This article is leaving a lot out IMHO. I'm from Spain and I've had friends and family working and living in Ibiza. It is a "financial paradise" to work because you make a crazy amount of money in very little time, if you can stand the drunken/drugged culture. Both "peninsula" (mainland) people and locals go work there in summer to make a little fortune. It is known that many locals work OR rent out the 2-3 summer months and with that they have enough to live for the rest of the year.
While it's true that summer rent is very expensive, people who work there can definitely pay it, but then you would not save THAT much, so people find their way into cheaper accommodations, whatever that means. So while I don't know the personal story of the interviewee, it's definitely not because a lack of jobs or low pay (a problem that DOES plague most of the country).
For hacker news, imagine if this article was about the "poor Google employee living in a van and cannot afford rent", you'd laugh at its face.
Agree, I spoke with some taxi drivers who were there just for the summer season and they told me that they've been doing that every year, sharing a small flat with other taxi drivers/workers to save money and to earn enough to live the rest of the year back in their towns.
The guys who sell Christmas trees in NYC used to all be all from the Balkans. They’d show up on a tourist visa, sell their trees, live in sketch accommodation and boogie home when they sold their allocation.
The typical you'd expect from a summer party place is what blows up (food, accommodation, bars, clubs, etc), but also even in non-seasonal jobs there's a lot more shopping and people going around so they temp-hire, again at high prices.
>So while I don't know the personal story of the interviewee, it's definitely not because a lack of jobs or low pay (a problem that DOES plague most of the country).
Why does that problem exist in Spain? Asking as a Spain newbie.
I had the answer clear 15 years ago, then I had a different answer clear 10 years ago. Now after having lived and traveled all around the world, I'm more unsure than ever of why it's the case and I don't think there's a SINGLE strong reason. I can give you reasons criticizing both sides of the political aisle, and both other sides will complain, but again in the end I'm not sure how much each reason does contribute.
Few reasons that seem to influence to some degree: impossible bureaucracy, very difficult to open companies, vicious cycle of stagnant economy, lots of "underground economy" that skew the official numbers, talent goes to work for other countries with better pay, a general hopelessness attitude that has permeated the culture, corruption at all levels.
Your analysis somewhat matches with a conversation I had here with a Spanish woman tourist some months ago.
We were chatting casually about this and that, and then she said she was not looking forward to going back to Spain / Europe, after her trip.
I asked her why.
I don't remember the exact words she used, but from what she said, my recollection is that she had been experiencing a kind of general malaise in the environment in Europe from some time.
Depressing.
This also matches with some of the news articles I have been reading for sometime now about Europe.
I met a guy from Galicia who's call center job was outsourced to Eastern Europe. So he moved there. In fact this is a job sector threatened by AI emergence.
He can afford rent, he just chooses not to pay rent and save that money. The same for many stealth campers who are working remote tech jobs while living in $60-80k conversion vans parked on the street.
Oh yeah, I mean that in the Googler in a van, everyone here knows that Google pays a lot so he IS choosing to live in a van to save 90% and he could def pay for a house to stay at.
My point is that most people here don't know the level at which jobs pay in Ibiza in summer, so I brought that up as a familiar comparison (people there work 3 months and live off that the rest of the year).
I’m sorry but you are forgetting a lot of people that has a public job with a predefined salary not adjusted to the island reality.
Nurses, teachers, doctors, firemen… especially those who are there just temporarily can’t afford housing and it’s a big problem for the correct functioning of the island.
It's true that I am not aware of the details of the gvmt jobs, but wouldn't they still follow, even if not so flexible, the basic laws of the market rates? e.g. if you are a nurse in mainland and get offered a 2000euro/month in Ibiza, but a house on its own costs much more (I wouldn't even dare to guess a whole summer month price TBH), you would decline that job. And everyone would do so, forcing them to raise the pay until it meets the needs, or have a shortage.
There is a significant number of empty houses in Ibiza because people and especially large landowners don't want to rent them because if the tenants can't pay and refuse to leave it can be hard to kick them out. Lack of renting options drives the property prices up, so there is no pressure to sell, and makes renting even more risky. It's a vicious cycle.
Source on this? Been living in Spain for 8 years now, and my wifes family have a number of empty of apartments here. AFAIK, they do not pay tax on any of them for being empty.
