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Comment by TheGallopedHigh | Hacker News Reader

There are more properties available in Italy that would not likely require 200k button the order of 10s of thousands. Maybe that’s your ticket?

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Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k.

People here say these are remote but that is really mostly just how "spoiled" (in quotes because I'm "spoiled" that way too!) Germans are with commute. You can be 1 hour drive away (including traffic) from many fairly central places in Berlin & have very cheap housing outside the city (partially this is because traffic is actually not that bad in Berlin & partially because it's in the middle of an otherwise fairly empty & large plain[0]).

In comparison nowhere within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap, nor from SF/LA/NYC or heck even Tel Aviv.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain

> within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap

1hr drive from central London is probably still in central London, though ;-)

1hr train from London gets you to areas where a reasonable 3 bed semi is ~£300k I guess.

You'd be surprised. 1hr commute from London in reality is 40 minutes on the train (10 minutes walk either side, even getting out of a major train station takes that long). And 40 minutes ride from central London is Sevenoaks, Reading, St. Albans, and zone 6 commuter towns like Amersham or Borehamwood -- your 3-bed semi will still cost you half a million pounds if not much more. (Thanks to the NIMBY policy that designated dozens square miles of farms inside the M25 as "green belt" and dozens more as private golf courses...)

Germany is a good choice. Very low cost of living relative to job opportunities.

Only if you rent or stay far away from the hotspots. Germany has one of the lowest home ownership rates recorded at 41%.

In Munich, an average <80m2 apartment 40+ minutes away from the city center costs around 640K EUR. And if you're looking at a decent detached house we're talking about a million at the very least.

Unfortunately doesn't add up when salaries in tech are 55-85k EUR, with net income somewhere around half of that.

But yes, outside of purchasing real estate, cost of living is pretty good relative to quality of life.

Right but Munich is the worst in all of Germany, rather than a typical example. It's like quoting SFBA housing costs as an example for the US.

I would not say that 2 hours of driving every day is affordable, if you calculate the fully-loaded euros per km cost of owning, maintaining, fueling, insurance and operating a vehicle, how many km you would put on it every work week, and the cost of paying for parking in the urban center. 0.75 euro cents per km would not be an unreasonable figure.

>Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k

Do you have any examples? I could never find anything larger than a matchbox in a village for under $200k in Germany.

Anything decent I found in the outskirts of any big city was over 500k.

The first thing is to look in places without good transit as germans (reasonably!) prefer those. The moment it requires owning a car anything outside Berlin (so in Brandenburg) will be affordable.

Here's a quick search for houses under €100k with at least 100m^2 and 3 rooms (2BR) in Brandenburg: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/brandenburg/guenst...

It returns 83 results & while not all of them are within 1 hour drive from Berlin, at least a bunch of them are.

Also if you're in the affluent south or west of the country (which I suspect is where you searched?) you will have far fewer options for cheap housing than in the depopulated former East-Germany around Berlin. You definitely can't repeat this "trick" outside of Munich.

No offense, but those places are cheap because nobody wants to live there and for good reason. It looks much worse than Eastern Europe.

Nobody in their right mind would want their kids growing up there.

In family friendly places with jobs the properties are far from cheap.

That's why I don't live there! But the topic we're attached to is "1-Euro Houses" and that's exactly the kind of places you'd find these in Italy or Spain as well - depressed rural/small-towns with no jobs and where all the young people moved to the cities.

Also not sure what counts as looking bad to you, a lot of these villages or small cities are actually quite nice looking (we often go to such places for a day trip) & if I was single/childless and wanted to live a quiet life without much disturbance I'd definitely check them out. They are mostly just not in easy commuting distance to jobs.

In fact some of the places in Berlin with the highest rents (like Kreuzberg) are often a lot uglier than sleepy Brandenburg villages & small towns.

Near the Dutch German border there are plenty of houses that are affordable, well under 200K. Don't cross that border though, then prices will skyrocket.

Hey, are you up for chatting more about Berlin houses? I'm Dutch and my German is ... not too great. But I am mildly interested in it. So if you're up for it, my email is in my profile.

does this reply answer your questions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198125

Hey, thanks, it does.

Why is the east side cheaper? I mean, I know it was occupied by the Soviet Union back in the day, but why is it still cheaper there now?

Lots of free space! Look at how relatively sparsely populated the area around Berlin is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Pop_dens...

Germany has a very low fertility rate & even immigration isn't enough to make the population grow more than very slowly so if a lot of people moved westwards and into the cities it means a lot of people moved out of the east and the country side.

Also almost the entire country is fairly flat & with a mild climate.

Is population stagnation a problem across Europe? Why not relax immigration requirements? I’m not an expert, but every time I’ve looked getting into Europe seems ridiculously hard. You basically have to have a company agree to employ you and sponsor your visa application, which (as I understand) entails proving why the company can’t find an E.U. resident to do the same job. Plus the salaries are quite a lot lower than the US (roughly 40% lower after factoring in healthcare, vacation, taxes, retirement, etc for software engineering jobs last I checked).

Software just isn't a focus for the German economy, it's more industrial machinery & automotive.

And Germany actually has among the highest amount of immigration in the world so not sure why you think they don't let people in. In my experience it is actually easier to move here than to the US (I'm an immigrant).

The places where it's a problem are those that people leave, like Bulgaria and Romania. There are basically enough "cheap" immigrants available from poorer European countries that the wealthy ones don't need to also additionally increase the rate of immigration from outside Europe.

I was speaking to Europe in general, but good to know about Germany specifically. I was asking about Europe generally because it seems like I’ve heard of a number of European countries struggling with declining populations in recent years, and if it’s a problem throughout the EU, then perhaps the EU would be better off by loosening its immigration requirements.

It's mostly a problem in countries that aren't doing well economically and thus their young people leave to other (mostly also European) countries.

You cant make immigration easy only in these countries as once you are in the EU you can then move to any other EU state (there is some wait required, like a year I think). So people will basically use these as a jump off point to the countries they actually want to go to (which do not lack immigrants).

I believe the solution is to invest in the poorer countries to make them attractive enough so that their diaspora wishes to return and young people don't want to leave en masse to begin with.

Right. That makes sense. If it’s not a pan-EU problem then easing immigration restrictions across the EU won’t help. I wonder if they could be more creative, for example, allowing people to work in those countries with negative population growth but not the wealthier countries (e.g., Germany). Maybe after working in a poorer country for 5-10 years you earn the right to work anywhere in the EU.

But yes, investment in poorer countries also seems reasonable.

Berlin winters ... mild?

Bigger concern is the long nights in winter (but long days in summer). But plenty of European cities have overcast issues in winter anyway.

All depends where you're coming from. w.r.t weather, I found winters in Toronto less depressing than Paris because Toronto at least had clear skies.

Yes, we've lived here since 2013 and there has been maybe a week of snow per winter (it was above freezing the rest of the year). It is almost unheard of to have icey roads and sidewalks (which was normal every winter when we lived in Austria before that).

That used to be normal in Berlin too 10+ years ago.

The last couple of years barely had any snow though.

Yes they are mild. A winter in Berlin matches late fall in Warsaw.

Berlin has a winter?

A few days. But the sun still rises confusing people in Berlin that are from Northern Europe.

Ah, you mean it has autumn!

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