It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany.
I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even gives me the chance in the first place after they see my income and plans. Right now I am paying 940€ for ~20sqm, and only because my mom co-signed my contract - which is incredibly humiliating as a 24 year old guy.
And even with high-paying jobs it's impossible to get anything remotely affordable. My girlfriend just finished her degree and makes 75k straight out of college and still gets rejected either for her financial situation or because the rental contract is already set to increase 8% each year - which we simply cannot afford. And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.
How the hell are we ever supposed to build up some savings, settle down and have a comfortable life? It really feels like being born 15 years too late for this.
Germany paid a lot for our education but offers us little reason to stay. We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories.
I believe we are in a time where everyone is milking the 90s-20s real estate bubble and no one wants to be first to fold. Internationally, not just on a per country basis. As soon as say, French real estate collapses (or UK or USA or Germany etc), the whole rotten castle of cards will fold as well. If it doesn't you can enjoy the expensive property, but you won't be eating farmed foods, won't be in a clean environment and wont have nurses to look after you since no one can afford to be in any relative area and I mean just for shelter from the elements.
Why would it collapse? There’s insatiable demand for extreme limited property. Interest rate hikes may lower the price of property but the interest will rise proportionately.
Do people really think at sone point no one will want premium property and I’ll finally get it cheap? Of course that will never happen.
If it doesn't collapse, then society may collapse? Like the sibling comment mentioned, you can only push this too far, and I think it's pushed too far to be very alarming.
And housing is expensive by design and not by constraint. I'm staying in KL, a comparatively cheap place by Western standards. The housing market is crap here from a seller perspective as you have an over-supply of condos. That, despite the large amount of foreigners living here.
You can fix Western supply issue by allowing high-density condos nearby cities. Young people will prefer to live in these 20-sqm things (and have shared amenities/no car) than lose a significant percentage of their income to housing. Of course, some of the powers are holding on this because it'll affect their artificially made limited supply of houses.
> If it doesn't collapse, then society may collapse?
But there are plenty very cheap areas to buy houses or rent. Sure, many people don't want to live there, that's why it's cheap today. But it is a possibility nonetheless, one that is better than collapsing society.
I'm always honestly confused why today it is seen as impossible to move to a cheap area? People have been doing this for generations (centuries?). It's never the most fun solution, but it is a solution.
When I was in my 20s I wanted to live in Manhattan more than anything in the world. But I was never able to make it happen, it was too crazy expensive even back then. Eventually I gave up on that dream and moved to a place that was cheap and was able to buy a house no problem. It's no Manhattan, but it is home and has been a good place to live for decades now. In hindsight it was a great decision to move away and buy a home in a cheap area instead of banging my head against the impossible real estate market of NYC.
It's always an option to move to a cheaper ___location!
But there are plenty very cheap areas to buy houses or rent. Sure, many people don't want to live there, that's why it's cheap today. But it is a possibility nonetheless, one that is better than collapsing society.
I'm always honestly confused why today it is seen as impossible to move to a cheap area? People have been doing this for generations (centuries?). It's never the most fun solution, but it is a solution.
Jobs. Most people don't have the luxury of working fully remotely. Areas with cheap housing are overwhelmingly geographically isolated and economically depressed, which is why the housing is cheap - local residents simply can't afford to bid up the price of housing.
A lot of people would rather struggle to make rent than raise their kids in a community with high crime, bad schools, poor healthcare, limited prospects and a general atmosphere of despair.
What good is a job, if it doesn’t cover your expenses, doesn’t allow you to save any money, is located in an area where there is no affordable housing, and restricts you from doing normal, societal things like having children.
I don't know the US situation, but in my city in Europe, there is a factor 2 to 3 for flats in fashionable ___location compared to my ___location. I have the same traveling distance to the city center, but my ___location has less public transport options. Schools are ok, it's even better than in the fashionable district, and I have less criminality.
I've spoken to a few colleagues who just arrived in the city from another region, and they all went into the fashionable district without considering any other locations, because someone from that district told them any other district is bad.
The fact is that if you bought your flat in this fashionable district, it doubled in value over 7 years, whereas in my district, prices went up 50% at most.
For me it is the same as the stock market, people follow the trend and smart folk get out before it goes downhill.
> Jobs. Most people don't have the luxury of working fully remotely.
Then you commute. Yes, sacrifices are required but it's not the end of the world (or collapse of society, as GP put it). When I moved to a cheaper place over 20 years ago working remotely wasn't much of a thing so I had to drive 60-90 minutes (occasionally 2 hours). It wasn't great but it was a pragmatic solution that allowed me to have a nice place to live and leftover money to save.
> A lot of people would rather struggle to make rent than raise their kids in a community with high crime, bad schools, poor healthcare, limited prospects and a general atmosphere of despair.
There is a very wide gray area of reasonable places with reasonable prices between the extremes of San Franciso/Manhattan vs. economically depressed areas with "a general atmosphere of despair".
> It's always an option to move to a cheaper ___location!
If you’ve got no savings and are trapped in debt, how do you suggest people do this? How are these people managed to scrape together the deposit and moving costs? The people who would need to do this the most are locked out of it. If you don’t have family members to stay with, what you end up with is skyrocketing homeless numbers which seems to be what is happening in California.
Sell all your furniture and all but irreplaceable and critical belongings, possibly including selling any cars you may have. Use a few thousand dollars of that money for airfare or gas money and move yourself and minimal belongings to a new ___location. Stay in a long-term-stay hotel (<$100/day) for a week or two until you can get the cheapest apartment you can find. Slowly repurchase essentials as needed. Done.
> Sell all your furniture and all but irreplaceable and critical belongings, possibly including selling any cars you may have. Use a few thousand dollars of that money for airfare or gas money and move yourself and minimal belongings to a new ___location.
We’re talking about the poorest people in society here so let’s assume they don’t have a car. And they’re probably not taking a flight anywhere, they’re most likely taking a greyhound bus if we’re running this thought experiment in America. How many thousands of dollars do you think they have in furniture? Do you really think it is going to get that person out of any existing debts they have, and then leave them with multiple thousands of dollars to spare? Because if you’ve got $1500 dollars and the hotel room costs $75 a night, you’ve got 20 days to find this cheap apartment and find a job in this city where you know no one before you’re homeless. In reality, you have less time because you’ve got food and transport costs on top of that. Oh and now you’re probably not getting any benefits because you’re in a different town and probably have to go through the system again.
Do you really think this is a good way for someone to turn their life around or do you think that the desperation of their situation means it is far more likely they are going to get exploited by both landlords, employers and possibly criminals in this new town, made all the worse by the fact that they don’t have any contacts and zero support network?
I started looking for houses in 2005-2006. The outlook sounded similar, constant prices going up and missing out. House flipping was booming and I was priced out of all the desirable areas. What I did was start near where I work and move down the line farther out getting to less desirable towns. 2008 hit and at that point mortgages dried up. I finally got a house in 2009, in an area where schools were not as good and was not as desirable and prices fell for the next few years where I felt like I over paid. With all the money I put in , being a fixer upper too, I just assumed if I sold I’d simple take a loss and move on with my life. Now, a decade plus later the area has moved from less desirable to decent. In the end it worked out. Once again today though the same areas I couldn’t afford are still the desirable area. People want the cute down time I was priced out of 15 years ago. There are still towns that are more affordable.
> And you stroll into whatever town/city/village with your income that barely meets the cost of living in NYC/SF/LA and destroy that housing market.
There's a lot of truth in that.
The ubiquity of remote work has made this much worse. It used to be that one could move to a cheaper area (as I did) but it still had to be within orbiting distance of a source of income.
Remote work broke that constraint which is causing a lot of disruption in very remote areas.
Also the other obvious answer that people have been doing for centuries is multi-generational households.
It's not the end of the world to live with your parents (or your partner's).
I think we could see a lot of pressure towards that as Western total fertility rate continues to decrease and larger population groups (Millennials) age with fewer or no children to help out.
Even a shift towards non-relatives households wouldn't be the end of society, it would just be change (and require some zoning/code changes).
> Also nothing signals undateable more than "I l[i]ve with my parents".
This is cultural though. In the US that certainly seems very true. In other places (such as where I'm from), living at home with parents until marriage is the normal default.
Cultural...and economic. I guess in places where there are arranged marriages, or living together is shunned upon, this is true. However as far as I can tell generation z is complaining about the economic situation that disables them from moving out. So it's definitely not cultural there.
Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the world. I would guess most ppl are not really aspiring for that. I would guess that the problem for a lot of people is to continue being able to live in their medium sized city where they have all their friends, family and life.
Around here in the North East of UK you can easily buy a house for around £100k. It won't be amazing or anything, but with banks offering 5% deposit mortgages pretty much anyone can save up for it and get on the property ladder. Of course the situation down south is completely different and the closer you get to London the more impossible it gets to ever buy your house.
For comparison that’s about 5 times minimum wage at 35 hours a week. You’d struggle to get a mortgage on your own without a £20k deposit but as a couple certainly no problem, and many entry jobs in supermarkets etc pay more than minimum wage.
You can buy flats in beautiful, historic city centre in Bytom, Poland for $500 per square meter. There are even well-paying coding jobs in the area (within 30 minutes by car or public transport).
> Could you point me to these plenty cheap areas? I work remotely and may consider moving there.
They are all over. Head over to zillow/redfin (or the corresponding real estate site for your region) to see them. They won't be in the hip city center everyone wants, but choices are plentiful if one is willing to sacrifice a few wishlist items.
"Cheap" is of course relative the the region/country so actual numbers will vary. I'm in California so I can give a California-centric answer.
Browsing zillow I see over 30 condo (and a few house) units for less than 200K in the Sacramento areas (not exactly the boonies, it's the state capital).
In the Fresno area I see around 60 units (many houses) under 200K. Some friends moved to Fresno and they have a very nice place, for pennies on the dollar compared to San Francisco.
For those who don't want a big city, head north of Sacramento towards Oregon and tons of choices to work remote and buy a place cheap.
Mind you, I set the search limit to <200K, but that's extremely cheap by California standards. Even 25 years ago 200K was a cheap house in California. If you increase the search criteria to a more reasonable 300-400K there are way more choices and areas.
Plenty of cheap areas, in many countries. Just have to give up things like jobs and services(both public and private). But they do exist. And aren't desirable for exactly those reasons.
In Sweden if you move from Stockholm to Eskilstuna (1h30m drive away) you can find a 5 room 100 sqm apartment in the dead center of the town for the price of a 2 room 45-50 sqm apartment in any of the immediate suburbs of Stockholm.
Or, to put it simply, move out of the big city, and the prices drop by a factor of two or more.
That's true in Germany as well, but to get cheap property, you have to go very far from the city, and Germany not being that huge, you'll be close to the next metro area by then.
Like, sure, a 120sqm house might be 400k in Hamburg and only 230k 60 minutes out to the north west (both needing an additional 25-50% of price in renovation costs), but the average net income is 30k/year and you're expected to have at least 20% in cash.
You can get very cheap houses in Saxony or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but there will be little to no infrastructure (like, the next gynaecologist might be a 60 minute car trip away), your neighbors will be down on their luck, unemployed and voting far right, and you'll essentially need to rebuild the house - and you'll need to do much of it yourself because the tradesmen work on construction sites in the big cities and rarely take local jobs.
We've been living in Berlin for the last 10 year and the prices are making me consider looking outside the city (no other big cities that near Berlin, so there isn't that challenge you speak of).
My main issue would be being more socially isolated as all of our local friends are in Berlin, kids having to adapt to new school/kindergarten (& find new friends), new work for my wife who doesn't work remote (but can find work relatively easily)...It's not impossible but it really sucks that we'd have to leave the city if we want a slightly bigger home (we've 2 kids who share a room & our apartment is in general feeling a bit small for a family of 4).
Without a large windfall I don't think we'll ever be able to afford buying a 3+ bedroom (4+ rooms as Germans count it) home in Berlin & rent would be high enough that no landlord will want us with our current income.
