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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

I’ve literally seen this same exact comment many, many times except with different locations. Eastern Mass, New York, Ontario, Britain, and even starting to hear it from suburban areas.

The exact same concepts: cheap grandfathered lease, hoping the landlord doesn’t cancel, can’t afford rent despite making >100k, “luxury apartments”, empty apartments, illegal renting (e.g. AirBnB) and shadiness.

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The underlying issue is that demand for these places has increased in our new globally-connected world. That's not going away. Cute little lake houses aren't going to be a local secret anywhere in the world, anymore, and the sooner people realize that, the sooner they can think about how to adjust to it.

We are currently in the "denial" phase. We can't get to "acceptance" fast enough.

I think the wealthy are already well beyond the denial phase and that is part of the problem. There might be a global panicked landgrab being undertaken by those who control large amounts of capital. Because if they dont, someone else will.

The problem isn’t a lack of “cute little lake houses”. The problem are is a lack of “affordable homes”. Or any home.

And adjusting to what exactly? Living in squalor way outside of what you call home because some parasite gets to live in a furnished and unaffordable temp home, payed for by a relocation package?

If you care at all about convincing others of this point, I think you should know that when you use words like “parasite” to describe people engaging in ordinary economic activity my eyes roll back in my head and I don’t hear anything else you have to say.

The underlying issue is wealth inequality. There's a glut of capital chasing returns internationally that grows bigger every year.

If 10 people with $1 to spend on an apple, and one person suddenly had $11 you could say demand for apples had "doubled", implying that this the result of an implacable, impersonal, unchangeable force but it absolutely isnt.

This is a bit of a shell game. What you describe is just another way to say that demand has increased. And your reframing doesn’t help us much, because there’s nothing in the short term you’re going to do to drastically change the global inequality landscape. So if we accept your explanation we’re actually worse off than where we started.

I reframed it in such a way to make it abundantly clear that the problem can be solved at any point with the judicious application of new taxes.

That guy with $11 just needs to lose most of it or not be able to spend it and then there is no more apples shortage "due to high demand".

Portugal cant tax an overly rich canadian living in canada but they can absolutely cut the bottom out of the portuguese-property-market-as-a-bitcoin-like-store-of-wealth. This would not only free up land for portuguese habitation it would help fill the portuguese budget hole.

However, for some reason that is probably more about a variety of property owning portuguese politicians getting very rich and not attracting useful investment, the Portuguese government encouraged this with the golden visa. They only cut porto and lisbon out of the program after a steep backlash.

Land value tax solves this (as they say).

Practically every single capital is like that these days. People of all nations can copy paste same rant and it would be 100% valid. This is how it is, too much buying power with new generation of higher level office workers compared to blue collar ones, on top of financial speculation with either prices skyrocketing, or airbnbs. Let's not forget there is more and more of people in general, and more and more coming for work, education etc. to bigger places and rarely going back.

Or to put it in reverse - I am not aware of any metropolis/capital where this isn't true, regardless of regime.

I would argue the Canadian one of Ottawa. Ottawa isn't cheap, but it is not anywhere near Toronto or Vancouver.

Right, it really should say anchor cities and not capital IMO. Those may coincide sometimes, but not always.

More than just anchor cities. I live in a town of 60k. Cheapest homes less than fifty years old are all C$600K and sharply upward. There are many multi-million dollar properties. It is insanity.

I don't think I've ever heard the absurd levels of this blog post and I've lived in few expensive cities from italy, poland and switzerland, where it is impossible for middle class locals to live there.

Compared with the 2, how is Poland expensive?

Locals have a much lower income than Italy or Switzerland. Thus they are still getting priced out of cities where they have lived a long time. In Warsaw the locals are often priced out by the returning diaspora. See Lebanon, parts of Italy, Ireland in the past, etc.

Currently I think it's quite expensive (for locals). E.g. bedroom + living room costs > 3k PLN in Cracow, and probably more in Warsaw. At the same time junior dev can earn about 5-9k PLN net. My non-dev friends often are not even able to live in Cracow.

