| >The state intervening more in housing should be the last resort, not the first. Agree that too much gov regulations push prices up, but like it or not, the gov intervention is a necessary evil for quality housing that has infrastructure and won't fall on you after 10 years. Where I'm from in Eastern Europe housing is affordable due to the lack of gov regulations as developers go crazy and just build anything everywhere but those buildings while nice looking and modern, have no good infrastructure anywhere near them as neither the developers nor the government wants to spend money on it. So you get apartment buildings with no paved roads or parking lots, no schools, no kindergartens, no doctors, no bus stops, no parks or green spaces. Awful. Gov regulation could fix this but also make buildings more expensive for the developers and for the end buyers. In the end you can't just leave everything to the "free market". >Realise that most people have property because their parents or grandparents worked hard and sacrificed for years or decades or their whole lives Or, they got lucky to be born in a time when real estate, even in now red hot metro areas, was far cheaper for the average worker/family, as was getting education and a stable career and raising a family. Saying hard work and sacrifice is the key ingredient to getting rich is massive survivorship bias and young people have wised up to this fact. >Undermine envy by remembering that most families with wealth lose it within 3 generations, and that many people move into the top 1% of earners during their lifetimes, if only for while. That's so untrue for Western Europe where the wealthiest families go back hundreds of years, and due to high taxes and low skilled wages you can't really move to the top 1%. In Austria, the country's top 100 richest people own a third of the wealth in the entire country, and during the covid pandemic, the gap between them and everyone else got even wider while they got richer and everyone else poorer. One city already voted a communist mayor into power. Their wealth goes back centuries and hasn't been lost in 3 generations and will survive 3 more generations. |
> Saying hard work and sacrifice is the key ingredient to getting rich
I didn't say it's the key to getting rich. I said they worked extremely hard (no holidays / long hours of hard jobs / making sure their kids prioritised school and working hard) to ensure their descendents could afford something. Not get rich. Afford something.
> is massive survivorship bias
I'm not saying that these things guarantee a home. They're just the most likely path to getting one.