Yeah, doing it with kids is extra hard. I have friends in Berlin who moved to Prenzlauer Berg in like 2005 and got a great deal. At some point, with kids that apartment just didn't cut it any more, but they can't move too far for the reasons you mention, so they looked long and hard and accepted paying quite a bit more and moving to the other side of the Ring in Pankow. Not as nice, but close enough to keep the kids in the same schools.
I had hoped that remote work would relieve some of that pressure, but maybe it'll take a generation because many couples can't move anywhere because only one of them can work remotely, or because they don't want to uproot their kids. Not to mention that you'll still need a solid internet connection to work remotely, and that's still hit and miss if you go more rural. And if nobody wants to move to Saxony, the empty villages there don't really do anything on the supply side.
I have many friends in Brandenburg (the state, not the city) and internet speeds tend to actually be great out there from what Ive heard (still in the towns/cities not literally in the middle of nowhere, but there are loads of small to mid sized towns). In fact I believe it may be better than in Berlin!
I wonder if it was because it was easier to upgrade/replace the East German infrastructure & as such it's relatively new/good? Sorta like how nice a lot of the highway network in Poland is, because it was mostly only built in the last couple decades.
BTW Pankow is considered a very nice and desirable (and expensive) part of Berlin to raise a family in :)
I guess Pankow is also pretty large. The parts I stayed at had mostly wide streets with lots of traffic, but it includes Prenzlauer Berg and goes all the way to the north, so it'll have plenty of different places. And gentrification likely changes it as well.
You're right about small towns, they're probably a good compromise before looking at villages, but it is a very different life style, so probably not for everyone that currently lives in Berlin or Hamburg by choice. I'm curious how it will develop, and I feel fortunate that my personal preferences align with what's cheaper. I feel for those who desire the hustle and bustle of the inner city.
I like to browse the real estate market just for fun sometimes and actually yes there are cheap areas in every country. Some are cheap due to remoteness, due to inventory or mismanagement/decline. Like in mentioned in another comment, (south) Spain has incredibly cheap properties because there are many available and mortgages are available to even non-residents (not necessarily _in_ cities, but within a 30 min radius from population centers). Generally speaking 15 minutes inland from the sea is cheap everywhere (apart from luxury pockets like Marbella), you can easily buy a nice mediterranean villa for less than 200k. If you want views that's around 250-300k.
More generally, cheap areas often means economic underdevelopment or decline, which leads to social problems and annoying neighbors (on account of drinking, unemployment and other issues). On the plus side, there's less traffic, because people aren't as busy going to places to make and spend money as they are in economically vibrant areas.
It also means that there’s less money available for infrastructure maintenance. While a city is expanding, the majority of the housing is occupied, and the infrastructure to support new housing doesn’t yet require replacement. As a city contracts, there are more unoccupied houses and vacant lots. There’s still the same length of water, sewage, and power lines along the length of a street, but fewer residents to pay for it as it becomes old enough to need repairs/replacement.
That's not really a factor here as most of the housing stock is made up of holiday homes so you only have neighbors for like 2 weeks in a year.
But with remote work many more are making it their homes so it might be a problem in the future.
If you're in the USA, the Rio Grande Valley is pretty cheap. Because it's next to Mexico, there's huge amounts of Latino culture & influence.
If you want to be somewhere that feels on the up & up and has cool stuff, Brownsville has a decent amount of engineers for SpaceX and you can go watch launches from a public beach if you get there early enough.
That you have more shops than one. More restaurants than one. Theaters. Clubs. Sports. Connectivity. Places and activities for kids. Places for hobbies. Concerts. Other various activities and events.
There are significantly more of each in a big citu.
> That you have more shops than one. More restaurants than one. Theaters. Clubs. Sports. Connectivity. Places and activities for kids. Places for hobbies. Concerts. Other various activities and events.
Then open a shop, start a restaurant, start a theatre group, gather some kids for sports, organize some concerts, and become an active member of your community, instead of expecting it to be handed to you on a platter.
Maybe you missed the whole discussion which was stemmed from complaints about big cities and the frustration many people are finding with being able to save any money, purchase or rent a suitable home, live in a safe neighborhood, avoid long commutes, or raise a family.
Life is more than just buying lots of stuff and experiences from other people in big cities. Giving back to your community and allowing them to enjoy your talents should enter the equation too. Don’t always be a taker.
Bigger cities are the same. Politically they are very homogeneous. If you want want you kids to be near variety of perspectives, you should move to a smaller city or near one.
My conclusion comes from statistics and logic. In smaller cities the population is a mix a between daily rural migrants, factory workers and office/service workers. In big cities the population is mostly office/service workers.
>>Maybe I'm just tired of being around people who feel the existence of cities is a personal affront.
It's a bit ironic mentioning that here, because there is a pro urbanization (anti rural, anti suburbs) article on the front page of HN almost every week. And every dominant media in the country promotes the same narrative.
> If it doesn't collapse, then society may collapse? Like the sibling comment mentioned, you can only push this too far, and I think it's pushed too far to be very alarming.
First off, what are they going to do? It’s the same in most big cities(1 million+). Second, those working remotely can always move from Munich to Leipzig (where OP can rent 3bd for the price of his Munich studio). I don’t see society collapse happening. Just need a bit of population redistribution.
A lot of service industry people can't afford a long commute. So even if the property is cheap X hours out, they still can't afford to live there.
And that's how you get what you're seeing in many cities - uninhabited property deserts where the houses/apts are nominally inflating in value, but most people can't afford to live there. And those can afford it don't want to because there's no one around to keep the lights on for them.
Portugal is threatening to repossess empty properties through compulsory purchase. That's drastic and not very popular - especially with property speculators - but govs are going to be faced with a choice between that kind of drastic action and cities which gradually empty of people.
It’s compulsory renting, not selling/purchase. Either way it’s yet another ridiculous move from the left ( in this case ) that doesn’t solve anything and it’s feasible only in the minds who never had a real job outside politics.
> Young people will prefer to live in these 20-sqm things (and have shared amenities/no car) than lose a significant percentage of their income to housing. Of course, some of the powers are holding on this because it'll affect their artificially made limited supply of houses.
The people most vocally opposed to these buildings (which I support) in the United States are liberals/progressives who say those types of living situations are unacceptable, and hold out for the magic beans of large apartments/houses at well-below market prices. Unsurprisingly, this only makes prices go up.
An answer could be land trusts. A land trust that is sufficiently capitalized would be a capital partner to help buyers buy at current market rates. When these new buyers sell, the land trust stipulates the price they can sell at. We have these to a limited extent in New England, and they may exist elsewhere. The problem is, at this point, only a currency producing entity like the Fed would seem to have the wherewithal to capitalize such an endeavor at a scale needed to substantially change things.
You can twist the supply demand imbalance only so much. Go farther than required for longer than required, and some cracks will eventually show up. Like they did for Silicon Valley bank.
So it is hard to say when those cracks appear since the global market is quite a big market and can sustain imbalances for a long time, but then the bigger the bubble the bigger the crash.
Foreigner limits, tax on no. Residents, start of uncontrolled construction - these are only some ways I can think it may break and my ideas are based only on reading the internet, you never know what dynamics come and break the housing. Or they break the world or its money supply.
Not trying to fear monger just saying the dance will end.
I think the difference here is fundamentally there is insufficient supply for the demand of housing globally, or at least US, UK and EU. The previous generation made new builds extremely difficult or impossible in many jurisdictions.
Well, EU isn't just one place. In Poland for instance building is very deregulated with very few cities having any kind of zones - basically if you can buy some land(and land is cheap) then you can build your own house. My own grandma built a house for herself to live in just before the pandemic - 120sqm of space, 2 beds 2 baths, with really large garden and construction+land+permits cost her a total of about $80k USD.
A friend of mine just got married, they bought a piece of land from the local council for about $20k USD and are looking at buying some house plans to start building this year.
From an outside perspective that seems to be a problem in many other countries - either the lack of land to build on(I can believe that in the UK but maybe not so much in US), or insane zoning laws that just straight up prohibit you from building something.
> But there's abandoned medieval villages (no plumbing or electricity so far...) in hilly rural Italy.
there's small towns with fine electricity and plumbing in rural Italy but they are de-populating anyway, cause most people want to live in/nearby cities as that is where money and opportunity generally is.
The same everywhere I think (bar few cases like the Netherlands which are basically a single sprawl).
Hungary just published their most recent census, and all of the country has depopulated in the last ten years except for Budapest.
The big hope is that the trend will reverse with more remote-ization, but it's, well, a hope.
zoning would not matter to my commute length unless I moved every time I changed jobs and had no dogs or human partners. I have made 30 years of compromises because of partners and pets. I've stayed at shitty jobs because good ones were too far away and I could not move.
building near jobs is either building company towns or embedding classism and environmental injustice into property. would you live next door to a small nuke power plant because it was colocated with your office job? how about a refinery? a bsl3 lab? sewer treatment? or would you force those workers to live near their work and put them and all the dirty parts of civilization far away from the upper class clean places?
I live next to a coal power plant. It's a tradeoff between my ability to pay the rent for a single family home with a garden and living close to a large city in Germany that gives our family the chance of job and education variety.
If it was that, then some jurisdictions would be doing much better than others.
Unless the parent generations all decided to make new housing construction hard, all over the world. In which case it seems likely that whatever changes they made were for a good reason, if they could all agree on it.
Eventually death, disease, or divorce will force properties to sell. That will move market values down. Meanwhile, my buddy’s mobile home manufacturer is back to being able to output a home in weeks. Construction has already fallen off a cliff-which makes sense given that’s the easiest to spin up/down of the market.
The RE market is responding to the rates. Though, whether it’ll be enough is beyond my knowledge or possibly anyone else’s.
If not, it’s precisely this sort of situation where change seems impossible that people can find the will to insist upon change.
For renters, I suspect regulation and oversight would go a long way. It’s not going to create a NYC level inefficiency if gobbling up SFHs for rental properties is curtailed. (And I’ve heard of at least one story suggesting AirBnB rentals may be unable to rent at current prices/supply.) Nor would outlawing problematic practices create problems.
In the west, people largely have a say in their governments. People just need to show up to elections and primaries with the demand that government work for them.
When I went to Newark 20 years ago the road I was on looked like an abandoned waste land. Today the area has multi level family houses and looks more like a walkable area. Ascetically it looks much better - if it’s really a better place to live I don’t know. It’s likely it needed massive investor cash to rebuild so I’m honestly not surprised.
I went to college in Newark from 2006-2012. Essentially the beginning to the end of the Booker era. Yeah they make a big stink about the new developments and how Newark was "Revitalizing" itself.
Nonsense: It was a dump when I started and was still a dump when I left. The thing is you don't realize it until you have gone to a place that has not had Newark's issues. Only then do you realize how much further they have to go.
I have been wondering about that. I’m not entirely certain of the effects either. Being held by corporate investors should mean they would be divested in certain circumstances, though.
Residences owned by corporations funnel wealth away from the community into the hands of the corporation. Renters also tend not to establish as deep community roots as there's no investment in the house or the neighborhood and they may move.
While on the surface that isn't "bad", when this happens in lower income neighborhoods it siphons what little wealth that is there away.
Additionally, as there's no investment in the house (call up the landlord and have them fix it up... in a while), it also means that the properties in the area tend to decrease in quality and make the homes that are owned occupied less valuable over time... and the community there less cohesive.
All these things together make it harder for people (frequently minorities) living in those areas to improve their lives and that of their children (can't leave a house you rent to your children or grandchildren to help them get a firmer financial footing as they reach adulthood).
As people die, etc their high paying jobs will be granted to new people. Some of which I suspect are real estate Marxists that will quickly become real estate centrists or conservatives. If you look at the math it sort of looks like this:
There are certain places people want to live and this is mainly a 2D geometry, with certain cases of 3D to a limited extent. 3D will always have detractors since it doesn't fit, it kills light, there aren't services to support the density, etc. There's a never ending conveyor of excuses, some which are actually legit. You aren'r building Manhattan again in the West. So as we grow we are forced to grow outward more than upward, and as anyone who has done a 4th grade pizza problem knows how that goes. Geometry! Applying math skillz to "real life"! Who knew?!
