Prices have risen by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and nearly 15% in the European Union between 2015 and 2024. Though policies have been implemented to increase supply and regulate rentals, their impact has been limited and the problem is getting worse
Housing access has become a critical issue worldwide, with cities that were once accessible reaching unsustainable price points. Solutions that have been proposed, like building more houses, capping rents, investing in subsidized housing and limiting the purchase of properties by foreigners have not stemmed the issue’s spread. Between 2015 and 2024, prices rose by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and by nearly 15% in the European Union (including by 26% in Spain), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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Salaries have not grown apace with real estate prices. In the EU, the median rent rose by 20% between 2010 and 2022, with rental and purchase prices growing by up to 48%, according to Eurostat. Underregulated markets are wreaking havoc, and in the United States and Spain, 20% of renters spend more than 40% of their income on housing, while in France, Italy, Portugal and Greece, that percentage varies between 10% and 15%, according to the OECD. Many countries have created programs aimed at increasing the future supply of public housing, but their effectiveness has yet to be determined and analysts say that results will be limited if smarter regional planning decisions are not made.
Supply and demand. Stop letting people (or corporations) buy more than one house and watch prices fall. I own a home, and I’m perfectly willing to see it lose value in order to avoid seeing my country turn into some modern feudalistic hellhole.
My condo has gone up at least $100k in value since I bought it just before shit went crazy, but that value is meaningless if I can’t afford to capitalize on it and move anywhere. I feel like I’m basically trapped in this house, since everything else has gone up so much more than my place.
Same. If Zillow is correct my house is worth 90k more than we paid for it, but I can’t sell it because everything else went up with it, and I’m locked into a stupid low interest rate. It’s like someone gave me a beer that never gets empty, but I also have to hold it forever. If I want to switch to a different drink I’m shit outta luck, but I can’t really complain because I always have the beer 🤷♂️
If only other people saw it the same. Property/homes should’ve never been an investment asset.
At some point we need to have a grown up conversation about the finite nature of land, specifically land that people can live on and find work from.
This “the rich make up the rules and lets pretend land will never run out” nonsense clearly isn’t working for anyone but the rich.
A lot of this was already talked about by the traditional Left, way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The discussion back then was all about Power, and by that I mean the capacity of forcing or blocking others from doing what they want, not just the version of “Power” talked about the useful idiots nowadays which only sees the Power of the State, never the Power that comes from Money and Ownership.
This is why some of the suggested solutions they came up with back then explicitly involved things like Confiscating the Means Of Production and Land Reform, which, whether one agrees or not with it, at least recognized and tried to address the Power inherent in the Ownership of that which is needed to produce things for the rest.
The problem is that the supposedly Leftwing (but really mostly Liberal and not even honestly so) thinking since at least the 80s pointedly avoids talking about the Power Of Money as if people’s life’s aren’t shaped by access to a place to live, access to food, access to healthcare and the time they have to spend working being defined by how little of the product of their work ends up in their hands, none of which is trully their choice nowadays.
Maybe we should start again looking back at some of the best things from back then, such as Social Democracy.
I’m on my thirties, I don’t know a single person that can afford to live alone, they are either sharing with a stranger/spouse or still with their parents.
The governments solution will be to start offering 40 year mortgages. Do nothing to make housing affordable, just extend the time to pay it off like they’ve done with auto loans going from 60 months to 72 months terms.
This is part of the plan to keep crushing the middle class. The powers that be would be able to change this situation within weeks if they really wanted to.
It’s been the plan for a while now. The wealthy look back at the Gilded Age as the Golden Age. That’s what they’re trying to return to very clearly. They want an age in which you and your children go to work in the dark and come home in the dark and that home is owned by the company. They want an age in which none of us have any chance at all of breaking loose of the cycle.
Well, in the Post 2008 Crash World with the most favorable policies for the Asset Owner class since the time of the Monarchy, after the rich finished draining the Poor and Traditional Working class using rent-seeking anchored on their control of assets connected to life essentials (most obviously, Housing) and, especially in the West, their leverage of the Demand Side for Work thanks to having sent most jobs abroad with Globalization (something which was itself pushed by the rich in the 70s and is core in Neoliberalism), they would obviously go after the Middle-Class next.
I mean, did anybody really expect that the Greed of the Owner Class would somehow magically stop when the only large pool of wealth left out of their hands was the one held by the Middle-Class?