Reason how this happens worldwide may be that 70% of world population is projected to be living in big cities by next decades.

I mean, tendency is that most people want to live in the big city, sometimes as necessity (can only find a job there) sometimes as a preference (better services, etc.) the result is traffic jams and expensive real state.

I'd argue that trend is reversing, just like it did in the 1960's.

Quality of life issues eventually drive people to live in the outer suburbs, further exacerbating issues within city cores (e.g. San Francisco right now).

You can argue it all you want but the numbers don’t support it. If the demand is going down then why is it becoming more expensive?

Also, white flight in the 60s was a move to the suburbs- many would consider that given the density of 2020, the suburbs are feeling the same crunch. Bellevue and other suburbs are more expensive than Seattle. I’m guessing there are suburbs of SF that are more expensive than SF.

Prices are dropping in San Francisco, especially condos which are below pre-Covid prices now.

And you yourself said "Bellevue and other suburbs are more expensive than Seattle." Which would infer that yes, people are leaving the city and moving to suburbs.

Of course they are as interest rates are rising quickly. Nobody is talking about it, but free (or almost) money was also a good reason why prices increased that much.

Prices were dropping before interest rates went up.

It is still one of the most expensive and sought after places to live in the country, and maybe even the world. You can’t just remove all context from reality to try to make your points. You know this. Be a big boy.

Now you’re just desperately pulling things out of the air.

My statement the cycle of movement to urban centers might be reversing, and I used condo prices in SF since pre-Covid as a data point.

You come back with “its still one of the most expensive places in the world”. Then you said “Be a big boy”.

You’ve failed to make your case and resorted to condescending remarks.

Let’s just chalk this up to you failed to disprove my argument and leave it at that? Unless you had more condescending statements to make?

Bellevue is 5 miles away from Seattle. It is the same thing as Seattle.

> I am not aware of any metropolis/capital where this isn't true, regardless of regime.

Tokyo. It is hoovering up all the Japanese youth, but manages to stay affordable for other factors.

- Permissive zoning - Immigration restrictions - Closed culture - Declining population

Also Bangkok, total renters market. New buildings going up every day. Lots of rents are lower than before covid.

Indeed, as far as I can tell (I’m in Bangkok but I’m not a local) there is a lot of choice and a super wide range of prices.

Public transit is constantly being expanded and there is so much stock of modern buildings, I can’t see it changing any time soon.

Last week I went to the fish market by Sky Train, first time I’d been out that way, and I was surprised to see a ton of modern condo towers clustered around Erawan. And why not? It’s 30-45 minutes on the train to the center of town.

It's been a few years but when I have been in Bangkok for a few months I just took my scooter around an area I liked and walked into good looking buildings asking for an apartment and had a monthly contract the same day.

Compared to months of planning and looking if you plan to move in an European city.

Came to say the exact same thing. Most in the English-speaking world have no idea cities like Tokyo exist. It’s still a global capital, still growing (for now), but it’s still very affordable for people of all economic classes. And it’s not for lack of foreign speculation; locals mostly aren’t buying up the $10M+ flats in the new Mori building, but there’s plenty of development to meet demand across the spectrum.

Germany is working to make its spot on the list. At least in the cities.

Given that rental laws in Germany can't even be broken if you buy a property for your own use ("in theory" yes but in practice...) it is not surprising why the traditional rental market is the last place someone will want to have their property

Tenant protection is good, but it breaks down in high-demand situations. And of course the better solution is to solve this on the supply side

I don’t agree that tenant protection and increased supply are comparable solutions that can be swapped out. Ideally you’d have both.

Meanwhile it is incredibly hard to build up or out in most German cities and towns due to lack of permits. Why aren't Baugenehmigungen given out? Well, landowners vote. Also, most politicians are landowners.

Lack of housing suits most people in power perfectly well. They get to control the populace through sops like the aborted rent control law Mietendeckel.

I wonder how many more software unicorns will we produce that start out promising but end up (possibly) being net-negative on the society as a whole?

You leave out Western Mass though.

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