Now secondly, lets look at economic and class structures. We like to say "the middle class is vanishing" and that's partially true. But the implied place all these former middle classes are going, the lower class, isn't quite right. Today, the upper middle class is the largest it has ever been. Around 30% of the population (assume the top 1-2% are the upper class). That's huge and these are the people that can actually afford the "nice places in nice places". They throw a bone to a black person or a teacher every now and then via "equitable affordable housing" - just enough to keep the polls working, but never more.
So what we have here is a lot of people who think because they went to college and have an unimportant role in a middling corporation that they deserve a DREAM HOME in a PREMIUM LOCATION. There ain't that many of those. Especially when you consider that 30% of people are really pretty well off due to income in certain cases and inheritance/genes in others. A good friend of mine makes a shit wage and owns a 2M home because RICH PARENTS bought the house. They're still rich even after that! You just ain't one of them. You need to do it the hard way and earn it, like I did.
There are winners and loser and most people feel like they're a winner, or at least did all the things that winners do. But it's a crowded trade today. Good luck.
In Japan, there are empty houses going cheap as old people die off. In a few decades, possibly there will be some effect as the de-population bomb from lowered birthrates globally begin to affect real estate prices. Let's hope.
1) Very insulated culture with nearly no immigration coupled with low birth rates.
2) They build houses very differently. They aren't generally made to last centuries if taken care of and renovated. The strategy is to build small units cheaply and tare down after 2- years. It's like Ikea for homes.
3) I agree, depopulation is a problem. We really need to incentivize middle and upper middle class people to have large families.
> 3) I agree, depopulation is a problem. We really need to incentivize middle and upper middle class people to have large families.
No, what we need to do is figure out how to run our economies without pyramid-scheme population growth. Human societies have managed to do this sort of thing for centuries, before the industrial revolution, and then the green revolution ballooned our population.
Surely, we can turn some of those productivity gains that technology has given us over the decades to solve the problem of a slightly smaller than-what-we're-used-to wage-worker-to-non-wage-worker ratio.
It's completely possible, but it may require the capital owners to take a haircut.
The first thing we need to do, in my opinion, is tackle inflation by getting government out of the picture. I think inflation is the root cause of a large chunk of what we don't like and complain about with capitalism.
I have yet to get a valid reason as to why inflation is an inherent and necessary property without circular reasoning. The market will always reach some equilibrium, even with a fixed money supply.
External incentives to have larger families don't work.
Hungary tried giving approx. 30k EUR (a very large sum, locally) to every family who have 3 kids plus other significant tax incentives like 0% income tax rate for life for mums of 3, and afaik these programmes are still on but looking at birth rates it resulted in a 0.8% blip and is still in a sharp downtrend.
item 3 is solving the wrong problem. people will have babies when they have space and feel like they can give their kids a better future. trying to move people into dense urban living it the opposite of space needed for kids. right now, we cannot give kids a better future in the current billionaire run world.
we need to depopulate the billionaires and with the freed up wealth, fix the environmental problems so we have a chance at a future.
as a rule, billionaires don't create wealth. They play games with power, accumulating wealth locked up in financial engineering systems that produce more wealth by taking money out of the hand of real wealth producers. The people that create wealth are inventors, scientists, engineers and laborers that create, figure out how to make and move the product out the door. capitol is needed to produce goods but is not the only recipient of the results of work.
"Having space and feeling like they can give them a better future" is about 1 thing.
Money
If you eliminated any of income taxes, or a combination of SS + reducing deficit spending (inflation), or the % of income going to heakthcare by eliminating its employee and employee subsidies (Medicares), there would be a populatiom boom.
All you need to do is free people from having to make money, to meet basic needs. And people Will have children again.
Instead, we have a social policy that everyone just needs to work in order to pay for the sins (and pleasure) of their previous generation.
Yes. Those Caribbean cruises , FL homes & racetrack bets, are paid by the empty silence of hospital newborn wards across the country.
> All you need to do is free people from having to make money, to meet basic needs. And people Will have children again.
This meme needs to die. People in poorer countries have more children than people in rich countries. Within countries poorer communities have more children than richer ones. There might be some exceptions but this broadly holds true across the world.
the opportunity cost of a parent in the 3rd world is negligible. income is very low as it is. theres not.much to do to make $$.
therefore, the benefit of parenting is MUCH higher, and the cost of raising a kid itself is low to zero , and in some cases positive (kids work on fielda or take care of siblings, therefore ROI is positive).
contrasts this with USA, where the opportunity cost of a developer to raise a kid is in the 200k level. ok so now what about alternatives for parenting?
well everything is regulated (daycare, schooling , extracurriculars), or hyperinflates (real estate), and every activity carriea an institutionalized bloat of an effective ponzi...to the benefit of the prior generation seniors in every activity.
So now what do you do? If raising kids is negative ROI and doing it yourself has a huge opportunity cost?
Is it a coincidence that wealthy families in wealthy contries like in Singapore, have more kids on average?
I think we need to change the income tax code to massively incentivize people to get married and have kids. I’d support increasing the tax rate pretty massively and then introducing a tax deduction of like $20k per kid.
For instance a couple with 3 kids and a home would have around $70k-$100k in deductions (60k kids, 10k-40k in state/local taxes etc). If they had an income of $120k it would be adjusted to like $30k and they’d pay essentially no taxes.
It’s a deduction and not a credit specifically so people that the state isn’t incentivizing clients of the state to have kids.
Hungary tried exactly that (basically 55-60k EUR/USD free to each couple that said they want 3 kids plus 0% income tax for life for mums) but it didn't work. It was a 0.8% blip but that's it.
Maybe it would be different in the US because in europe healthcare and education is already "free".
Since you believe that human reproduction is a de-facto property of the state, simply calculate how many women should have babies, for optimal society, and force them to?
No need to muck around with some tax incentives. Redistribute the true source "commodity".
As a bonus, if you're high up enough, you might even get to choose who mates with whom.
There might be a pretty huge gap between incentivizing responsible people to create families and own property (these are very good things for a country and society) and forcing women to reproduce and with whomever the government assigns to them.
What I mean by that is using a deduction, not a credit. You aren’t paying people to have kids but rather incentivizing people that are financially independent by lowering their current tax burden while they have kids <18. Their surplus of kids will more than make up the tax revenue down the road.
For poor people you continue to focus on helping with basics (food and shelter), family planning measures, and up-skilling towards becoming independent. Since a deduction probably isn’t helpful in these cases, a tax credit would continue to exist.
It's not implausible that changes in technology and life/work habits will ultimately make currently highly-attractive areas less so. And once population starts to fall in combination with minimal wage growth it's hard to see what would sustain current high prices.
Ultimately it seems the primary driver behind property prices is the willingness of buyers to take on debt and for banks to issue it. If house prices did start to plateau/drop off over a sustained period with no obvious indicators of future growth then that willingness (particularly on behalf of banks) may well drop off pretty quickly too.
Why would it collapse?
Nobody is able to afford to buy/live in your property anymore.
If you don‘t find buyers/renters how will you manage to pay off your investment credit you took out at 95%credit rate while only covering contract signing fees at ~1% interest with 10year stable interest.
Once interest is adjusted after 10years to 4-5% you (property owner that can’t find any high paying renters) are fucked
In the USA your interest rate is fixed for the term of the mortgage. There are exceptions but they are comparably extremely rare.
I think you have a good point though regarding places that reset interest every n-years. People will struggle to make payments. It will be interesting to see what happens in places like Canada. I’m guessing millions more people on the governments teet. I assume the current admin wound love that.
I don’t know about your country. But in mine prices of property has not followed population growth, increased income or really anything that would make this growth sustainable. It has been a product of central banks setting way too low interest rates (and to a part lacking regulations).
Interest rates don’t really matter as much as you might think. Yes as rates go down the price a house sells for goes up. But the monthly payment stats the same as that’s how people buy houses. They figure out what they can spend easy month in principal, interest, and taxes and then shop and bid in the places they want to live, which almost always aligns with how much they can spend.
Rising interest rates are good for cash buyers and banks.
Are actually rising rates good for banks? Didn't SVB fail due to rising rates? And the other banks might also have issues. They got deposits. They lend out money, but they locked the loans to certain rate. Now the depositors can get better offers from elsewhere, but they can't always renegotiate the old rates. Thus they end up with possibly losing the deposits.
> Do people really think at sone point no one will want premium property and I’ll finally get it cheap? Of course that will never happen.
Well, the economic landscape can change drastically. Compared to other assets real estate has quite some costs. With all the environmental regulations, for example, the EU is planning, real estate might be much less lucrative. For individual landlords, it might be even impossible as they don’t have any money for investment.
I’m not dismissing your point. Just adding some balance.
> everyone is milking the 90s-20s real estate bubble
Look at the market statistics. It's not a bubble at all. Demand is legitimately very high and supply is very low (just look at the very low vacancy statistics).
We have banned the construction of most new housing and this is the natural result.
Real estate prices are not being artificially elevated, they are a simple function of supply and demand. Just build more houses and prices will do down, and they'll go down slowly, without collapsing.
The typical model works like this: The suburbs around a city grow, the city runs out of space. This causes land in the suburbs to become expensive, so they subdivide lots and build more houses. The suburbs now become the city.
And people move to the edge of the city and create new suburbs, and the city grows.
Of course if you read the propaganda suburbs are evil, but in the real world, they are simply a place where the city will eventually grow to.
Maybe that's the problem? People are actually buying in to the propaganda and not building suburbs, and this breaks the entire model?
No, the problem is that suburbs are the only thing we build anymore. Fresno has doubled it’s population since 1940 while 10x increasing it’s land usage.
Blame instagram and US television programmes for that. Even in Europe now everyone wants a house with a lawn, which is unfeasible and leads to a lot of frustration. Even if you're stuck in an apartment, it has to be "instagrammable", 10 year old kitchens are unacceptable. Oh and you just _got_ to have iPhones, otherwise you're an undateable nobody.
> Real estate prices are not being artificially elevated
Alas, they are. Supply and demand for housing is measured in units of currency, not people. Ask yourself, how many multiples of income can you borrow, with what kind of deposit? The ratio has shrunk over time, allowing roughly the same people to borrow steadily increasing amounts of money.
What's worse is that (in some countries at least) common measures of inflation don't measure house prices. The UK is an example of this. I'm unqualified to tell for sure, but I suspect some central banks have seen house prices as a way of keeping down measured inflation.
The solution (IMO) is a policy of relative decline - look to make house prices rise more slowly than wages for a generation.
The US does not include house purchase prices (the one-time capital cost), but does include actual rent or owner equivalent-rent (the ongoing/operating cost) in its measures of inflation.
This is entirely sensible consistent treatment, but often inadvertently or intentionally misunderstood.
Not everywhere has the space the the US has. Many places in Europe, especially Germany, the UK and the low countries simply have no space to grow into, the urban areas are basically touching as is.
It is politically unfeasible to turn swathes of these countries into an endless urban/suburban sprawl. Many have a strong agricultural lobby (The Netherlands in particular) and/or have an eye on food security.
Housing prices are mostly a function of supply and demand, but heavily influenced by demand from investors, and the limitation that not all supply is created equal: it’s all about ___location, ___location and ___location.
> It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening.
It's a way of transferring money from younger adults to older adults, and older adults vote.
It's basically an intergenerational pyramid scheme where each generation pays to the previous one, and each time they pay more. Of course, like any pyramid scheme, you can only keep it up so long.
> It's a way of transferring money from younger adults to older adults, and older adults vote.
Always makes me wonder where these younger adults come from? Don't they have parents who invested their saving in a few apartments for rent? Can't they get some financial help from their parents?