IMO that is one of things they can do to address the housing issue we have but I have seen no mention of this policy anywhere.
My wife grandfather bought them as an investment and after he died, the grandmother inherited them. She couldn’t care less about them as investments, but I guess my in laws are waiting to inherit them and then sell them off.
This pedantic objection is silly. First of all, nobody (well, no adult) is going to think that free means that it didn't cost anything -- there is no manipulation going on. But secondly, I would argue that the word doesn't mean what you are implying. If a bar offers you a free beer, would you also object that it was in fact paid for by someone? What would ever be "free", by your definition? Weather?
Is there any where in the world that's not feeling pain from housing? I'm pretty sure the entire world is struggling. Peppe I know across the US can't make housing work. Idk how I can realistically purchase a house. I was just in Europe talking with people who brought up how hard it is to buy a home.
I think each little area focuses on some red herring. Transplants, tech workers, digital nomads, foriegn investors, airbnb, but can those really be the same problem everywhere in the world? Idk seems like something else is going on.
Housing is affordable here. There's plenty of supply of single person apartments. Regular people can buy houses. Often the statistics hide this fact by comparing price per square foot, but the average apartment or house here is a lot smaller than in other places.
This is all true. Looking at that same reality from a different angle though:
- available housing is primarily for single persons. Family housing has become a luxury, which makes having kids all the more expensive.
- those single person apparts are flimsier and less maintained than past homes. Leopalace grade housing is becoming widespread.
- buying anything above 2 rooms apparts will land you in the 30+ years debt area. And to get those you'll have to prove a stability level that's not common anymore thse days.
Your second is certainly not. The baseline expectation for Japanese homes is constantly improving and something built cheap today is many times better than something built cheap 20 years ago.
Yeah, you get a 30 year loan, but that’s standard. Where do people not do that to afford housing?
On baseline expectations, there's two different standards: the one when you build/buy your primary residency, and the other when it's for rent. In most countries there's not that much of a gap, in Japan I see it as way wider.
Also, appartments can have a very solid foundation cleanly matching mandated standards and very cheap resident rooms with paper thin walls and poor insulation. On paper they will be better homes (free internet, air conditionning, automated bathtub etc), in practice the difference will be less obvious.
On 30y loans, it's fine if you are a full fledged employee of a well regarded company. It's another story if you're a contractor (roughly half of the active population! [0]), and impossible as part timer.
People make less in Japan, population is falling (even Tokyo has tepid growth), housing depreciates (even if land appreciates, second hand houses are often seen as a liability that needs to be rebuilt) and Japan went through a horrible speculative real estate bubble burst that led to their lost decade. Still, I love what can happen when housing isn’t seen as a speculative asset.
I live in a depopulating city, but even so, whenever a single-family home in my neighborhood is torn down, it is replaced with a 3-4 story multi-family unit, increasing densification. An old bowling alley was torn down and is being replaced with a massive 14-floor, 200-unit condo. Empty space near the train tracks has become two huge condo buildings (200 units each, built by Japan Rail, of course). And this is just in the past few years.
Even in depopulating areas, huge projects are happening to increase housing supply as multi-generational households lose favor.
They also do not have NIMBY legislation. They are able to build and have mixed use buildings ie business on the bottom and homes on top. The reason why there’s so much inventory is that rarely any of it is a single family home with a yard.
I wondered if it was just a perception difference...I didn't get the feeling housing was still affordable, but it might depend on individual needs.
To get an external perspective, average house pricing [0] and average rent [1] have stably rose, while average wages have stayed basicslly flat [2] during these years:
You definitely own land in Japan. Even if you buy a condo you own a fraction of the land the building is built on. It's the only thing that doesn't lose value.
You just don't hear news about affordable places because there's nothing to report. In Europe at least, housing is quite affordable outside of major cities and tourist hotspots like Ibiza. A couple with average income can get a nice home with reasonable ease in secondary cities. All you need is a 20% down payment and a steady income, of which your payments must not exceed 35%. This is not a very high bar. And it's not like the price of all real estate is that high either; the average price of 1 sq m was 3k EUR in Germany in 2023 and a typical apartment is 80-90 sq m.
In the Czech Republic, an average monthly salary buys you about half a square metre. Supposing you don't spend on anything else. And most people earn less than the average...
