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Shortage of labor, high cost of labor and red tape are all consequences rather than causes. The cause is cultural. Property is the asset in much of the world and the value of property depends on limited supply. There's a disincentive to build more property, especially if you are a politician courting property owning voters.

In the U.K. people are indoctrinated from birth to believe that you work hard to save your money to buy a house and the value goes up so that you can retire with a valuable asset. Flooding the country with new property would completely upend that foundational part of U.K. culture.

If the governments of European countries wanted more property to be built, they could make it happen. The problem is, there is no appetite, they're walking a very fine line: more property must be built but property values cannot go down.

China is an extreme example (and has quality issues) but they have been building more than 10 million new homes per year for a long time, and now have tens of million of vacant homes that nobody wants to buy. That's a nightmare outcome for most Europeans who plan to retire on the value of their home.

The U.S. is fairly unique among western economies in that investing in the stock market has been a normal part of wealth building for the hoi polloi and while homes are important assets, they're not everything. In Europe, investing in the stock market is still novel, property is still the asset.

While it’s a different country my experience in Ireland and the Netherlands has been that there’s this bizarre contempt for builders. Like “I build homes and sell them to people for money” basically makes you satan incarnate. So housebuilding is bogged down in x% social, y% “affordable” (because apparently the goal of making all housing affordable by actually building enough is unthinkable) and very little gets built .

In Amsterdam the Green Party is celebrating making homes more affordable to buy…. By kicking out the people who were renting them. And they continue to say only 20% of developments can be market rate, aka for everyone. When you’re new to the city because you just got a job at booking.com or whatever you only can hope to get a flat in that 20% - the rest isn’t for the likes of you!

https://youtu.be/t05cFv02pzY

Both of you are really just beating around the bush of this whole issue in basically the same way as the very people you are complaining about, albeit at a different position. You both have a very elitist mentality towards this issue, i.e., “those peasants should move out of the way for superior people like me”, when what you are both describing is ironically failure of the privileged and powerful to understand what is causing the problems, conflicts, and tension; their own behaviors, actions, and mentalities.

Maybe the indigenous population you have contempt for wanting to preserve their communities and cultures don’t want your colonialist mindset of “those savages are not utilizing the land as I wish, so we can just overrule, overrun, and take it from them. How dare they not avert their eyes, for I have a job at booking.com or I go to UT/work at Oracle/Tesla.

It’s funny how you types never suggest that newcomers, i.e., colonizers, pay a high price for their colonization and that go to the indigenous, even if just to compensate them for the imposition and abuse. You always seem to insist on wanting to kick the indigenous from atop your high horse and demand they make way to your superiority as you abuse and exploit them. You’re not any different than any other past form of this colonist mentality, you want to steal from and abuse the indigenous.

I think it's funny how you think I would be "colonizing" the same neighborhood I literally grew up in.

I grew up in Austin. A bunch of people had kids there in the 1970's and 80's. More than where there before. So even if literally nobody had moved to Austin, there would still be a housing crisis without letting people build new housing.

Unsurprisingly, literally just letting the market respond to demand makes things more affordable for everyone. Yea, some people I don't like might move to Austin. They're probably not all bad. That's what multiculturalism is about.

Ah yes, the well-known "indigenous population" of the Netherlands, one of the highest-GDP places in the world at present and of course a country with its own actual colonialist past. Do you really think these "indigenous" noble savages can't afford to pay for their own rents on a market-rate basis? They're keeping outsiders away (unless they pay outsized luxury prices, of course) out of pure unchecked privilege, not for any kind of high-minded culture preservation.

Yes, we need to stop Amsterdam from being colonised by people from Groningen, I guess? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.

The Netherlands is a different kind of environment because there is a calculated policy of not doing anything that could reduce home values. This trickles through all policies for any action that could meaningfully solve the housing crisis.

Well it’s basically illegal to save money so it’s no wonder people use their house as an investment

Illegal?

I exaggerate but the tax structure is such that it encourages using your home as an investment vehicle. We'll see where things go with it but proposed changes to box 3 rules taxing unrealized gains may effectively destroy the possibility of saving any money in something that isn't your primary residence or a pension...

> (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape

Does the red tape also stop the Syrian refugees from working in construction? It's a genuine question and I am not trying to be disingenuous.

The last time I was in Germany, I aw several constructions projects in Cologne and Frankfurt. However, I rarely noticed any non-white construction workers. This was quite unusual for a Texan like me because Mexican laborers drive all the construction in Texas if not most of the US.

>But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines.

There are 9 billion people in the world, roughly half of them are perfectly capable of doing manual labor.

There is plenty of skilled labor, and the cost is frankly not that high, you just need to let them work.

Can we be serious here? There is one and only one cause of "high housing prices" and that is a political choice to make housing expensive.

Don't tell people what they can or can't do with their property.

Don't prevent people from being brought in to build stuff.

Do these 2 things and housing will be built if the price is truly high. Anything else is bullshit.

High cost of labour is positive.

Like most other things, labor is highly regulated in Germany. You've got to understand that (from my experience as an outsider) it seems to be a country where it matters more what you are on paper (e.g., degrees, certifications, etc) than what you can actually do (e.g., practical experience). Not that the latter is not valued at all, but on the job market, it's often not sufficient.

Labor costs are determined by a lot of regulations - minimal wage, mandatory health insurance fees, mandatory pensions fees, etc. make labor costs in Germany much higher than the average in the West. So, it's all not that easy.

It is that easy.

Those regulations are choices. You can make different choices. You can make them tomorrow.

I'm sorry but i cannot take seriously any problem that essentially boils down to "We want it to be like this".

>Don't prevent people from being brought in to build stuff.

If housing is about supply and demand, surely the demand part matters too.