This is how a lot of the younger adults are keeping their head above water. Not everyone has this luxury though, it's not like everyone's parents made bank
It's definitely not every city in Germany that has this problem.
You're trying to live in one of the objectively best parts of Germany by a lot of stats and thus you're competing with a lot of folks.
I'm honestly sick of this whining about rent in top-tier areas.
Living there is a luxury, given the major move to cities and scarcity, driven by insane regulations and basic logic.
There are plenty of cities in Germany with very cheap rent, where apartment buildings get torn down because they're vacant.
But of course the entitlement seems stronger than the willingness to compromise.
> I'm honestly sick of this whining about rent in top-tier areas.
I don't know if this applies to GP, but we certainly get this in Zurich, Switzerland. We have a fantastic public transport system, and you can get fairly affordable apartments that are <30mins away from the city center of Zurich by train. But people somehow feel they have a right to live dead center in one of the most expensive cities in the world right after graduation.
If you look at Zürich, one thing that stands out is that everything related to school and daycare / day school works a LOT better in Zürich than in surrounding nearby cities and villages, which is probably a boon of having a socialist city government. So for parents it IS attractive to stay in Zürich instead of moving 30 train minutes outside.
Of course not everything is greener in Zürich, but if you need some public services like well organized schools or services for the elderly, Zürich city is really a bit nicer.
Are the opportunities in those other cities comparable? I don't know Germany, but usually when I see people saying this about places I do know the answer is a resounding 'no'. So it would seem to be a little more complicated than entitled kids these days who simply will not compromise.
somewhat. You still have Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin etc.
Maybe Munich has slightly better opportunities, really depends on you specific niche, but then probably Zurich has even better opportunities but is even costlier. Or Copenhagen.
I really somewhat agree. You really have to see that living in munich is a luxury that a lot of people can not enjoy because it's too expensive. Since you major in CS your social bubble is very well of (75k salary for the first job?) so you see it as somewhat given that you also belong there. And at the TUM they constantly tell you how much of an elite you are. It's a bit entitled I would say. Many Germans can't really live in munich and therefore have access to the opportunities there, it's just the most expensive place in germany you can rent in.
You can always try to find a flat to share with roommates, this is still possible in munich.
> There are plenty of cities in Germany with very cheap rent, where apartment buildings get torn down because they're vacant.
There are plenty of cities in Finland like this too.
But the problem is that the jobs aren't there. I could buy a huge house with a big yard from one of those cities, but then my commute would be over 300km every day. Not really worth it.
Or I would have to quit my job and start working in the local paper factory or sawmill.
Germany is not that centralized, you have way more options than just Munich if you’re willing to move, unless you’re specifically looking to work for Google. Köln, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and more all have dynamic job markets if you’re into software. Even for English speakers.
I'm not attacking your experience, but in 2023, with the explosion of remote jobs in software and generally post-covid, this sort of argument looks a bit weak on HN.
"I'm honestly sick of this whining about rent in top-tier areas. Living there is a luxury"
Hm, I am quite sure, that even luxury areas need garbage people. If the top income people are having problems living there, how is that socially sustainable at all?
Or is the solution, that the peasants all have to commute 2h plus every day?
Because of demand and supply. But there are many more "shitty" sectors, that are absolutely vital and underpaid. That showed quite nice at the pandemic, where vital workers got excemptions from the lockdown. Those vital workers were mostly all the low paying jobs. I think that got some people thinking, at least for some minutes about the absurdity of the status quo.
So I am all for paying them all more and for example the executive of the german train (who had his company have a shitty year in the reds, but still effectivly doubling his salary) less.
Suggestions on how to actually change it?
Most approaches I know where people go to the top to change things kind of fail, - once they are at the top, they rather enjoy the benefits there. Whether they are socialists or free market radicals.
In US cities with highest costs of living, the laws of supply and demand are already fixing the issue. The lowest paid professions in there pay $20 per hour or more, so basically twice than in areas with low CoL.
You should pay enough to live in the area you work in. If that means that the jobs pay more than someone that needs the degree to work in their field, the person with the degree is being underpaid as well.
FWIW: Some of the garbage men, janitors, retail employees, and others working in "unskilled" jobs likely have degrees too. This is even more likely if they are immigrants.
You are sick of people wanting to live in good places? Are you really sure "dem poors should just stay in crappy places" is the point you wanted to make?
> still gets rejected either for her financial situation or because the rental contract is already set to increase 8% each year - which we simply cannot afford. And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.
The logical step, when individuals cannot afford their own rent, companies that need workers will be providing housing to their workers. And they will be able to evict them whenever they feel like it.
Then we will finally return to feudalism in all but name- you will have a lord, live on his land , and he will be able to control your life far beyond what a job normally does.
This case is different though, 75k is a very, very good salary in Germany so if they can't find rent with that then they are looking at the wrong properties. 75k is great but it won't buy luxury penthouses (same as everywhere else in the world.) If OP is telling me they can't find a normal 2 bed apartment in Munich on a 100k (assuming) income something is wrong in their search or their expectations.
Most likely pre tax. In software development range will be probably 70-95k euro, for mid to senior dev in a big city. After all taxes, contributions you are getting around 60% of this.
So mentioned 75k, will be 40k net.
I live right outside a big city. Here 50 sqm in quite a new building costs 1200 monthly.
Corporate feudalism was a big theme in cyberpunk literature, and lo...
If you consider that renting is basically "housing as a service", though, you can see where we're all subscribing to it (eh) a little bit more every day.
I would be curious to see what kind of studies in Svalbard have been done on this. Virtually all workers are in company housing. Has it devolved into feudalism in all but name?
If you are able to work remotely, Spain is fantastic at the moment. Relatively low real estate rent/purchase prices. You can still get a nice 3 bedroom house with a pool under 200k by the Mediterranean sea (of course well, not in Marbella). There are some surprisingly high-tech jobs locally as well, the space industry is booming right now. Lots of programming jobs in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia even if you don't speak Spanish. Just had two acquaintances move over and they both found tech jobs within a month (in English). There is startup culture and events as well. Surprisingly, Spanish companies are really hiring at the moment unlike most of Europe. It's not been hit as hard with inflation either.
Plus, government and population are for the most part pretty grown-up and progressive. Universal base income, focus on equality etc...
Anecdata, but the vast majority of European new hires I'm seeing in my team are from Spain (though they are Spanish) and work remotely from mid-sized cities or islands (like Mallorca). It feels like Central Europe is slowly losing steam while Spain is, unexpectedly, gaining some steam.
Central European salaries are getting high enough to not make remote work for abroad companies as atractive. $80k+ per year is becoming more and more common for Seniors in Poland.
Because his rule and values look more similar (at least from what I can see from outside the country) to the ones in Nazi/Fascist regimes than in Soviet ones. Stalin wasn't Russian, his rhetoric was about transnational collectivism; whereas Putin is firmly in the traditional nationalistic mould, "my nation first".
Also, Stalin organized his underlings and allies in a monolithic fashion, inside the party; punishments were mostly distributed with demotions or convictions, as internal to the system. Putin keeps his oligarchs at arm's length, in charge of companies and institutions that are nominally independent, occasionally even abroad; punishments are inflicted by "fall from balcony" and indirect ostracism, again closer to the Nazi model than the Soviet one.
I know this is not what you meant, but it's a really sad answer.
Not because of Spain, which is a great place where I hope to live again one day, but because the answer to a question "how can I live a comfortable life and save money" is "move 1000km away from your family to a place where you don't know anyone, and don't even speak the language".
It shows that something's really, really wrong with the system if people making significantly above average salary struggle to have a sustainable (in financial sense) and comfortable life in their own country.
The flip-side of this is that all the "expats" (not immigrants :)) and "digital nomads" are outbidding the locals and pushing up prices for them.
If you think it's bad renting a house in Munich on a German salary, imagine renting a house in Lisbon (similar or higher prices) on a Portuguese salary.
The solution to this is of course land value tax, distributed to citizens in a dividend. The gains from the land value go to the citizens of the country, not the private speculators who add nothing.
I'd argue Spain doesn't have a property crisis exactly because speculators and developers. There is lots of housing stock available. I don't know any single EU country which has ready to live in apartments listed at 20k EUR.
The problem is everywhere from the US to Europe, is that there is simply not enough housing available. Blaming speculators is blaming a symptom.
> government and population are for the most part pretty grown-up and progressive. Universal base income, focus on equality etc...
This may well have an expiration date on May 28. Voting intention polls currently predict a shift to a right-wing majority (and this has been so for long), and the right in Spain is not moderate as in e.g. Germany. Although Pedro Sánchez has proven to be a tough nut to crack with a tendency to resurrect when everyone thinks him dead, so let's see what happens.
Sorry, I've just noticed that May 28 is the date for the municipal and regional elections. The general election (which is what I was referring to) will be later in the year, no later than December 10.
I’ll put my own add in. Come to Asturias, you got mountain and sea right at your doorstep. Affordable, safe and welcoming. Also very temperate summers.
Difficult to make a direct comparison, but taxes are very similar to Germany, salaries are pretty much the same for white-collar IT work. But IT is not terribly well-paid in Germany to begin with. I've seen people earning 3k per month in a senior IT position for a bank. But the same money goes a lot longer in Spain, especially outside big cities. The sweet spot is to freelance for foreign companies and spend the money in Spain.
What skews the comparison is Spain is surprisingly empty. 70% of the country the same population density as northern Sweden. But a lot of people live in these small remote places where there are basically no permanent jobs apart from odd jobs, fruit picking and working in the post office. Think of a remote US mining town, without the mining :)
> And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.
That's nonsense. Larger Munich is the most expensive place to live in Germany (except for the island of Sylt), and has been for many years, but is still nowhere near London, NYC, or SF. In contrast, you can purchase entire houses in abandoned (but well connected) places in east Germany for as little as 10k EUR.
There were reports last year that per square meter Munich is more expensive for property than London (but less than Paris) https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2022-08-26-real-estate... - that probably covers a range of prices of course, and other costs are lower.
The openly racist, climate change denying, far right Alternative for Deutschland party won almost all districts in the last federal elections. It was the launching pad of the anti- Islam PEGIDA movement, and had the lowest covid vaccination levels and consequently the districts with the highest number of cases.
The economy isn't great either. Geographically it's kind of a dead end, and transport links are fairly poor, so few companies want to locate there.
I bet the other places he looked at was London, Paris, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Of course in a cool part of the city. The reality is just that many would like to live in munich but it's just very expensive because of this. Many can't pay this. His girlfriend makes a lot with 75k, so they should be able to find something but you have to be realistic in this city but you have to adjust your expectations.
American here, in silicon valley. I'm actually a bay area native, and the only reason I'm able to stay close to my parents is that I make a "tech salary". I bought a moderately sized condo, and it was a huge stretch at the time when I bought it - now that I've advanced my career, it's not such a huge load.
But, the fact that, at $110k a year, a two bedroom (yet small) place was a huge stress. And that was not even in not one of top 3 most expensive cities in the bay area, which should say something.
I'm extremely grateful that I can live close to my parents, and will be able to help take care of them as they age.
Something is broken when it's a financial pressure for someone in the top 10% of income to live within an hour drive of where they want to be. And, that's kind of a luxury, tbh. I have extreme sympathy for the working class. There's something fundamentally broken with our housing policy.
Sure, but there's so much open, empty, and underutilized space. With some more aggressive building and well implemented transit policy, we could really fit a lot more people into the area without creating a decrease in quality of life. Not even like a huge amount of people, like 10% more.
> We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories.
Could you share a few places at the top of your list? As you yourself pointed out, it looks like the same story is playing out everywhere one looks, especially in the West.
Given the current situation, the more I think about it, the more I conclude that going fully remote from a low-COL ___location may be the better answer. Unfortunately I think this complicates things for founders to raise.
Also, this makes me think how utterly unprepared Germany is to receive all those immigrants needed to keep the economy working.
As a newcomer you can't live (properly) in a top tier city in any major Western country that I can think of unless you manage to accumulate significant wealth.
