The requirement to work for a foreign company and have an income double the average seems to allay the complaint of taking local jobs and consuming local social services.
The fact that the visa doesn't allow application to local jobs is enough to stop the first complaint on its tracks.
I wonder how they intend to deal with the seemingly inevitable rise in housing prices that comes with an influx of high earners.
I'm from a country with a demographics falling off the cliff, like Germany but worse, and just like Germany, housing prices (where jobs are) have went nowhere but up at a steep rate beyond wage growth, because housing is not a fixed pie for whom now less people are competing due to increased deaths vs births, because for a few decades now, it's no longer just people competing for housing against the other people, but piles of money competing against other piles of money, and the bigger piles are winning(aka investors).
If you expect housing to get cheaper because less babys will be born, you'll be in a rude awakening. If you want housing to go down you need to decouple it from investments because otherwise, all the levers will be pulled by the governments and banks to make sure that line only goes up regardless of demographics. "Too few babies are being born? No problem, we'll just market those houses to foreign investors. Problem solved. Line goes up now."
It might take a long time, but at some point the chickens will come home to roost. Or roast...
Internal migration is a big thing even in countries with tanking birthrates. Entire villages are being emptied as old people die and their kids move to the cities for studies and work. The population overall is shrinking but housing demand in cities is still growing fast.
So yes, you can have a booming property market in a country with shrinking population. Nobody's gonna live in those forgotten villages with cheap empty housing but no schools, universities, hospitals, doctors, jobs and entertainment opportunities.
>at the end of the day has to pay for it to use it, otherwise it's just a ponzi scheme.
The housing market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Safe to assume housing market aint going to go bust anytime soon if you live anywhere in the first world cities.
Have you seen the old city center of Prague in Czechia? or any old city center in any major city in Europe. These numbers only go up.
To add salt to the injury, SBB (the federal railway company) entered the real estate market and rents exclusively. It feels like a government sanctioned way to keep people out of the housing market.
[update] Also the regulation on gear/materials is insanely costly, in Dublin new houses need to have a BER [1] rating of 'A'. Looks great in paper but this severely increases the cost.
[1] https://www.seai.ie/home-energy/building-energy-rating-ber/u...
But for most immigrants it's really hard to feel at home in a small town halfway around the world.
Interesting thought process.
So the local gas station owner is also to blame for the increase in gas price and destroying the community and not the global supply/demand, right? Also the local bread maker, etc.
Home sellers equally sell their homes as expensive as they can and if the local work force can't afford a home then fuck them, they should move away or pay a land lord and stay broke. That's what most people think. But it's ridiculous to then blame the consequences on politicians or foreigners.
Businesses on the other hand have their own costs that dictates what they have to charge to remain in business. And they go out of business if they can't balance that. A land lord never goes out of business. A home owner can abandon his real estate for decades without losing it. There's a huge difference to businesses.
An example similar to real estate is natural resources, such as oil and gas. They generate enormous profit compared to investments and cost of operation. Some nations chose to let a few interests take those profits, some nations give their citizens cheap or free gas, some nations invest the profits into large funds and et cetera. There are different ways of doing things. Wherever you live right now, people did things differently in the past, especially when it comes to real estate.
Their cost definitely increases if the property is on mortgage and their rates went up. Also cost in maintenance increase and taxes as well. All those increases for the landlord will directly go into the price of rent for the tenant.
They also raise their prices because of supply/demand so someone comes and is willing to pay more. What are you gonna do, say no to more money?
The private rental market is still a business and not a charity. Only the public housing is there to cater to the needs of the people and not for profit making. Have you voted for the construction of more public housing?
> What are you gonna do, say no to more money?
Yes, sometimes you should do that if more money goes against your values. I've said no to more money a ton of times. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am surprised that hackers think that the thought is absurd. It's not being a "charity" to not squeeze as much as you can.
When I had a physical business I went out of my way to employ young people from the local community. It never crossed my mind to do things differently, while some of my competitors were taking advantage of cheaper foreign labour.
If the idea is to squeeze as much short term profit as possible, nothing is stopping you. But then don't turn around and blame the people who rented the apartments for a higher price. It was the landlords that increased their price. If I'm selling train tickets and then start cancelling the tickets that were already reserved so I could sell them for a greater profit to a foreigner, is it rational to blame the foreigner or me?
People do as they please, but put the blame were it belongs and admit you did it for personal profit when the consequences come.
If the market bears crazy sums then is it the individual landlord at fault, or is the market itself for being broken, as in the supply of housing is too low "thanks" to government building regulations and the demand too high thanks again to government opening the flood gates on immigration?
A couple of landlords here and there like you, charging below market rates, is not enough to fix the broken market created by the poorly though out government policies because you're not changing the supply/demand numbers.
So again, is it the landlords at fault for the broken market, or is their pricing simply just a reaction to the broken market itself? /Rethorical question
Here's a thought exercise: if there's 10 apartments available on the private market and 15 people wanting to move in due to the influx of immigrants, how do you decide who gets to move in and who gets left out if not by purchasing power?
How do you decide to fairly split a limited resource like housing without going full communist and have the state own everything and the state decide who gets what?
Here's the hard truth: If you're the government and you open the immigration floodgates then you'd better have buikt enough free housing available, or the immediate market reaction is gonna be increased rents for everyone. Simple.
What you want is social housing, laxer building regulations, and tighter immigration regulations based on available housing.