It’s definitely a combination of airbnb/tourism/digital nomads on the low end, and the rich buying shit up on the high end, with both ends facing little international resistance, and pleasant places get hit hard.
Housing costs in Italy fell continuously for the last ten years, except in the very recent past, just the last few months, there have been real-money price increases. They have no economy and nobody wants to live there.
I wonder if the "American dream" has managed to spread to the rest of the world and now young people have unrealistic expectations that they can buy a house like young people used to be able to in the States while it was still filling up. This was not a thing in most other places, with multigenerational living being the default.
The 'American Dream' is very similar in a lot of the OECD nations.
NZ'er checking in. Late 40's - a good portion/most of my peer group bought houses in their mid 20's to 30's. Now the same age range can't unless they've got mega inehitances or very, very, good jobs.
Ditto UK/Australia/Canada etc.
All countries to a greater or lesser degree have the same cost of living crisis (arguably NZ is one of the worst at the moment).
America did not have 200 million naturally-occurring houses that needed to be "filled up". 20th century Americans had to build them all. This is still the obvious and best way to relieve housing costs.
This county owns land which it is going to develop for housing. Their goal? $450k houses because that will bring in more tax revenue than the same number of affordable homes.
Sure but it's a matter of turning some policy knobs, and we know where they are and how much to turn them. The policies that prevent us from building are favorable tax treatment of existing properties and financial penalties for building new ones, favorable treatment of professional labor and penalization of productive labor. The "better options" of which you speak are policy outcomes and we can change the rules.
> Is there any where in the world that's not feeling pain from housing?
Probably 90% of the United States by area. Honestly its just an urbanization problem. There are huge amounts of homes in safe neighborhoods in places you dont want to live in for 200k. See 95% of Pennsylvania for example.
In New Zealand we have the same problem, in sub-zero temperatures, in our alpine party capital Queenstown which is popular with international movie stars and musicians [1]. The house prices and rents are crazy high, but the tourism sector "needs" (wants) young low wage workers. You would think an equilibrium would be reached where the tourism sector / luxury housing size is limited, but it has not yet.
I don't know about that for Queenstown. There's quite a bit of construction, but the town is beside a lake in a glacial valley, so there's very little land available (it's sandwiched between the lake and very steep hills). There's basically one narrow main road to get to other nearby towns, which have seen a lot of construction due to the demand (and in some cases have sprung into existence).
This argument is tired and simplistic. Zoning and other homebuilding laws also prevent large-scale tragic disasters that occur because of self-interested corner-cutting and profiteering.
Many people died on a regular basis because of the unregulated living spaces you’re fantasizing about.
This is a great study on people actually dying because of these problems, temporally located many decades after the most egregious problems had been prevented:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2965780/
There are similar studies for traffic and pedestrian issues due to poor zoning.
The idea that somehow one builder in competition with other builders with no enforcement is going to make appropriate safety tradeoffs everywhere they need to is untenable.
OP: “Zoning laws mean you can’t just build large volumes of cheap accommodation.”
Building codes prevent cheap housing more than zoning laws. It sure seemed like a marginally-informed rant to me.
I live on a street that attempted to convert grass-roots to a bike greenway. I don’t think I have car brain. Zoning is useful, but imperfect. It sounds like we’d agree to be against nimby residential protections of high-end housing, but that’s not what OP said. I didn’t realize OP’s post was just a dog whistle.
The government is obsessed with obtaining economic growth via unrestrained population growth.
There's simply not enough houses to increase the population of Australia by 1 million in 18 months and keep adding 2,000 population per day into the future.
People say "this won't end well". It's already ended badly and getting worse.
And the government - mostly landlord owning multi house portfolios - have zero interest in fixing it.
Yeah I watch with pity our Commonwealth cousins in Canada - terrible in Australia, worse in Canada.
The thing is - why?
Politicians want "economic growth" at literally any price.
And seemingly, the population of Canada (and Australia) want this too - the politicians keep getting voted back in. Though I must say here in Australia the current government at no point gave "unconstrained population growth" as one of its policies - and an election is coming - we'll find out then if people care or not.
The Australian government made a big announcement in December that it would be cutting back population growth perhaps because so many people are angry about it. And yet last month we had the largest population growth in 70 years announced - apparently the government has nothing at all to stop the additional 2,000 people a day arriving.
