Hacker News Reader

Comment by valzam | Hacker News Reader

The sad part is that all these tax gimmicks are there not because the state wants welfare but because they want to put up a free market charade. You don't directly encourage additional supply but 'let the market build housing' and support the demand side. It's the same here in Australia, the amount of shenanigans related to buying a house a insane. Of course this only drives up prices and leads to asset bubbles.

View on HN

Ridiculous population growth is what’s driving housing prices. This would be a problem if we were aiming at reducing the population.

But the majority of European countries have negative organic population growth?

What matters is that the total population is growing, which push the prices up, I think mostly in already attractive and crowded cities ("Over a longer period, the population of the EU-27 grew from 354.5 million in 1960 to 447.7 million in 2020, an increase of 93.2 million people" https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...). That's 93 million people you have to house, and they are not going to the countrysides.

That doesn't matter, what matter is demand for housing going up, which it does because due to net inflow, there is still a growing population; plus households get smaller (more people not partnering up or at least not living together, more divorces); and housing supply is geographically concentrated, those that are new to the EU don't want to live in the countryside of Romania or even the countryside of Germany, they want to live in or near cities, where everybody else also wants to live (and for the same reasons).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com