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Comment by ratsforhorses | Hacker News Reader

There's a guy who made it big in Silicon valley and bought 150 hectares near Cluj , north west Romania, he's built/building 28 houses with a school and afaik there's a agricultural component attached... curious if he's using ecological insulation (compressed sawdust, hemp, wool) or ecological plumbing, heating systems... seems a good intent but such initiatives have a tendency to push up local land prices :-( I have no idea how much his houses cost but since people have been going to Europe as "cheap" labour and especially since the banks have gotten involved in lending money for real estate purchases , prices have been going through the roof... https://youtu.be/VCBIyvYtMBI

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I can't imagine most romanians are happy with their land being so cheap overall (and their economy not doing great) so I doubt most people living there would object to the local land prices going up (that's a good thing).

It’sa double edged sword, the average home price has doubled where I live but it’s also created a homelessness problem where it was non existent before. This seems to also have increased drug use and mental problems or at least exposed them on the public streets but probably both. When homes are cheap people can get by with very little, being poor is not so bad when you have a roof over your head and food and people around you. Now the pre are sleeping rough in the street or overcrowded in tiny apartments with no prospects of having their own home. I’m sure those who can invest in building and selling expensive houses are doing well though.

Is there anywhere where most people are really glad that a bunch of foreigners are coming in and driving up the prices of necessities?

Rural Japan. I am moving out of it, and most rural communities are very aware of the fact that they are dying out. Houses are not only cheap, some are free. I have a friend who is living in a house just in exchange of cutting the grass there regularly (long story). Landlords have to pay for the cost of destruction if one house they own becomes abandoned. They are happy to have a tenant even for free if they fix things there and keep the place in a good shape.

Schools are closing one after the other. The countryside is littered with abandoned schools. People there are despaired to see their cities shrink.

When we arrived from Tokyo with a young kid, we were more than welcomed and locals helped us localize the best houses for us.

Rising prices are bad for all but the most wealthy

* It’s bad for people who don’t own a house, which disproportionately impacts the poor and the young.

* It doesn’t really help homeowners either: their property taxes go up but the increased land value will just be spent on the increased cost of a new property if they move nearby.

* So the only way to realise increased land value is to move outside the local market. This turnover reduces the community of a neighbourhood, and creates pockets of dull old homogeneous people with no shared history.

* The only real way to benefit from rising prices is to invest in property, further concentrating wealth among the wealthy.

* Treating one of society’s most important assets as an investment has a ton of negative side effects, like poor utilisation due to land banking, cheaply finished low quality buildings rather than ones that vest serve their occupants, evictions, further increased community turnover.

* It’s a self perpetuating cycle, as the wealthy investors vote, lobby, and just straight up are politicians.

It really depends on why prices are rising. Prices rising because a society is getting wealthier overall and wants to spend more on better quality products (or more ethically produced/sourced products) is not generally a bad thing.

That's not the case for 99% of romania.

I do think increased building standards and expanded city amenities explain some small part of price increases. But not like 10%+ increases over inflation year after year as is seen in many areas worldwide.

I completely agree, I think the problem with "agricultural" land is that due to WW2 (in western Europe) we jumped too quickly in the 50's from a largely rural society to mechanised farming to pick up the slack from all that surplus war production and lack of (killed off) manpower. The wealthy have used the captive cheap labour force to fill it's offices, factories and rental tenements... Governments have made bigger farms a priority and as in NZ they have become the playthings of hedge funds and corporations (where ironically a Maori once told me something that still sticks with me as profoundly one of the best ways to manage land, telling me "in our living space people have their houses but it's communally owned land, ie " your house, our land") To certain extent our society is focusing on using farming largely for "junk" food, ie wheat and other grains for bread and bakery, corn for glucose syrop, rapeseed for oil used in biofuel, palm oil, sugar beet... and of course, meat and diary... (i heard something like 60% of straw is burned in Germany...) rather than focusing on letting people produce fruit and vegetables in small-scale holdings... Here in Romania a lot of people still live in the countryside (40%?) government is sidelining people selling on the street or in markets and the westernized , yuppified youth is being sucked into the glamour and anonymity of huge supermarkets full of too much stuff but so convenient...

Most people don't own land, so rising land prices just make them poorer.

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