I doubt that "every" city in Germany has this problem, but I believe you that all of the ones that I could name as a non-German do.
The 50th percentile Brit can't afford to live in London. Nottingham, well that's easy.
In the US it's still possible to work as a Software Engineer in major cities and buy property. Great Atlanta/Houston aren't exactly dirt cheap, but you can buy a decent house by paying less 2500/month mortgage (not hard on a Software Engineer salary). In the Midwest there are even more affordable cities.
Your GF gets rejected on a financial basis while making 75k euros? How expensive are the places she's trying to rent?
> We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories
It seems like if you want to live anywhere that's desirable you have to pay an arm and a leg for rent, no matter what country you're in.
Same thing in Spain, compounded by the fact that not only the generation of people over 60 own the housing and receive the rents, but they actually make more from pensions than new workers make as a salary (the latter is, I think, not true in Germany).
This is a really toxic situation because it seems that for many young people, objectively speaking, career matters quite little. You can be unambitious, get a mediocre job, need your parents' help to survive and expect most of your wealth to eventually come from inheritance... or you can be ambitious and hard-working, get a better job, but still need your parents' help to survive (only somewhat less) and still expect most of your wealth to eventually come from inheritance.
It's a sad situation, and I say this as someone who is not that young anymore and owns an apartment, so it's not personal whining but genuine worry about where society is heading.
> And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.
No, Munich is an outlier. You generally can find apartments under 10€/m² without too much trouble, at least in mid-sized cities. However, it’s true that rents have been rising significantly over the past decade or so.
Capital accumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are the objective fundamental causes of inequality in every capitalist society, which is why every capitalist society depends on a plethora of ostensible efforts to counter these fundamental characteristics of capitalism.
If the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was the underlying problem, basic needs and housing would be dirt cheap. That's not a problem - it's a good thing for consumers (and therefore the lower classes). It's the plethora of efforts to counter this which capitalists employ (mainly monopolization) to inflate prices anyway despite underlying increased efficiency (and less labor) that's the problem. The main problem though is that labor is perpetually kept desperate enough to accept bargains which favor investors, and consumers have no other means of gaining capital, even as they get automated out of the job market.
It's a fundamentally unfair system which inevitably maximizes inequality. It's untenable without a government-enforced wealth-redistributing tax to offset that.
Capital accumulation is necessary because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In other words, you can't merely "create value" as a capitalist. Capitalists must accumulate capital merely to avoid losing everything. Capital accumulation is protected because capitalists literally created a government for that express purpose.
> It's untenable without a government-enforced wealth-redistributing tax to offset that.
I find it interesting that you point the problem (this is not capitalism but rather the lack of it) and then suggest that the government (which made this whole system possible) somehow fixes this. The government is the problem and a top down approach doesn't work (it didn't work for the soviets and it's not going to work now).
The solution is capitalism, and liberalization of the markets. In other words, letting people and capital build houses and live in them.
You post is not coherent with the one you are replying to. Without government setting the rules, capitalism leads to monopolies, like it did with standard oil.
The bigger company can kill all competition despite having inferior product with unfair practices such as - Dumping, market manipulation, self-dealing, wash trading, antitrust, insider trading, collusion, cartels, negative externalities, anticompetitive practices, misinformation, corporate espionage, etc.
If you take off the last remaining government safeguards, you will not have more competition. You will have monopolies for good we need to survive.
I (a Czech) moved from highly desirable Prague to Ostrava, a postindustrial city I was born in.
Remote work was a huge boon, because our family income is independent on our ___location and housing costs in Ostrava are literally half the costs in Prague. We have a nice newly built house not far from public transport (6 tram lines stop on a major intersection in a 15-minute walking distance), with a garden, pretty calm and several minutes of walking from two huge supermarkets that are open till 9 and 10 pm, respectively. Even a small apartment at the outskirts Prague (two rooms) would be about as expensive.
But it came at a cost, yes. The restaurant scene is a shadow of Prague's, and a lot of personal connections had to be weakened, if not severed.
People seem to be forgetting that everything is a tradeoff. If a city like Munich or Prague is highly attractive for students, workers and connosieurs of urban life, there will be a huge demand for housing there, and few regions in the developed world have escaped the enormous NIMBYfication of construction regulations, so the supply will be lacking.
Or you can have a really nice place for living, but not in a major and growing urban area.
What about Dresden or Meissen? Nowhere near as expensive as Munich, but still urban enough to have some doctors and other opportunities.
Yes, you will have a lot more AfD voters around, but everything is a trade-off. Living in a mostly B90/Grüne-voting neighbourhood may be the most costly privilege in entire Germany, and is it really worth the added cost? I surely wouldn't like to be held hostage to my neighbour's political preferences.
Moving doesn’t necessarily help much. That is because usually house prices are directly driven by how much people can loan on a mortgage, which is directly driven by earnings. Cheaper housing often means lower earnings potential. Conversely, saving in a high earning country can mean you have a deposit for a house in a cheaper country.
Edit: Counterintuitively, high interest rates can help middle class people that don’t have homes. House prices drop, so you need less deposit. And usually you can work harder for a few years to nail principal (I know people that bought in the 80s - one friend had an interest rate of 28%).
Some remote workers can earn in a wealthy country and live in a cheaper country.
Meanwhile, watch out for the most unaffordable cities: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jan/23/10-mo... Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have some batshit insane unaffordable real estate (stop whinging about SF - 9th place on Guardian list!). As a New Zealander I would struggle to recommend moving here without already having a nest egg - although if you are willing to move to rural areas you might find something cheap (but usually not find a job too - house prices are driven by median incomes in most places, sometimes driven by investors, wealthy immigration, or movement of people such as retirees) https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/property/residential/sale
Wow… Singapore is not even on the list. As a Kiwi expat I can tell you Singapore is at Hong Kong levels of unaffordableness for non locals. The Singapore government housing scheme skews theses statistics significantly. If you are a local here, great. Everyone else is paying top dollar (2 bedroom condo units renting for 50% of the median household monthly salary)
I live in rural HongKong where rental is reasonable(by hk standards). Cost of living not too high if you ‘live local’ and don’t bleed money on nonsense like vehicle, clubbing, and ego fueled high life. That said my monthly electricity gone from $1700 to $2400 in 3 years in same place running only one aircon and one dehumidifier to dry washing for family. It’s easy to see the inflation fueled price gouging by business is a global problem. Driving people to choose what and when to eat - sad state of affairs.
The solution is obvious. Just look at Vienna, not far away from Munich. A lot of flats belong directly to the city of Vienna and a lot of subsidized and owner restricted flats exist. The prices on the free market were also rising the last years but much lower than in other cities. Red Vienna got it right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Viennahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau
By "driving", you mean "helps create inequality", right? But inequality is already there. Someone now pays that high rent already; otherwise, landlords would lower prices to avoid empty units.
You are competing with many people from all parts of the EU and, to an extent, the world for the same limited resource. Someone who built their startup and banked on it already came to Germany to work and live there because it is a very comfortable place to live. Refugees without any money at all are willing to go to Germany instead of Greece or Italy, not to mention Bulgaria or Hungary.
I am trying to be a devil's advocate now, but landlords are interested in getting paid as much as possible; it is Economy 101, rational agent behavior. Otherwise, it would be a charity, not a business.
I think moving away, or at least moving your business away, is rational behavior on your side. Take a look at said Bulgaria: Sofia is a dull place compared even to smaller German cities. Still, they have 10% flat taxes for companies and individuals, and for 1000 EUR, you will have a 150 sq.m. two-level apart in the historical city center with 3 bedrooms, a separate dining room, and a large study with a real fireplace. They have a subway to the airport and several budget airlines flying from there to any part of the EU. Source: several people from the company I work for are living there.
Sofia is a dirty, badly maintained city. Quality of life is low, air is horrible and there's dirt/mud almost everywhere. It's pretty bad overall. But it's not dull, at all. Not bad for young folks because almost nobody cares about the things in their 20s.
Plovdiv is 1000x better than Sofia in any conceivable way. Older, cleaner, cultured. Built on top of an ancient Roman city. It's by far the best big place in Bulgaria
This is mostly the question of tastes. I lived in Sofia for two months, mostly in the city center. For me an international mobility is important and I don't drive, so the well connected airport and good means of transportation towards it were paramount. Thus Plovdiv and also Varna and Burgas are not an option for me. But from the business perspective it is a real tax haven. Also, there is an IT community there, and offices of large companies including Microsoft and Uber.
"How the hell are we ever supposed to build up some savings, settle down and have a comfortable life?"
The idea is, you pay so much rent, you never will have enough money to buy something. So you have to spend all your money the whole life just for rent and still own enything when you are old.
> Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening.
Have hope. Things are changing as I see it.
Fundamentally, I believe that we have seen a multi-decade boom because property prices are closely linked with interest rates. People borrow according to their capacity to service the loan. For most home buyers affordability is measured by monthly repayments, not the ticket price.
As prices rose, capital gains became a more significant consideration. This meant that some people who would not have purchased investment properties did so. They would not have done this if they were only looking at the income earning potential of the asset. Rental yields have been getting much worse over time. People stopped investing for yield and started to speculate - doing well with favourable tax regulations and the leverage opportunities that mortgages provide.
In the past, if you owned a second home (holiday home, convenient apartment in the city, etc) it would cost you money if its value didn't appreciate at a quick enough rate. For decades now that hasn't been the case - property prices have been appreciating so quickly that owning a property has been a good financial bet even if it hasn't been earning any income. It was no longer the preserve of those wealthy enough to maintain more than one property just for the lifestyle it allows. Naturally this means that the number of people that have been doing this has increased considerably.
There is no doubt in my mind that the proportion of underutilised properties has increased in correlation with the rise in property values and the steady decline in interest rates. For many, this is hard to accept as it doesn't fit with the naive assumption that prices have been rising because there is somehow more demand for homes. What they forget to factor in is that there is a difference between demand for homes and demand for investment opportunities. To put it another way, a speculative boom creates artificial demand.
A few points to back this up:
- In the UK, the proportion of underutilised properties is highest in areas with a higher average property value.
- In Melbourne, Australia, it has been shown (through examining water usage) that the proportion of empty properties is highest in areas that have experienced the highest capital gains.
- In NZ, the ratio of households to dwellings has decreased since the mid-90s (the start of NZ's boom).
All of this suggests that the rise in prices is not due to a shortage of dwellings for people to live in. It is a shortage of available dwellings.
The wheels came flying off NZ's property market at the start of 2022. This was caused by rising interest rates. Where I live, this resulted in a flood of properties getting listed for sale and an increase in available rentals at lower rents. Where did those extra rentals come from?
Another factor in all of this is the rise in short term rentals (AirBnB, etc). AirBnB effectively allows property investors to take properties out of the housing stock and still collect rent. Many cities around the world (especially major European tourist destinations) suffer from this. Ideally it would be regulated much more tightly in future, but I think there is a small chance that that may not be necessary. Prices are now so high in many places, and servicing loans so costly, that even the higher rents that can be achieved in this market may not be enough to make yields worthwhile. A lot of these properties may make their way back to the regular housing stock as investors are forced to sell up.
So, the big question in all of this is, we know what happens when interest rates drop and property prices appreciate - what happens when interest rates rise and capital gains are off the table (or negative gains become the norm)?
Question must be - in a country where population doesn't grow at all and haven't been for a generation+, and housing is not being torn down on a massive scale so supply of it probably still increases a bit, why is there a need for any new housing at all? Basically, why can't people on average just live in their grandparents' apartments once they die? Housing construction standards have been decent for at least 60 years so these apartments are good and are probably better located than their parents' just because of city growth since.
This is all about regulation, although each layer of regulation tends to be popular.
Many things typically seen as good add to the cost of housing.
Building is difficult because of zoning restrictions.
Building is expensive because of labor and zoning and construction and accessibility and many other regulations.
Renting also is risky for a landlord because of eviction protection laws.