Australia is in its worst housing crisis in its history, and at the same time there is no restriction at all on foreigners buying Australian housing, real estate is exempt from international money laundering laws - making Australian real estate one of the top places to put your criminal money from Russia or China or Burma or whatever, the government pays tax benefits to property investors so young people cannot buy, houses are being converted into AirBNB tourism accommodation. And still the government fails to act on any of this - the cynical might wonder if all these things driving up house prices is in fact enjoyed and loved and making the landlord politicians happy.
I'm not sure how it's in Australia, but here in Canada, majority of people own their homes. It's not in their best interest to let the housing to depreciate heavily, so they'll go through anything other than letting it burst like in Japan. It also doesn't help when we're not really a manufacturing giant like them, where we could support our economy.
I also know people whose parents' entire retirement plan is just downsizing and using the extra cash to supplement their social benefits. So yeah, kicking the can down the road, hoping some bigger economies figure out a way out of this problem, so we'll just follow along.
And I'm saying this as a renter, who is just in the sidelines with no real desire to buy as of now.
One reason is that the Baby Boomer generation is nearly 100% retired now and no longer making big money and paying big income and sales taxes. This means government revenues are down, right at the same time that the Baby Boomers will begin heavily leaning on public services, particularly healthcare. Immigration brings workers, who are young enough to not need much healthcare, to replace the Baby Boomers and increases government income and sales tax revenue. It's like a Ponzi scheme they are trying to keep from collapsing. As the Baby Boomers pass on, their homes will become available for younger generations to live in.
Same in The Netherlands regarding immigration and housing. Probably same in many of the “richer” EU countries.
I believe much of the “Western” world is in slow decline and part of the problem is lax immigration policies especially when combined with a welfare state. In the long run, it’s just not sustainable.
"Immigration policies" are a major contributor to both economic productivity and cost-of-living stabilization within most industrialized countries in the West. They're not lax, good lord are they not, anywhere you'd want to live, and They Terk Er Jobs/Benefits is broadly untrue.
You can believe anything you'd like, you're entitled, but that doesn't mean it's real.
EDIT: And while I am generally loathe to address green-text posts, especially when rightly autokilled, this topic tends to make people think "the truth is being hidden" or whatever, no matter how obviously frothing the post is. So to the claim "four million immigrants in the last 15 years" - total migration into the Netherlands over the last twenty years is 400,000 and net is 220,000. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/dossier/asylum-migration-and-integr...
If you're an immigrant from a (north-)African country or maybe a country like Turkey, it's very easy to live like that.
I once was in financial hardship due to a depression and wanted to apply for welfare. When I visited the local government office to apply for welfare, probably 90% of people were from African countries.
The local government made it complicated for me to apply for welfare, so eventually I gave up and found other help (through family) to get my life back on track. But I am sure, for most people applying from African countries, they will not encounter many obstacles when applying for welfare.
Another thing that bothered me regarding Dutch government ... Many years later I spent a holiday in Thailand. I met my girlfriend there. We stayed together, got a daughter. When I wanted to visit The Netherlands with my girlfriend and daughter, it was a very complicated and expensive process to get my girlfriend and daughter to come on over.
While, again, people from African countries don't need papers and all to get access to the country (perhaps it's even beneficial to have no passport is such cases, as I've heard of immigrants throwing their passport away (or hiding) when moving to EU countries, perhaps to prevent background and age checks.
And I wouldn't be surprised if people from African countries would be able to get a Dutch passport in a shorter amount of time and with less effort compared to my Thai girlfriend.
Australia's other problem is houses are not homes to live in, they are tax efficient investments.
So you have a lack of properties pushing up rents/sale costs as people need a home to live in and will pay what they have to pay until they can't. Anyone buying has to pay more than the previous owner to ensure a capital gain after being negatively geared to avoid the economy collapsing as Australia's wealth is in property. Requiring someone else to pay more than the previous person is a definition of a pyramid scheme. Higher purchase price then requires higher rents to cover costs and homes become even more out of reach.
