The Continent’s housing crisis has gone from being a slow burn to a four-alarm fire — but some countries are handling it better than others.
One of Europe’s long-simmering political frustrations is suddenly boiling over.
From Lisbon to Łódź, voters are angry about the lack of affordable housing. Anti-immigrant riots broke out in Dublin last fall, fueled in part by claims that the Irish capital’s limited public housing was being given to foreigners. Meanwhile, in cities like Lisbon, Amsterdam and Milan, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to denounce the lack of affordable homes.
In a poll ahead of last week’s far-right surge in the European Parliament election, the Continent’s mayors listed housing as one of the most important issues facing their constituencies.
Seems more general an issue with wealth distribution
Is housing a basic right in your country ? I believe it should be.
It’s not. Not in the U.S. Not at all. Not even slightly.
In many cities, politicians have decided that it’s better to have tourists than people living there permanently, so they simply ignore the fact that every house is today an Airbnb (legal or else) and that any new homes being built are simply unaffordable because they aim to be purchased by Investors to speculate.
This website won’t like this. But it’s a failing of the market and it could be fixed by capitalism.
Removing restrictions on housing density, and where houses can be built and adding a Land value tax would help things. Also obviously less immigration would solve the demand side of the equation. I think countries should stop focusing on the ever increasing growth of countries and we should focus more on things like free time.
But really the solution to this is A build a new city or B destroy large parts of a city that were built when the city size was 10% it size and built more density, modern building standards, public transport etc.
But the boomer generation don’t give a fuck about the next generations so probably have to wait for them to die.
Only capitalism can save us from capitalism! - Capitalists
What’d the solution to a fundamental lack of housing stock then?
Government spending but capitalists don’t like that answer unless they’re the ones getting the money.
Government spending do to what exactly?
I have no issue with government spending. If fact I think the government should buy all the land. That’s my proposal. But housing will be built more efficiently by the market. Governments are inefficient.
I don’t see how this addresses the AIRBNB problem, or the corporations that are rapidly buying up all
analogousavailable housing stock in order to rent it out.Ultimately it is a supply and demand issue.
Supply is artificial restricted because no one will build because either they simply can’t or the value is going up too much that there is no point (which can be solved) and population is increasing.
If you built a shit load of homes there would be both more houses to rent/buy and more Airbnb options. Honestly the airbnb option in a lot of places is a problem because large hotel can’t be built.
There are 827,557 residential homes in Barcelona. There are 10,101 airbnb properties. That’s about 1.2%.
What you think happens if Barcelona builds another 100,000 houses/hotels?
100k hours and hotels is going to hit where exactly? And that 10-50 billion dollars of investment is funded by what exactly? Magical money printing machine?
The industry in Spain is worth $206.4 billion per year. Money would be found.
No one is going to loan an industry 20% of its yearly revenue.
I’m beginning to suspect you don’t have an mba.
You’re an idiot. You’re not going to build that much in 1 year.
If you did have that much work being done in Barcelona money would flood in from elsewhere also. Especially the EU.
Congrats you lose the argument by resorting to personal attacks.
I never said it would be built in a year so it would appear the idiot is you.
Ah yes, let’s make it even more of a hell to live in cities by paving over anything green and making people live like livestock in tiny cages. That will surely solve the problem!
Oh, and really it’s the immigrants’ fault! They’re the ones buying up all of the houses with cash to later rent them as AirBnBs!
I didn’t say any of that.
Airbnb is 1% of the stock having been formed in 2007. How much do you think immigration has increased by since 2007? Less than 1% of the population?
You really think freeing up 1% of housing stock is going to magically mean everyone that wants to buy a house now suddenly can?
Saying “Airbnb” is obviously an oversimplification - a ton properties seem to be bought by rental companies, not normal people. There’s a ton of properties just sitting empty, as well.
The solution is to introduce more control for housing, not less. Less control means more cheaply made hell-scape skyscraper buildings housing hundreds of people each, with no green spaces anywhere in sight.
There isnt a ton sitting empty. Dome need to be empty obviously for people to move in and out and for renovation. But even that isn’t enough to satisfy demand.
Your plan is more housing restriction and let me guess the awful idea that is tent control? Neither of these prevent the issue of lack of supply. Thats where the solution lies.
Of course governments need to enforce building standards. Things like public transport and density.
But at the moment the government is the one stopping more housing, especially higher density. If you allowed business to build more houses they would.
About 10% of homes in the US are considered vacant, 5.5% in UK, 18% in Europe. 0.02% of the US population is homeless, I believe it’s 0.006% in UK, 0.07-0.33% in European countries.
Yet your solution is still to make housing even less comfortable for poor people by getting rid of density laws and blame immigrants for the housing prices, to boot.