And so forth. Housing doesn’t need to be so expensive and scarce. We made it so. We have far better technology than in the past, we can build better, safer, faster, cheaper. Except we can’t.
You have to carefully analyze if you absolutely need to live in Munich - the most expensive city in Germany - in order to run and build your startup once you graduate. Is the extra cost and low quality of life worth it over the long term? There are dozens of smaller cities in Northern or Eastern Germany which offer very affordable living and office space while still being very attractive to young families.
this is crazy. in 2015 i paid 480 eur in berlin for a 20qm room, then 1050 for 101 qm (on 48k eur in a 3 person WG) and then 1355 for 50 qm in hamburg (neubau).
never had an 8% increase tho, that’s rough. it was a different world in 2005 for sure
IMHO Germany is killing its social stability and its future by having this situation right now. And I‘m afraid this will bring more votes to AFD and similar rightwing parties. Kinda similar to a century ago.
The overall population of Germany is not declining yet, in fact last year the German population has never been as high. In general, if Germany wants to keep its economy the population has to continue increasing until the boomers are dead. So yes, counter intuitively, for now there is going to be a major pressure on the housing market at least until the peak. Germany is a major immigration target inside the EU so it's not met with the same fate as poorer european economies like Russia, Ukraine, or Italy.
The high rents in places like Munich are due to the urban areas seeing a major boom: that's where the jobs are, that's where the immigrants are going, that's where the young people from the countryside are going.
> And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.
Well, rising cost of living is a reality everywhere (it’s called inflation). But Munich is really extreme. You might want to consider moving to Eastern Germany. If you pursue an academic career, you might want to watch for positions in Magdeburg, Greifswald or Leipzig.
> How the hell are we ever supposed to build up some savings
ETFs (exchange traded funds i.e. index funds) give you better yield than just paying into a savings account. You also might want to invest some percent in more risky positions like BTC and ETH (10%) bc now is a good time to do that.
Also give it a couple of more months. Housing price increases are already decelerating and start to decline in some areas. The last 10 years were exceptional in low interest rates and money printing in the EUR zone.
If you can avoid it, don’t own a car — it’s always a money drain. :)
>If eastern Germany is still affordable like that then it might be for a reason.
I'm not German, but you can't complain there's no affordable housing when there actually is, but you just don't want it. Just because you only want to move only to a specific city you like, that has the "right vibe", where others also want to live, it's not society's fault you're too picky and you think you're too good for other more affordable cities. Beggars can't be choosers. That's like complaining about starving with a plate of Big Macs next to you because it's not what you like to eat.
>Don't move there unless you pass as a German and speak the language.
That's total nonsense. Plenty of foreigners who don't "pass as German" live in East German cities just fine. And why is it so bad that you have to learn the local language when you move somewhere? Do you not need to speak English when you move to the UK/US? The official language in Germany is German, not English. Best learn it if you move there out of respect for the host country and to integrate and become part of society.
If you're lazy about integration and learning German, and only want to move somewhere just to make money and party in expat bubbles secluded from the German society, in cities where English is the majority spoken language, then you can't complain they're unaffordable when everyone other white collar yippie expat wants to do the same. Again, beggars can't be choosers. That's like complaining there's rush hour traffic jams, when you're part of the traffic jam.
And I got news for you (not you specifically, but others who have this mentality): whenever you move to a new country as a foreigner, you'll always be at a disadvantage for housing, especially if you don't speak the language, and just because you got a visa for a white collar job at some startup making the fifth best food delivery app, doesn't make you a special snowflake worthy of the German society to turn itself upside down for you and roll the red carpet and make life super easy for you. It's still your job to integrate in the country you choose to move including dealing with the unpleasant things.
You(We)'re not special. 99% chance you were given a visa and got hired there not because you've got some super rare skills nobody there had, but because of wage dumping. You moving there puts downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on rents, meaning the government, landlords, and business owners can profit from your presence there. We're basically cattle in the economic machine. You should be aware of these facts and factor them into your decision when it comes to immigrating somewhere, as it's never a free ticket to El Dorado as many delusional white collar expats (tech workers especially) think.
"Plenty of foreigners who don't "pass as German" live in East German cities just fine. "
Are you one among those non germans living in a eastern german city, or know some of them personally?
If no, how can you judge then?
I am german and I happen to live in eastern germany and I can attest there is a very high level of anti immigration sentiment and action.
There are some bubbles in the bigger cites, where you can get by without much trouble while only speaking english, but move out of that bubble and you actually have to fear for your live in some areas as a non white person. Ask my girlfried who is not really of color, but the little color her skin has because of latin american roots, is enough for hatred and threats towards her. Even in "hip" places like Dresden.
I'm definitely not white "BIO-Deutsch" looking if that's what you're asking.
But you still haven't told me exactly how the hate has manifested towards your half latino girlfriend in East Germany.
From my findings I find a lot of people are just snowflakes that exagerate the perceived hate towards them, for example if the waiter, service worker, bus driver, etc. was rude or mean to them, they immediately assume people are being racist and are hate targeting them for their race/skin color. No, bro, that's just the traditional East German "friendliness" or they're just dicks to everyone, nothing to do with hate or racism.
Or in another instance blocking it, from going out: "You cannot go out here"
Children in rural village: "you don't belong here"
And then we have spitting. Bad looks. Cashiers being friendly to me, but very unfriendly to her (when they don't notice we are connected, but she speaks a very good german). Etc.
That is just racism and not "east german friendliness"
East german friendliness would be the sentence on a shirt I saw in Görlitz (very eastern city):
"I don't have prejudice, I hate everyone"
That's the "normal" friendliness in some areas, but in most areas (especially also Görlitz), they canalize that hate and frustration towards anything different.
So not everything is bad here, otherwise we would not still live here, but we explicitely live in a no nazi village, so kind of in a bubble. But we do regulary think of moving away, so no, in general foreigners do not live here just fine.
And most, especially those with a really dark skin, have it way harder than we. For example we didn't got any death letter yet.
This is just the just world fallacy in a post. If you lived in Germany you would understand that statements like this that you wrote:
> doesn't make you a special snowflake worthy of the German society to turn itself upside down for you and roll the red carpet and make life super easy for you
are utterly, utterly ridiculous. There is absolutely no risk whatsoever of Germany "rolling the red carpet" for immigrants. It's a fairly hostile place to be if you're not German even if you're white. It can also be hostile even if you're German but not white. Among "expat" destinations (so plausible expat destinations, so excluding, e.g. DRC), it regularly tops the rankings as the worst place to live (harder to live in than Japan or China, and no disrespect to those two countries, but they are traditionally considered benchmark definitions of exclusive countries).
> Best learn it if you move there out of respect for the host country and to integrate and become part of society
Let me tell you as someone who lives in Germany right now: the vast majority of 1M Syrian refugees will never, ever, ever integrate into German society. I had no opinion on this before I moved here, now it's obvious. Your idea that integration is purely a one way street is nonsense and only leads to broken societies. Even if you change your name to Winfried and got C2 German, you'll still never be accepted here. Maybe your children will be, but maybe not if they're not white. But the fact is that if countries want immigrants to pay for their boomers' pensions, they need to actually be a generally more welcoming and friendly society. "Fuck you, learn German, and go and live in Chemnitz" don't really pass muster these days. I mean for example this is nonsense:
> make you a special snowflake worthy of the German society to turn itself upside down for you and roll the red carpet
As if Germany is doing everyone a favour by letting people move there. If there was no demographic crisis then immigration would be practically impossible. I am doing Germany a favour by moving here at least as much as they are doing me a favour by letting me.
> there not because you've got some super rare skills nobody there had
I'm an academic in a fairly obscure branch of physics so in this case I can categorically say that I do have those rare skills. Everything you said about the country is wrong. Their advice: "don't move here unless you speak German" is absolutely on point, and what I myself tell people. Living in Germany mostly makes no sense if you're not German or not a refugee.
> the vast majority of 1M Syrian refugees will never, ever, ever integrate into German society. I had no opinion on this before I moved here, now it's obvious.
The parents maybe won’t. But their kids. Watch out in the real world or on TV for the children of Syrian refugees that came here in 2016. In the mean time many of those graduated from German schools now and speak German very well (schools invested quite a bit in making sure of that) and learn a profession or even enroll in a University program.
While Germany is certainly not a classic immigration country like the US is, as a German I really got the impression that we became much more open minded. Personally, at my work place we started out as a prototypical mid-range company financed by Bavarian entrepreneurs and were pretty much speaking German only. Nowadays (10 years later) we‘ve got many Indian, Turkish and Eastern European colleagues and speak almost only English in meetings. Even our CEO is non-German now. I don’t think that would have worked 10 years ago nut younger co-workers nowadays tend to be much more proficient in speaking English.
Of course, living in Munich and Berlin won’t give you quite the same experience like living in Rostock-Lichtenhagen… but parent mentioned she or he plans on founding a start-up. Office space is less expensive in smaller cities like Rostock (or Wismar or you name your favorite less world famous German city), too, and with remote work it is much easier these days to setup an international team in a German company located even in more obscure places. And it gives neighborhoods a chance to develop and rise from their obscurity.
Anybody reading this from the city of Neubrandenburg? ;) (I just learned about its existence a couple of years ago as a German native.)
> It's a fairly hostile place to be if you're not German even if you're white. It can also be hostile even if you're German but not white.
BS. If Germany were that hostile it wouldn't attract the biggest migration waves from non-white African and Middle Eastern countries in all of Europe. And now home to over one million Ukrainians.
>Let me tell you as someone who lives in Germany right now: the vast majority of 1M Syrian refugees will never, ever, ever integrate into German society.
Again, BS. Most Syrians I met spoke much better German than techie expats who were entitled enough to think that learning German is something beneath them, only mandatory for the lower classes of immigrants doing blue collar work, while they should be somehow exempt because they're special snowflakes who push code to git in English at work so the whole society should switch to English for their ~2% demographic of SW devs to accommodate their laziness of not bothering to integrate and learn the local language of their host country they choose to move into.
>Even if you change your name to Winfried and got C2 German, you'll still never be accepted here.
Again, more biased BS. I did my best to learn German and mostly hanged out, dated and socialized in German circles instead of English speaking expat circles so I could integrate better, and was always accepted and never discriminated by the Germans because I was a foreigner. I even became friends with people working at the German Government in Berlin or with kids of upper class Bavarians who owned vacation homes in Sylt or Austria. Of course you will find bigoted racists everywhere, but I found the Germans to be very friendly and inclusive if you show willingness to integrate.
How far do you think you'd go without English fluency as an immigrant in US or UK?
>As if Germany is doing everyone a favour by letting people move there. If there was no demographic crisis then immigration would be practically impossible. I am doing Germany a favour by moving here at least as much as they are doing me a favour by letting me.
Germany is a democratic country responsible to provide to the German citizens with voting rights. It's not a country founded by immigrants, like the US, who focuses on pandering to non-German immigrants. If Germany has decided it wants to commit demographic suicide then so be it, it's well within their rights to do so, what gives us foreigners the right to complain about it when we voluntarily chose to come here? Their country, their rules. No like? Vote with your feet and choose another country. Expats make the mistake of expecting Germany to be like Europe's USA.
Let's be real here, you didn't benevolently move to Germany to save their demographics like some superhero, but you did it because you found a good economic opportunity in doing so for yourself. Germany didn't kidnap you and bring you here against your will to save their economy, you voluntarily decide to come because it benefited you. Then it's our responsibility as guest to integrate in their society, and not vice versa.
Again, how far do you think you'd go without English fluency as an immigrant in US or UK?
>I'm an academic in a fairly obscure branch of physics so in this case I can categorically say that I do have those rare skills. Living in Germany mostly makes no sense if you're not German or not a refugee.
Then why are you staying in a country you feel doesn't like you? If you're such a special immigrant, why aren't you voting with your feet and moving to a country that is more accommodating to your kind?
Question: if you'd leave, would the German GDP or company you work for collapse in your absence? If not, maybe you're not as special as you think and the country is doing fine without you as well.