You will be extremely lucky to find a house within 45-60 minutes of Sydney selling for less than $1,000,000 / $650,000 usd. Those houses in the $1,000,000 range will be little more than wooden, asbestos ridden shacks, last renovated 30-40 years ago so needing big renovations. The average salary in Sydney is $80,000 according to https://www.forbes.com/advisor/au/personal-finance/average-s...
Low quality appliances, bad insulation, badly designed homes with kitchens and bathrooms in the deepest parts of the house with the lowest quality ventilation, dodgy real estate agents and really low housing supply large especially 3BDR+ which is essential for starting or growing a family.
Both skirt any policy to increase or decrease population, just focus on the planning and the need to decrease pressure on city infrastructure by increasing growth in rural areas.
The ABS lays out several paths, net-zero migration and slow population decline from ~ 25 million, along with low, medium, and high growth.
Vienna's affordable real estate is entirely down to the quantity of housing they build - around 2/3 as many units as NYC with 1/4 the population. It has nothing to do with locking private capital out of real estate (which anyway isn't what Vienna does - there is private housing too). U.S. cities used to be affordable too, when they were building lots of housing.
You’re right, it is quantity. There is only so much housing that could be built in Ibiza, it’s only about 220 sq miles. If a majority of that housing was non market housing, this problem wouldn’t exist (and folks with wealth would simply fight and churn over the minority of market housing).
Non market housing isn’t exposed to capital, and therefore avoids the demands capital places on housing and extraction of ever increasing rents.
That argument is being made all the time, without sufficient evidence to back it up. Even places which have experienced tremendous growth of their housing stock have often seen massive house/rent increases (e.g. Melbourne).
Even more the theory can't explain the sudden jump of house prices that happened during covid in many places. People were moving out of the big cities and house prices still increased? How can that be caused by government regulation not building enough houses.
The reality is that the house prices are much better explained by the fact that the top 1% have essentially unlimited funds compared to everyone else and the main thing to buy are assets, especially during covid.
It's easy to observe when walking around the richest parts of cities like Melbourne, Auckland, Sydney... 90% of thr biggest houses are almost always completely shuttered, because it's the 5th home for the owners and they only use it for a couple of weeks a year.
Slow Boring frequently discusses academic studies and quantitative evidence around the relationship between housing supply and affordability, if you're actually interested.
But what really requires evidence is the extraordinary claim that housing is some kind of special case market where prices don't respond to supply, despite the fact that places with high supply elasticity (Texas, Tokyo, Vienna) are more affordable than places with tightly limited supply, and despite the fact that housing prices took off in the U.S. just as strict zoning became common.
Prices increased during covid because everyone was suddenly spending much more time at home and wanted more space, a home office, etc. This is well understood.
The top 1% have more money to buy everything, not just houses. But most other goods are getting more affordable over time, not less.
So where are the citations? Also you're acting like housing affordability is a US phenomenon. It's global and effects essentially all large cities worldwide, funny you mention Tokyo which has seen massive increases of housing prices compared to salaries [1]. Saying land/housing behaves like other goods completely ignores the fact that land/property is by default a limited supply asset that almost never depreciates in value, that is very different to pretty much any other good. People have shown that much of the increasing inequality highlighted e.g by Picketey is due to assets (largely land/housing)
That island lives thanks to rich tourists. What's the plan? Turn Ibiza into a slum so that rich foreigners owning houses there sell their houses? Not collect garbage? Allow crimes to run rampant?
You could turn Ibiza into "not Ibiza", but be careful you may get what you ask for: a place without any economy anymore.
I've seen a few towns where everything shut down. Supermarket, all restaurants, gas stations closed because people working those jobs can't afford to live there at all. They even thought about bussing people in, but they had 0 takers.
When wealth becomes more unequal (across the globe), of course the rich will want to vacation more often, leaving their homes empty, while the poor will have to live in cars/tents in order to make way.
Either fix strictly monetary inequality, or make sure the wealth (housing etc) is spread around more equally regardless of how much money is in someones's bank account. This needs to happen right now.
While it's true that summer rent is very expensive, people who work there can definitely pay it, but then you would not save THAT much, so people find their way into cheaper accommodations, whatever that means. So while I don't know the personal story of the interviewee, it's definitely not because a lack of jobs or low pay (a problem that DOES plague most of the country).
For hacker news, imagine if this article was about the "poor Google employee living in a van and cannot afford rent", you'd laugh at its face.