In modern life,you have a house as a service™.
Jokes aside, why the prices are so high in some countries?
Jokes aside, why the prices are so high in some countries?
Single family zoning, NIMBYism, moral panics over public transit, suburbanism... the list goes on and on.
Building duplexes is a start but Seattle should look a lot more like Brooklyn than like Idaho Falls: 6 story apartment buildings everywhere. Density. Public transit galore with very restricted parking.
Only then would housing prices be reasonable.
I was born in a city that lost 40 000 people over the last generation. From 320 000 people to 280 000 people. A Central European rust belt city called Ostrava.
And the real estate prices there made a huge jump in the last three years. Not as huge as in Prague, but +50 per cent nonetheless.
Lots of those apartments are actually empty and cannot attract tenants, because there just isn't enough demand on the rental market. But they still sell like hot buns at a bakery. I believe this is caused by the fear of inflation combined with relatively low mortgage interest rates. People don't want to have cash in hand.
In the US: Interest rates.
Interest rates are low, so mortgage rates are low, so there is a crap-ton of money going after what is effectively a fixed resource.
Outside the US: Investments.
A lot of people have made a shit-ton of money from low-interest-rate investments like the stock market in the last decade. These people are looking for places to put said money, including real estate in out of the way places. Once again, a lot of money going after fixed resources.
This is a case in Europe, too, especially in the Eurozone, where interest rates are kept very low by the ECB to keep heavily indebted countries afloat.
MILLER: Yeah. It's a huge, huge issue, a global issue. And you're right, Terry, it distorts the real estate market when you have individuals - Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs or whoever - buying real estate as a way of basically moving money that they made from other sources into hard assets in Western countries that are attractive because of their stability. I mean, it works for them. it's basically - they've acquired an asset that they know is going to be reliable. It's going to be there. Their money - they're not going to lose."
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046008243/the-pandora-papers...
Housing prices are NOT reasonable in Brooklyn.
> NIMBYism
I really dislike it when people immediately jump to this. There are simply a whole lot more people living in Seattle than a generation ago. The math dictates that the housing would be more expensive.
2. Housing prices in Seattle would be more reasonable than they currently are with more supply of housing.
3. NIMBYism is absolutely the problem in Seattle. Upzone everything to have a minimum density requirement of 4 family, instead of insisting that 70%+ of the city stay in single family zoning. Don't want a duplex in your back yard? Tough. Move. If the entirety of the city core were as dense as average Brooklyn you would have sufficient supply to meet demand. As is you can buy a fixer up apartment in Brooklyn for half the price of a burnt out shell in Seattle.
4. There are more people than ever and they're all coming back from the desolation known as suburbia: Cities simply have to densify in response. You can't keep your city the same size forever.
3. Having lived in NYC, I can tell you that living in Seattle is far more pleasant than Brooklyn with its massive over population.
4. "Cities simply have to densify in response." Your solution is to make it unpleasant for everyone. Got it. There are many other solutions - don't jump to the easiest one.
Having also lived in both I deal with needles and aggressive homeless people far less often here than I ever did in Seattle. I have functional public transit. I can also even walk places for food, groceries and entertainment.
Don't be such a NIMBY: You're clearly against people having affordable housing. Just move to some shithole suburb and get out of the cities.
You jump to conclusions a lot. I disagree with your solution of making it overcrowded for everyone. There are other solutions.
> Just move to some shithole suburb
Your language says a lot about you. The reason suburbs exist is because people don't want to live in overcrowded places.
Basically, houses are being used to serve profiteering much moreso than actually housing people affordably.
That's a lot of un-lived-in houses.
Also, because it’s a non-custodial physical asset, countries that allow foreign ownership get a lot of real estate investment from money laundered out of more financially-repressive countries.
This is localized to specific cities, not the entire country. (Though country-wide home prices are also up, just not into the millions like this).
The reason is that people want to live in these specific places, but they can't build upward fast enough to hold everyone who wants to move in. So instead, new buyers compete over the same housing inventory and the current residents never want to sell because they're afraid they may never be able to buy back into the city in the future.
Seattle does have some major problems right now, but it's not literally a lawless wasteland. I think most of us believe that the city will get on top of the social issues eventually, at which point it becomes even more attractive to live in Seattle and the prices go up even more.
Prices of all assets has skyrocketed in the last few years. Part of the blame for that is speculated to lie on the ZIRP (Zero interest-rate policy). Real estate all throughout the developed world has seen a lot of money going into it, as has the stock market as well.
Most people agree everything is overinflated right now and a correction will come, but that sentiment has been around since around 2016. I don't think a violent crash will come without another event to cause it, but I wouldn't be surprised by a plateau or a stagnation in prices for a few years.