The problem is your argument boils down to: you are a guest in Germany and you are completely disposable so shut the fuck up or fuck off. It's a take one hears loudest from the AfD and old German Boomers, the same sort shouting at you in the street for some perceived infraction. I found this sort of attitude objectionable and xenophobic when I was living in my home country (the UK, where your argument is again mostly held by old racist boomers or EDF types), and I find it as bad now I myself am an immigrant. If you want to live in a society where immigrants opinions are widely accepted as worthless "because they should just leave", then great, maybe that's why Germany worked out well for you. But I just don't agree with your idea of how a country should integrate and welcome newcomers, because it's bordering on fascist and plainly inhumane. In any case I can speak German, but I don't use my own German proficiency as a tool to beat other immigrants with (as you're doing now, which is quite sad). Just one further comment:
>Again, how far do you think you'd go without English fluency as an immigrant in US or UK?
Which is precisely why I said: don't bother moving to Germany if you don't speak German already or are not a refugee, which cover both your points "why do refugees come here then" and "learn the language", but it seems you cannot read.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions from my comment based on your need to vent because you have a chip on your shoulder because you feel like Germany didn't roll the red carped enough for you.
Whether you like it or not it's always the immigrants who should integrate into their new country, not the country to change centuries of culture and identity around for the immigrants. Germany is already welcoming enough to immigrants as it is. The best in EU I'd say, as other countries are much worse.
And each country has their own mentality and national identity developed over centuries, and as flawed as they may be in your viewpoint, these don't change overnight just because you decided to move in and don't like it there.
Blaming my viewpoint and calling it racist, for your personal (maybe flawed) life choices in immigration and your lack of success in integration, won't really help you, because yes, it's just like a relationship. If you don't like it somewhere, then pack up and leave. Simple.
If you want to change things in your favor then get citizenship and vote, or walk somewhere else that fits your personal view. It's not a racist viewpoint, it's just the cold hard truth of how all societies work in real life, and refusing to integrate somewhere is just rude and counter productive to everyone.
Venting on the internet that the country you voluntarily moved to doesn't give you the special treatment you were expecting, is just laughable and pointless.
People keep bashing Germany that it's the worst welcoming for expats, yet they won't stop coming to Germany:)) So because people won't stop coming, anbbecause nobody walks away, Germany will never see the need to change anything. Simple.
I don't regret my choice, I met a nice woman here and I have a good job. But I don't adopt the unambiguous slave mentality that you advocate and I have my eyes more open about the country's problems than you.
>Venting on the internet that the country you voluntarily moved to doesn't give you the special treatment you were expecting, is just laughable and pointless.
Yes, and unrolling the red white and black in defence of the Reich online is also quite laughable, especially as you claim to not even be German. In the end we are both wasting our time, but I'd rather be on the internet trying to seriously discuss something than aping this strange ultranationalist performance piece of yours. Better still would be to not engage at all.
>But I don't adopt the unambiguous slave mentality that you advocate
Sorry, but equating integrating and being assimilated into a developed country to having a "slave mentality" is complete horeshit and makes you look completely out of touch with reality if this is how you see things.
>unrolling the red white and black in defence of the Reich
Where the hell did you come up with this? I never said anything like this. You must be tripping.
So strange to meet a German ultranationalist who claims to not even be German. Truly a unique experience, you may even be the only such person who exists on the planet. Thank you for sharing yourself with us.
I've been using Brave for a few years now in combination with ublock origin - as Brave just does not block everything that's annoying. I use duckduckgo and don't see a need to switch to Brave search.
I primarily like the Brave sync feature, and it's actually the second main reason I recommend using Brave these days. It was quite junky when it was first released but by now it works like a charm for my 6 devices.
I volunteer for a "Tafel" in the center of Munich for about four months now, and here the main issue is related to immigrants. I can state with confidence that about 19 out of 20 people coming there have an arab background, and the vast majority have more than 7, sometimes even 10, people in total in their household. And you can see from the cards they need to show, that most of them are children.
Many of the migrant kids I've met can't speak any German. Even kids that are already 10 years old. Thus I believe this situation will escalate even further in the future, as it will be very hard for these kids to get a proper education without the needed language skills.
It makes you feel really bad to see them growing up in such an environment without much chance for a better life. But ultimately this is due to their parents decision to have so many kids, even if they can't afford simple food.
>Thus I believe this situation will escalate even further in the future, as it will be very hard for these kids to get a proper education without the needed language skills.
> It makes you feel really bad to see them growing up in such an environment without much chance for a better life. But ultimately this is due to their parents decision to have so many kids, even if they can't afford simple food.
Is it ultimately the fault of the parents, though? It's easy to place to blame on individual parents, but more interesting to study the misses/wrongdoings of the educational system. Schools tend to cast immigrants children on the side very early on, and not even try to teach them anything (their future as low-wage workers for the industry has already been decided), at least it is so here in France and your suggestion that 10 years old children can't speak properly the language used by everyone around them seems to indicate the situation is the same in Germany.
If anything, it's a sign of deep social disintegration on a broader scale, probably due to a mix of institutional racism/classism and public policies aiming to dismantle public services.
I'm not sure mandatory indoctrination is a healthy sign for society. Study-at-home was rather strong in France historically, due to public schools being so reactionary and authoritarian (or on the other side of the political spectrum, due to teaching sexual education and evolution), and there was an entire public institution (CNED) dedicated to that.
However in the past decades, the government's attack on home schooling has coincided with the introduction of more and more nationalist/racist doctrine in public schools.
Don't get me wrong, i'm strongly in favor of public education, as long as it's in the interest of the children (for example Montessori methods) but public schools in much of the world are the exact opposite of that.
Why would "assimilation" be a goal? Of course giving children opportunity to learn (including the local language) is good, but pretending a single culture and way of life needs to be shared among everyone is an imperialist construct.
Not everyone born to a land shares the same culture. There are huge cultural shifts between faiths and political sides, for example, and it's not a problem. A society that is not multicultural has a settler's mentality which is profoundly racist.
For example here in France, at the same time the colonial process aimed to destroy local cultures in the colonies in Algeria/Indochine/etc, public schools were used as a weapon to destroy the local cultures and languages in Bretagne, Alsace, Occitanie, etc... A few generations of beating children who spoke their native tongue, suggesting that french was a somehow superior language (and assimulation was a requirement), was enough to annihilate most local cultures.
EDIT: I also don't understand why "reliance on safety net" would be a bad thing. There's a reason such mechanisms are in place, and one's contribution to society can hardly be measured in purely economic terms.
Assimilation and respect are not the same. If anything, there's strong incentives for immigrants to respect the local culture and to assimilate. I dare bet there's more respect for the flag and symbols of a nation from immigrants than from natives themselves, in proportion.
I've often found myself in situations where immigrants despite facing very rude situations were telling me all the great things about France, and praising Napoléon's conquests. And it's required of them as part of the legally-mandated racist assimilation process (in France at least). Many french people i know spit on the national flag and despise Napoléon for being a bloody tyrant and colonizer.
> extract benefits without giving back
Source? Even if you do have stats, they would be skewed by the fact illegals are often unaccounted, and that most immigrants (students, asylum seekers) are not allowed by law to work and declare income. Also, measuring in purely economical terms fails to account for participation in society outside of work: school trips, local associations, arts, militant activities...
> You wouldn’t like if I moved into your house, didn’t respect your way of life and just ate your food.
Of course not, but my house is my house and i don't appreciate anyone dictating me how it should be run, not even the State. Outside of my house, there's an abundance of food and housing and other resources. Who am i to dictate how other people should live? Who gets to decide what's "respect" or not? There's not a single way of life that's fairer than others, and even within a same ethnic group / region you'll find plenty of different ways of life and cultures.
The problem will multiply. If people are incapable of integrating into one of the richest, most well-run, and liberal countries on the planet, then entire family groups should be sent back, with a once-off €50,000 as motivation (still representing a substantial saving in lifetime welfare costs for society).
It doesn't make sense to be taking care of refugees in Germany when they could take care of themselves for a fraction of the price in their regional homeland.
As long as these groups have food, they will continue to multiply, until the generous capacity of the host population is extinguished. Its classic R vs K reproduction strategy:
> The problem will multiply. If people are incapable of integrating
It's not and never been that people were incapable of integrating. Usually it's that they're refused the opportunity by being recognisably other and easy to discriminate against in various more or less overt ways.
I've a bunch of french journal clippings about first diaspora italians, they read exactly like your ilk. But once they speak french it’s pretty hard to differentiate an italian from a southern french or corsican.
"Incapable of integrating"???
The biggest constant here is the attitude to Difference in German Society.
A fellow engineer, of Arabic (Tunisian) origin but raised in Germany, told me that when she was little girl, she was a very good student - including in German language - and on the occasion of her test being the best of her class, an angry colleague said: "they shouldn't have given you a better grade: you're not German!".
Having lived in Germany for 8 years, I got stories like this from immigrants raised in Germany, all the time.
At some point I started to consciously choose my words to make sure there wasn't any bias when I heard the telling of this kind of story when I asked something of the sort: "how was it to grow up in Germany?".
That is true of every culture, period. In France, white people that comes from metropolitan France get discriminated against by black people living in Martinique, La Réunion, etc, because white people are the minority here. It is human to think that our in group is superior.
> That is true of every culture (...) It is human to think that our in group is superior
I don't think this is true. There's nothing inherently natural about this. One could even argue that cooperation, not competition, is what brought us this far. Of course i'm all ears for counter-arguments but usually this stance is just misinformed "common knowledge" among people coming from imperialist cultures who tend to see the rest of the world in the same way.
> white people (...) get discriminated against by black people living in Martinique, La Réunion
That's not exactly comparable. There's a deep history of colonization, massacres and exploitation which leads to resentment (which is not the same as racism in my view, and is definitely not the same as a superiority complex). If you think that's over, just look at who owns land and industry on those islands you'll see it's all white people most of whom inherited their wealth from pillaging the local population.
> I don't think this is true. There's nothing inherently natural about this. One could even argue that cooperation, not competition, is what brought us this far.
Cooperation with the in-group, sure. Outside of that, most humans will at some point compete with the out-group for resources. That's thus far the history of humanity, for the vast majority of people that lived.
> That's not exactly comparable. There's a deep history of colonization, massacres and exploitation which leads to resentment (which is not the same as racism in my view, and is definitely not the same as a superiority complex).
Most of the people currently here have nothing to do with that history though.
> If you think that's over, just look at who owns land and industry on those islands you'll see it's all white people most of whom inherited their wealth from pillaging the local population.
Sure, they may be white but they're mostly filthy rich. Changing a class struggle in a race struggle is divide to reign 101, and it seems to be working.
> Outside of that, most humans will at some point compete with the out-group for resources.
Source?
> for the vast majority of people that lived
That's the history of civilizations maybe, but not every group/culture turns into an imperialist civilization. See also anticiv critiques.
> Most of the people currently here have nothing to do with that history though.
I would argue otherwise. They are not responsible for the actions of their ancestors, but everyone has a possibility and responsibility to correct unfair situations.
> Sure, they may be white but they're mostly filthy rich. Changing a class struggle in a race struggle is divide to reign 101
These are two different aspects of the same situation. How some nations and people became filthy rich is historically tied to a history of hierarchy of races and cultures, and this cannot be ignored. Studying class/race without the other is doomed to failure.
Race reductionism is just as dangerous as class reductionism. It's often brought up in leftist circles that bringing up racism in political analysis is "dividing left-unity". However, historically (at least here in France), immigrants had to form their own unions (Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée, Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes) because they were discriminated in the mainstream anticapitalist movement. Now we're facing a second trend of economically-privileged liberals over-emphasizing racial issues while downplaying class struggles, and that's equally misjudging.
>It's not and never been that people were incapable of integrating. Usually it's that they're refused the opportunity by being recognisably other and easy to discriminate against in various more or less overt ways.
Why is it that the people themselves never have any responsibility for integrating themselves?
