Summary
A 24-hour general strike in Greece on Wednesday shut down transport, schools, and government offices as workers protested high living costs.
Unions are demanding a 10% pay raise and the return of holiday bonuses cut during Greece’s financial crisis.
They accuse Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of not doing enough to tackle inflation, despite recent minimum wage increases.
Hospitals operated on emergency staff, while protests and marches were planned.
Many say wages have not kept up with the rising costs of energy, food, and rent.
Cost of housing seem to be the primary issue plaguing the world. Even in china the real estate market is fucked… but they have too much in locations people are not.
It’s almost as if a lot of societal rules (that are mostly needed) create an unfree Market causing shortages… and governments refusing to acknowledge that they should be organising it and not leaving it to “the market” are the cause of the issue.
Organizing means organizing, not building all houses themselves.
Europe is facing population decline. Houses should get cheaper, not more expensive, and the fact that prices keep rising means that they are artificially inflated.
the second anyone was allowed to use houses as an “investment” to gain wealth we basically guaranteed this. obviously anyone with a lot of money tied up in housees is going to try and make their value go up. once we got multinational billion dollar conglomerates involved it became child’s play for them to make that number go up through infinite methods of varrying complexity carried out by thousands of people working together with billions of dollars behind them.
this problem is inherent to a housing market that people are allowed to speculate on. we just need to make that stop entirely. limit house ownership. no one needs 100 houses. especially not companies. if that results in less rental houses than desired, we need to build more apartments. apartments are different beast, but if the cost of houses are lower then it will be harder to inflate rent if they can afford a house instead. this may result in some people who want to rent a house, but not an apartment, unable to find that. that’s not a big problem. they might just need to rent an apartment instead. certainly it’s much less of a problem then the current state of no one being able to afford housing.
the rich don’t need this vector for growing their wealth. they have enough others and are doing quite alright at it. the world will function just fine without mult billion dollar corporations investing in buying properties for the sole reason that they think they can extract wealth without contributing anything. houses should be for living in, not for extracting wealth.
“Facing” sounds like its a bad thing
"Europe is responsibly decreasing their population "
Alas, it’s not trivial to move houses from deserted villages into booming cities. Plenty of European cities already have anti-speculation and rent controls in place, it’s not really helping.
Quickest and cheapest option would be to expand public transport actually, I think, spread out the pressure, combined with more remote work. Once you’ve got a steady, if overall tiny, de-urbanisation trickle going on urban prices are going to tank.
Government really should be building housing themselves though and working on the zoning laws to make building easier. Even in a free market the government should be a competitor driving prices down to fair levels.
Measures like rent control don’t work because landlords are greedy. People end up staying in locations that don’t fit them anymore for the rent control, landlords try to chase those tenants away and don’t improve the property, new housing stops being developed and supply/demand get wrecked.
Measures like stimulus and tax rebates for first time buyers tends to increase the cost of real estate as well. It’s called a demand subsidy and generally isn’t a great way to tackle a supply problem. The individual home buyers will be helped at the expense of tax payer money and real estate cost - and the types of homes being bought aren’t necessarily the best use of land either depending.
Restricting companies from bulk purchasing and holding real estate seems like a good idea but again when you remove that new housing, especially multi-tenant housing, stops being built. Supply goes down prices shoot up…unless of course the government is willing to personally finance and build out the supply and keep prices fair.
It’s governments that are responsible for a lack of housing: local governments through zoning policy. The homeowners in a given city are politically engaged and they vote to protect their own investment in real estate. Call it NIMBYism if you like but homeowners are never going to voluntarily agree to have their house go down in price. Doing so could put their mortgage underwater and result in losing their home and becoming homeless.
Japan does not have this issue to nearly the same extent because they have structured their governments differently. Zoning laws are set by the national government, not the local one, so problems like this can (and have been) set at the national level.
For other countries to solve their housing problem Japan style would require the national government to take power away from the local governments (and in the case of the US, this would put the federal government in a fight with state governments). It would be an extremely messy fight and probably not work out.