Yes, we all know that. It doesn't mean that they have to, and it doesn't mean somebody else is to blame for the consequences when they do that. Whatever bad incentives the government provides, every person is responsible and is to blame for their business decisions.
> Here's a thought exercise: if there's 10 apartments available on the private market and 15 people wanting to move in due to the influx of immigrants, how do you decide who gets to move in and who gets left out if not by purchasing power?
If you want to preserve the community, you give priority to people from the community and deny the immigrants. If you expel community members to make room for the immigrants, that is your fault and nobody else's. It's not the immigrant's fault, it is not the government's fault.
Human existence is not binary communist/capitalist. Only full blown communists and capitalists think like that.
> What you want is social housing
No, I don't want that. So if the rent is too expensive for poor people to afford because land lords are hogging real estate, then I have to pay that expensive rent for me and on top of that pay taxes for other people's housing through the government. That is nothing but injustice.
If everybody thinks that government regulation is the only way to stop people from abusing each other to the limit, instead of asking for personal responsibility, then don't be surprised when people do something stupid like vote in communists. What other options do you give them, if the answer to their woes is always a variant of "tough luck, get fucked"? Yes, for business and yes for career, those fields should be competitive. But no if decent and hard working people can not afford to live in their own place.
Yes, if I really wanted more money, and am willing to make it at the expense of society, I could jack up the price until demand meets existing supply. But again, that is my decision, not the decision of some abstract concept named "demand".
If I really want the widged but really can't stand in line for long enough, is it okay to hire someone to wait in line for me? How about a programmer to make a bot to constantly refresh your website so that I don't have to? Two bots?
Or maybe some economic analogue of all that.
Anyways, the allocation is a matter secondary to the price: the point is that I can find a buyer for the lower price, and there will always be prospective buyers who think any allocation scheme is unfair, especially when they're crushed beneath the matching Ugg boots of Jan and Pat, the couples doubles doomslayers.
Or you can sell to the highest bidder, maybe a foreign investor.
I personally find bread lines and black markets to buy basic necessities to be bad for society.
edit: By increasing prices you get capital with which to increase production to make even more money at closer to the original price point (due to selling more units). This in turns means that everyone can get a widget and not just a few people (lucky or well connected). It also means the money goes to the person able to increase production or make better widgets versus a pure scalper who resells the item (legally or on the black market).
You can sell some of these exclusive widgets for $4 instead of $1 but getting leads would cost you these $3.
I also see how it should destroy one's chances to rent any property if they deviate even slightly from the ideal tenant. A mixed ethnic family? Reject. Small child? Reject. Small business owner? Reject!
I think one reason for this is that the Soviet Union started infiltrating Western institutions about a century ago.
This extremely long-ranged strategy is still churning out results, even after they went belly-up. It's the kind of phenomenon that sustains itself - what conservative would ever consider becoming an academic in this environment?
And from there it spreads downward. It's also very helpful that the social "sciences" don't have a direct feedback loop to reality, so it's possible for large numbers of them to have completely kooky ideas for decades on end.
https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=100...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/jul/01/schools.uk
Very good point that it’s likely still the tailwinds from Soviet propaganda and covert tactics to influence western culture.
The reason for this being, UK has quite stable political system for centuries, so even if it gets part of its own venom, that would not be nearly as destructive.
The USSR did surely assist in that, but it was too ham-fisted to serioulsy influence developed countries.
# If that sounds hard to believe, remember who paid Marx to publish Capital, hosted International Worker's Association and who published Communist Manifesto (and in what language).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_A...
For example real estate and migration are things that have existed for millennia before capitalism or socialism, and have been dealt with in a lot of different ways.
This is your comment from above. In order to make such a comment you are by definition either a collectivist or socialist. It reflects some fundamental illiteracy in the basics of economics and markets, because you suggest that a virtue would be for sellers or landlords to accept lower prices or rents than the market clearing price. That’s nonsensical frankly. It’s like suggesting asset owners are evil unless they hand out their assets as charity or donation or perhaps you will next suggest they should be obligated to, which is by definition redistribution and socialism.
I’m curious what education you do have and where you received it? You are here on HN and while I haven’t looked through your account history, I’m guessing you will somehow be technically very literate yet somehow have a mental framework for human economy and society that consists of some of the most failed and falsifiable concepts conceivable. Which country and/or state failed so deeply in providing a background in the economic components of our shared reality? there are many such as yourself and it’s incredible dangerous to civilized societies as when such wild failed and empirically flawed concepts are translated into policies via politics it brings incredible devastation, poverty, and suffering.
We need to start with reform of education systems. Almost as bad as not teaching evolution or perhaps even history of the holocaust.
Multiple other comments are genuinely curious how individuals like yourself hold such bizarre views around markets but yet are likely technically very skilled. It’s a curious phenomenon.
I don’t have any issue in real life and don’t have any “stalker tendencies”, people check other accounts posts and histories commonly and it’s expected. I was saying I haven’t.
I’m both a landlord and buyer and seller of real estate. Let’s say I follow your recommendation of selling or leasing below the market price, then I would have multiple buyers or tenants to chose from. What would you recommend my selection criteria between them be?
It's a human behavior which could theoretically be changed but wont be because it's irrational and unique to one person's perverse interests that none of the rational actors understand. Or maybe we could get the government to enforce this person's interests on everyone.