Hacker News Reader

Comment by hash07e | Hacker News Reader

The inflation on rent is not due the recent "increase" in new population?

expanding this:

Not complaining but it is unfair to increase your population not organically, forbidding new constructions and expecting this "just works".

What happens is both sides are squeezed in inflation and have lower quality of life and the govt. reaps higher taxes.

Then same govt says you are evil for pointing out this?

Edit:

People are pointing out the asylum or refugee. That is not what I am talking about. Talking about cities having an influx. Like Austin or others cities where a large flux of people migrates.

Please don't remove population movement from the equation only because it may affect some narrative

View on HN

If you wish to complain about migrants you can say so explicitly, as the dog whistle is entirely transparent anyway.

Can't deny it is a factor. Not a single mention in the article though, of course. It's all discussion of the resulting effects, and the supply side.

Demand side has multiple parts:

- National population growth (migration, as fertility rate below replacement)

- Money supply inflation (government spending, mortgage borrowing, years of artificially low interest rates) allowing people to bid up prices

- Urbanization (office jobs and universities); people within the country move to the big cities

- Social atomization (more housing needed per person)

(EDIT: Ageing population too: children tend not to have their own place)

Depending in the demographics, a fertility rate below replacement level can still lead to a rising population even when excluding migrants, as the people who would be "replaced" by the new births might live for many more decades.

I.e., we'd probably still have a housing crisis in Europe even if not a single foreigner came in.

Not complaining but it is unfair to increase your population not organically, forbidding new constructions and expecting this "just works".

What happens is both sides are squeezed in inflation and have lower quality of life and the govt. reaps higher taxes.

Then same govt says you are evil for pointing out this?

I'll guess that this is referencing asylum seekers and migrants.

I keep seeing this argument pop up all the time online and in person, but it's never really made sense to me. Population growth in most European countries is lower now than at many periods in the past, yet we were able to house rising populations somehow.

Do people think cities like Berlin and Paris just got plopped down fully formed at some distant point in the past, together with instructions reading "Population: 3 million max., never exceed or add anything"? They and their infrastructure have grown over time as the population has grown. There's no magic maximum population limit that every city in the western world has just happened to hit right in the last 20 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com