What I find funny in all this is the “Modern” “Left” parties were the scions of the Middle-Class obsess over Supposedly-Left-but-really-Liberal ideas (mainly Identity Politics) having forgotten the core concern of the old-fashioned Traditional Left (such as Communism, Socialism, Social-Democracy and independently of one agreeing with their actual solutions of not) which is about Power (in the sense of who, if any, can impose their will on others directly or indirectly) hence totally ignoring the detail that 4 decades of Neoliberalism have de facto turned Money into a Power far above the State, and which most definitelly forces on others choices such as were to live, how to live, and what to do.
The “Modern” “Left” thinking, birthed in the 80s from some ideas from American think tanks and without Equality explicitly as an Ideology (instead they had some pre-made policies for “Equalities” - i.e. Equality on a group by group basis, with how much each person’s deserving of fair and equal treatment and access to things in life depending on their “group” membership defined by their genetics, religion, gender, sexual orientation or place of birth - that avoided like the plague even mentioning Equality For All, the only real Equality) were useful idiots for the Neoliberals and now here were are, when even those priviledged scions of the Middle and Upper Middle-Class are starting to be squeezed by the wealthy, whose power they so pointedly avoided talking about and criticizing, must less trying to control and reduce.
Con-fucking-gratulations!
Just want to point out, EU inflation rate from 2015 - 2024 is a 12% change, so out of the 3 examples listed only the EU has had stable prices. Technically housing prices went down in some EU countries based on this information, like Portugal. And EU inflation has gone down since the 2022 spike, which means there was a tiny housing bubble in 2022.
This only applies to housing prices of course - rent is a different story so being addressed in different ways across different EU members.
Yeah, I was curious so I was looking the other day, median household income I believe came out to 14% of the median house cost in the U.S. (in 2022) in 1975 it was around 28%.
It’s affecting the working poor worse. the middle class can still afford rent far easier.
Basic, modern human needs such as housing, healthcare, education, nutrition, utilities (electricity, internet, water & sewage), and transportation should never be a means of profit. As with everything, there is a cost to maintaining these systems and to profit off of them inherently means diverting resources away from these systems that serve our society into the pocket of an individual.
Hey, here’s a thought: outside of banks holding the deed in the context of mortgages, corporations aren’t allowed to own residential properties for perma-renting purposes.
I’m in the middle of relocating to Ohio. I sold my house in GA and despite getting mildly fucked by the “they’re first time homeowners” BS I still have about $130,000 profit from the sale. 100k of that has to go into the down payment just so I can afford anything over 200k.
My initial budget was about 310,000 but I had to bump it up to 350 just to find something that isn’t a poorly maintained shit hole that would require 50k just to make it decent again, and to have more than 1.5 bathrooms.
And this is on top of all the houses bought by people who watched a a season of Flippers, and thought it they put shittier grey vinyl on the floor they could net 100k.
Come round everyone! I got a proposal! How about we buy up entire city squares, then remove all vegetation and houses, then build endless labyrinths of corridors, cubes where we can live. And elevators and stairs to reach the next level! Using an elevator is just like riding a commuter bus thru the 4th dimension! Because you start at your cube and suddenly you’re at the cube on the next block that corresponds to your cube! But see you didn’t have to travel a full block horizontally! You rode vertically!
Calm down willy wonka
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Where have you been for the last 30 years? You’re just noticing this shit now?
In Canada in top of that, we have 500k-1 million new people entering the country, per year. We have no housing, and not enough services, schools, healthcare, etc.
Canada is about the same population than California, imagine California going from 39 millions people to 40 next year, then 41 the year after, then 42 the next year, etc. Is it sustainable?
Great if you own property and or buy labour though.
Somehow they’ve got the world convinced that its “tha left”, and not wealthy businesses, who want and benefit from this, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Why are you trying to hijack the thread to make it about your xenophobic hot take on immigration?
Having 500K-1M new people could mean having as many as 500K-1M new construction workers to build more housing, if that’s what the zoning code and the market (etc.) allowed. That that isn’t happening is a failure of those things, not the fault of the immigrants. There is absolutely no reason a properly-functioning society would be unable to keep up with the demand from population increases, and scapegoating immigrants will do absolutely fuck-all to fix any of the real causes of society’s failure to function properly.
Lol I’m a Canadian immigrant, and regular population has something like 4% of people working in construction, new immigrants has something like 2% of people working in construction, so no, they will not build more housing. The problem is not immigrants, it’s a system/society problem, like you wrote, Canada is not a properly-functioning society.