Britain has three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
Speaking about France specifically, that's not true. People 50 years mostly knew how to recognize French from Italians. Not with 100% certainty of course, but what you say about " once they speak french it’s pretty hard to differentiate an italian from a southern french or corsican" is a bit like when people say asian people look all the same. Also, immigrants in France 50 years ago made more sacrifices to intergrate themselves (be it Italians, North Africans or Asians). They took French names, spoke French at home, things like that. I've seen a few documentaries about this. It was frequent from Asian to suddenly be told "now your name is <French name> and not <Asian name>", and be told to not speak anything else than French outside of home. Same for Italians, same for North Africans. The immigration was also more limited at the time, which allowed some people from North Africa, especially young women, to get away from their traditions and have a better place in society.
That is not what is happening right now. I'm not sure of the causes, but things have changed.
Edit: as some other people mentionned, work might make a big difference. The grandfather of a friend was a bus driver all his life, and that friend and his father are well integrated. If you can't access a job like that it's going to be hard to fit into society.
> Speaking about France specifically, that's not true. People 50 years mostly knew how to recognize French from Italians.
No, a second or third-generation french of italian origins is not recognisably non-french at a glance. At best they can be recognised as "not from the area" (which in some places is still a concern, but nowhere near the same).
> is a bit like when people say asian people look all the same.
It really is not.
A second or third-generation french of african or middle-eastern or asian origin can generally be recognised at a glance.
> Also, immigrants in France 50 years ago made more sacrifices to intergrate themselves (be it Italians, North Africans or Asians). […] That is not what is happening right now. I'm not sure of the causes, but things have changed.
That's from 140 years ago. It might as well be from yesterday, with the nations of origin changed.
And it's hilarious that you're now using north african immigrants as a model minority alongside asians as a cudgel to hit others.
> The immigration was also more limited at the time, which allowed some people from North Africa, especially young women, to get away from their traditions and have a better place in society.
Hundreds of thousands of italians moved to france during the first diaspora: the italian population in france went from 63000 in 1850 to 330000 in 1901 (this does not include seasonal worker). The country was barely 40 million people. And over a million non-pieds-noirs immigrated from northern africa between the 50s and 70s.
> No, a second or third-generation french of italian origins is not recognisably non-french at a glance.
I thought we were talking about first generation immigrants. I agree with you that second or third generation immigrants from Italy are hard/impossible to recognize, but that's not the case for others.
> That's from 140 years ago. It might as well be from yesterday, with the nations of origin changed.
There's rarely mentions of nations of origins in the news these days, journalists mostly talk about "young people", probably because pointing out the countries of origin would be racist, and also because sometimes the people mentionned have been in the country for a few generations.
> And it's hilarious that you're now using north african immigrants as a model minority alongside asians as a cudgel to hit others.
I wasn't hitting other minorities, I mentionned how some acted differently before. These days having to sacrifice your culture to integrate yourself in a country is seen as a bad thing. Before it was the obvious thing to do. I'm not passing judgment on any of those views, but highlighting that the mentalities have changed.
> Hundreds of thousands of italians moved to france during the first diaspora: the italian population in france went from 63000 in 1850 to 330000 in 1901 (this does not include seasonal worker). The country was barely 40 million people. And over a million non-pieds-noirs immigrated from northern africa between the 50s and 70s.
We have around ~150k people going in the country every year (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_en_France#Solde_mi...), with ~100k people becoming French each year. Considering the population didn't double since 1850, we now have more immigration in terms of percentage of the population compared to the two events you mentionned.
Again, I'm not passing judgment on anyone. I'm trying to understand why people felt that there was way more cohension in the 70s-90s (when my parents grew), and if their sentiment is true.
Here in NL a beer went from 5-15 cent to 3-4 euro. Tea, coffee and water use to be free. Hell, you would get a free cookie with the coffee.
300 years ago we had no job agencies, there was no need for them. You just went to the local bar and asked the bartender. They would be quick to point out the unemployed guy with the biggest tab and his friends would push him forwards.
Learning a language in school just doesn't work. You have to go to the pub and talk with the [drunk] strangers. Its the only way to learn (and preserve) the local dialect.
Migrants come here and wonder where the f the public places are? Some are quick to build a Mosk. Learning dutch there is somewhat of a challenge to put it mildly.
So the problem [in my view] is that to much effort was put in shutting down public gatherings. We use to have Neighborhood Associations all over. People went there to chat with their neighbors/organize things. It was all shut down from the top down to boost exploitation and dictate the narrative.
And yet, at some point in history all those groups you cited were "stealing our jobs" and "dangerous individuals" whose culture is incompatible with "ours". See also, the myth of the model minority: https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/what-is-the-mode...
> Because within a generation they were impossible to tell apart.
I don't think that's a correct interpretation. I would rather say the conservative blamers found other scapegoats to blame, for example with other immigration waves
> Usually it's that they're refused the opportunity by being recognisably other and easy to discriminate against in various more or less overt ways.
As someone who works as a volunteer at a refugee center and supports a syrian family i can tell you thats not the case. We have two kinds of "refugees" in germany.
1) Real Refugees, that fear for their life
2) Migrants, that use the opportunity and the political climate to come to germany.
The second ones are the ones causing problems. A lot of them are aggressive, dealing drugs, using multiple identities to get more money. They miss their (provided) german classes and in one center they ripped out all ceramic toilets and sinks MULTIPLE TIMES.
The amount of times i had to call the cops because one of them was drunk and drew a knife is just crazy.
So maybe they are refused integration because they are "recognisably other and easy to discriminate against" ... maybe its just because they behave like assholes.
That can be expected from people who went through various forms of traumas and insecurities. The same is usually said of people from poor neighborhoods, with the same kind of disdain.
Social problems are not solved by repression. 60 years ago, there were just as many racist comments pointing out how polish/spanish/italian immigrants were dangerous and not integrating in society. But 60 years ago, the economy was booming and the industry couldn't afford to discard workers; as a consequence, noone was forced a life of insecurity and most people had general faith in the system that if they worked hard enough they could enjoy their life.
Today it's much harder to find a job, especially without a recognized diploma (even janitors and cashiers are expected to have diplomas nowadays) and working very hard every day is not guaranteed to get you out of misery. "Migrants" as you call them, or most of them any way, are very much looking for a job and denied the opportunity. I know quite a lot of illegal immigrants here in france (sans-papiers) and they're always looking for an opportunity to work (they don't have the same social benefits french people and asylum seekers do) and it's very often, either they work very hard for little pay on construction sites or in kitchens (think 10h works 60€ pay) or the boss won't even pay them after weeks of work (that is VERY common in the restauration industry).
This is a hard reality we can't ignore if we try to understand the situation. Give people decent situation and opportunities, and you'll see they'll integrate just fine. Only people who've been denied justice turn to antisocial behavior... that's a very well studied problem in social sciences since way before this latest immigration wave started. Remember that for a very long time, the nobles of Europe claimed to be of a different species (the blue blood) and that workers were genetically programmed to be aggressive, stupid and hard-working.
> maybe its just because they behave like assholes
Take anyone and treat them bad, they'll either become ultra servile, or start behaving like assholes. The same is true with immigrants, which fall into both categories.
Those migrants typically don't qualify for asylum and are basically not allowed in the first place. They are just navigating the system for as long as they do not get expelled, which is impossible in some cases.
It is beyond me why you would give these people the right to work.
Them being allowed to stay is not my point. My point is that IF they are in the country they will do something. If you do not allow them to work, they will do other things.
Either have proper borders around Europe, push them out instantly etc. or allow them to work. But don't complain about them dealing drugs. It is not the underlying problem here, just a logical consequence.
Side note: Just legalizing marihuana would also work.
No it doesn't. I am from NL, we have legalized the (selling to) consumer part for decades, so they'll do other stuff.
I agree it is a difficult political problem ( which we created ourselves ), but just as other 'simple' solutions are not feasible, simply allowing them to work is equally infeasible.
Unfortunately, once they are here, we will have a very hard time to push them out again. They will destroy their passports, lie about there identy, their countries of origin won't take them back etc.
If we do not want them, closed Southern and Eastern EU borders or rather closed North African borders are our only courses of action. We can try to work with North Africa and Turkey to handle asylum processes over there. Of course this does brings some moral problems with it and will be opposed by the left. Children drowning is the ultimate bad publicity for your political stance. It comes down to what we are willing or feel obliqued to take responsibility for.
People, who are already here will stay anyway. That ship has sailed, we should start integrating asap.
> generous capacity of the host population is extinguished
I don't doubt there is a lot of individual generosity in people. However, the assumption that social benefits are profitable and very open to immigrants to people is very wrong. Life on social benefits is hard, and immigrants don't live in luxury. Hell, a lot of immigrants have to live illegally due to racist "asylum" policies (you cannot apply for asylum as citizen of a country which is not recognized to be unsafe by your host country, or rather you can but you can be almost certain it will be refused).
I don't disagree that helping remote communities overcome their problems in an autonomous manner would help, in place of the current neocolonial theft and NGO industrial complex which creates dependency schemes instead of developing local autonomy.
But in the end, who are you to judge where someone should be allowed to live? Was someone in charge of judging whether you are allowed to reside where you live currently? Do you think it's a fair mechanism? If so, why is it only applied to people from the global south moving to the global north, and never the other way around?
So if people are so poor that they cannot feed their family, it's - at least generally - their own fault?
Specially in a notoriously wealthy place like Munich?
And you, Watrami, volunteer for a food bank there to help people that hurt themselves through their own misguidedness - is that it?
You thought social services didn't have it's share of racists ? They see never ending misery (because if the misery stops they stop seeing the people), and they must have an explanation.
Obviously they have the same demands for an explanation as society at large: they themselves are perfect (for example, these kids go to school, so they can be taught German, it just doesn't happen), so the explanation must be something else. It can't be them, themselves. It can't be the support structure. It can't be society around them (even though one just exposed himself as somewhat of a racist). So who is left? Homeowners, banks, that sort of thing if they're generous. The immigrants and their backwards ways must just cause it themselves! (and I might agree: in some cases that's true. Generally it's not)
It's like youth services. They generally blame what happens to kids ... on the kids. And if not on the kids, then on the parents. The most generous will blame the most useless blame of all "society". Never themselves. Despite research pointing out that the many "missed" kids (who stay with abusive parents) have a far better life than foster kids. In other words: even when you can prove that it is the social workers themselves CAUSING misery, they will still blame anyone else.
And in Germany, like in many other places, give a try to finding an Arabic-language German course book for cheap, through social services. Go ahead, give that a try. That doing so is so very hard, of course, has nothing to do with immigrants failing to learn.
My startup is providing a somewhat similar service to our customers. However, we also provide intel on suspicious activity regarding the customer's software on social media and on forums. This way our beta testers were able to prevent the OWA hacks that happened a few weeks ago. It's primarily targeted towards small and medium business that usually lack some deeper knowledge in cyber security and can't monitor this stuff themselves.
As a guy trying to build something while still in Uni I'd have to name most episodes of the indiehackers podcast. It's incredibly valuable for me to listen to established "normal" founders telling their story. It feels like I'm at a table with them.
It proves that failing at previous projects doesn't mean that you are a failure yourself.
I'm from southern Germany and the startup scene here is basically non-existent. So listening to indiehackers is sort of like a replacement for other meetups.
I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even gives me the chance in the first place after they see my income and plans. Right now I am paying 940€ for ~20sqm, and only because my mom co-signed my contract - which is incredibly humiliating as a 24 year old guy.
And even with high-paying jobs it's impossible to get anything remotely affordable. My girlfriend just finished her degree and makes 75k straight out of college and still gets rejected either for her financial situation or because the rental contract is already set to increase 8% each year - which we simply cannot afford. And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.
How the hell are we ever supposed to build up some savings, settle down and have a comfortable life? It really feels like being born 15 years too late for this.
Germany paid a lot for our education but offers us little reason to stay. We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories.
Sorry for the rant.