much easier to deal with. The market is rough due to often fierce competition but there are tons of properties available for renting and buying at any quality & price point.

[nly]

Wrt the UK. There was an article recently about "affordable" out-of-London commuter homes being built in Harrow.

£300K for <40m^2, one bed, which is barely affordable to a couple both on median salaries.

[eurasiantiger]

> how we got to this place

Money laundering. It’s as easy as that. International organised and serious crime is buying up real estate to clean their money flows, typically from wholesale meth/cocaine/opioids and human trafficking.

Then they started buying up businesses and politicians and now we are here.

Construction companies build huge towers full of huge apartments nobody can afford, yet they are all bought up, and nobody lives in them.