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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

You are in IT earning only 20K EUR per year? That is unbelievable! Why is the housing crisis happening? What changed? Did you have a population boom?

    > Not to mention all the "expats" and "digital nomads" that are willing to pay whatever the landlord says because they really really want to live here without thinking about the consequences, but that's another story.

Hmmm. Do you have any stats on this matter? It seems easy to lash out against this group because they are outsiders. The "expats" will pay tax, and plenty of it, because they are higher income. "Digital nomads" are another issue -- I am not a big fan because they usually pay no income, nor residence, tax.

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It is a pretty normal salary here in Spain. The housing crisis is happening because of several factors, but mostly because there's a huge increase in demand due to immigration (millions of people coming) from all profiles (richer and poorer) so we're getting squeezed hard.

The regulations around housing are so bad that almost nothing is getting built. What's getting built is for wealthy people, and no public housing in sight.

And yes, of course rich foreigners play a role here. You maybe don't like to hear it because you're likely richer than the average spaniard, but they are plenty, and we can see what they do once they arrive here.

This is no second-hand information. Because the housing situation is so bad they go on sprees trying to convince landlords to rent to them by offering more money.

Also, getting out of cities is problematic because we can't save money nor have disposable income, so owning and maintaining a car is quite an effort, and that in a city where I don't need a "B" stick to enter the city, in other cities it's worse because you're only allowed a subset of cars which are more expensive. There aren't cheap cars anymore, even shitty Dacias are +20k and anything under 10k second hand is close to junk.

We're fucked honestly. I'm willing to move, but I don't know where...

I can suggest Romania. Depending on your IT skills, 2000 euro in IT is considered minimum and country is still very cheap to live in. There is a great shortage in IT there..

Climate also similar to Spain in sommer , you will get used to winters as well. Seaside and mountains are available.

Great suggestion. Plus, the language will be easy to learn for a native Spanish speaker.

Anecdote but I visited Barcelona just pre-Covid, one of my California friends met another California friend who had bought a condo for the bargain price of 500,000 for a vacation home (and they spent time and money to renovate it) right next to the most popular touristy section of town and only lived there about a month a year, and airbnb'ed it the rest of the time. There were already things on the news that I could follow about hostility to short term rentals to tourists in the city.

> Did you have a population boom?

Unchecked (or even encouraged) mass migration, yes.

> You are in IT earning only 20K EUR per year?

Do you realize most people working in IT are paid minimum wage or close to that? Most sysadmins and developers i've met here in France are under 2000€/month and it's only on places like HN that i read about huge salaries in IT. (sorry i don't have stats this is just anecdata)

Spain has exceptionally low wages in the IT sector though, taking cost of living into account and all.

Why don't people move to a place with higher wages? Spain a member of the EU.

And, why do people enter IT in Spain, if the wages are so terrible?

Where would you move, and how? Wages are not better in surrounding countries, unless you work in specific companies it's not easy to get in. You also need the opportunity. Most people living paycheck-to-paycheck have little time and mental space to radically change their situation...

The Spanish population in general ain't that good when it comes to English and the quality of living in Spain is, in general, quite good. Weather and food are hard to replace.

Which begs the question: "Well why don't they work remotely from Spain then?" and the answer to that is that the Spanish IT sector does a whole lot of that to begin with, so a business in the market for it can just hire one of the many consulting business there.

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