Hey, you can leave US you know. Europe will probably gladly have you.
As selfish as this may sound, the last thing we need is more foreign competition on the housing market with bigger pockets.
It would be fair that if people from the US want to buy property here with their foreign megabucks, we should also get unrestricted visa-free access to the US labor market. Tit for tat. Otherwise it's just unfair to Europeans to be outspent out of their own housing market.
Just because the country is profiting from your megabucks, doesn't mean the average Joe is.
Look at Austria. The most touristic areas are profiting a lot from all that foreign tourist money, but a lot of the locals can't afford to live there anymore as all that tourist money is only going into a few pockets. Those who don't already own something or have an inheritance have been royaly fucked by that tourist money. It increases inequality between the haves and the have-nots.
If the middle class are the ones buying the properties, then they're the ones selling them. Therefore it actually injects money into the middle class, foreign capital that never existed in that country.
>he most touristic areas are profiting a lot from all that foreign tourist money, but a lot of the locals can't afford to live there anymore as all that tourist money
Those who move to a country to work and live there on anything but a very short term basis on not generally considered tourists. Most of the money flowing into the rich is a function of capitalism, not just tourism. You can examine virtually any industry and make the same statement. Yet, some fraction of money is usually better than nothing for the middle class people benefitting.
The US has your Austrian analogue, it is called Hawaii. In Hawaii most money is made from tourism. The common person there is mostly employed in tourism. Housing prices are high, because lots of people want to live there. The result when it was mostly closed off for coronavirus was that although demand for housing decreased, unemployment skyrocketed without tourism, making the middle class worse off.
Sorry but since you make no distinction between someone owning and selling a house ($500k asset in Austria) and someone who doesn't own a house and call them both middles class is just plain wrong.
The property owner middle classer is significantly better off than than the other and would benefit even more from your intention of buying while the other middle classer is worse off without a property to his name and will suffer more from being in competition with you.
Sure, one guy profits, but you can't possibly tell me with a straight face someone else doesn't get screwed from this wealth driven game of music chairs which is the property market right now.
value of house + value of rest of economy.
Now someone foreign comes into the country to live there and work in tech from abroad. They buy a house. Now the wealth inside the country looks like this:
value of house + foreign money paid for house + value of rest of country.
You can see that the wealth inside the country has increased. If it is the middle class owning those houses, then the wealth of middle class has changed by the difference in value between the value of the house and what it was sold for. The middle class then further benefits from whatever money the foreign worker spends in the country, which is a net gain for the middle class, plus the injection into the economy of the foreign money paid for the house. The only way the middle class end up worse off here is if the foreigner doesn't live and work here, and is just a foreign landlord (siphoning money out of the country) -- which is something I think we can both agree is detrimental.
I will say here in the US people have a lot of problems with foreign landlords and people who buy property here and don't live here. But only the most backwards rednecks have serious issue with an honest foreigner who buys a normal middle class house to live their lives, especially if they are injecting foreign capital into our economy.
>districts of Berlin were like a quarter of Bay Area housing
So what? Nothing touches Bay Area prices, even in the US. And then there's the income difference as well.
Try comparing to something more similar like Texas. Last I checked average dev wages in Austin are easily 2x more than average dev wages in Berlin while buying a house there costs the same. So who's buying power is stronger then?
Buying something decent in Germany now, in the current market is nearly impossible without an inheritance.