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.
It’s affecting the working poor worse. the middle class can still afford rent far easier.
Middle class isn’t real. Everybody (perhaps over a certain age) thinks they are the middle class. There are those who own the factories, farms, offices, etc. And there are those who go in and sell their labour to make a living. “Middle class” is a term invented to sow division in the second group.
What a dishonest argument.
There’s a world of difference from someone barely getting by, living paycheck to paycheck, versus a middle class worker well into their career, able to afford minor luxuries and still squirrel away money for savings and retirement.
I am middle class. I am 20 years into my career. I make comparatively good money.
But due to not prioritizing buying property, I’ve pretty much missed my window. I can qualify for a mortgage, have the 20% down-payment, but the monthly payment would pretty much wipe me out, costing around $3k more per month than renting.
If I were at this point in my career 20 years ago, I could have easily afforded a house comfortably.
That is what we’re talking about when we talk about the housing crisis for specifically the middle class.
Middle class doesn’t mean anything. It’s a term to pander to suburbanites.
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.
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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%.
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!
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
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.
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.
Wait, what?
Hold on. Around here, house prices have falled, dramatically recently.
In fact, 54% increase from 2015-2024 is low. When my house was appraised a year ago, it was +72.5%, it is now +54.5%.
Housing prices, anecdotal as it is, are going in the right direction.
Your house matches their estimates and you’re questioning their numbers?
No, they aren’t talking about the sudden drop, they’re talking about the rapid increase. Which I get the point but we may finally be looking at a true correction, which is hopeful more than anything
Or it was just your area reverting back to the prevailing trend. Microeconomics vs macro.
Where is “here” for your buddy?
Upper Midwest.
Zillow is months behind, but you can find chunks where they’ve fallen 10-50k since first listing for houses under $500k.
Yeah, my parents just sold their house in the Midwest after dropping the price by 30k. The key is, house prices are dropping in places no one wants to live (like the Midwest). Anywhere worth living, housing is only going up, up, up.
Worth living? :(
TBF it’s boring as fuck out here
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.
How? There is just too many people, too few houses here in Australia. Not enough materials to build them or tradespeople.
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.
I know three people who can live alone. My friend the computer scientist, my friend who lives on a property her engineer dad bought, and my friend who live in a three room apartment. Bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, top floor of an older Colonial house. Looks like a converted attic.
That probably says more about your bubble than anything else
Where have you been for the last 30 years? You’re just noticing this shit now?
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.
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.
Stop letting corporations gobble up single family homes.
Stop letting multi-home owners buy and buy and buy.
Tax vacant homes.
Tax vacant homes.
I know this is a popular idea on Lemmy, but intentionally vacant homes are a very small minority next to homes that are not livable or not sellable. It’s mostly going to hurt people who can least afford it
lol you’re worried about the landlords
Source?
Driving through rural areas and seeing all the unlivable homes. Seeing home listings in the rural area I grew up how long they can be on the market even when houses sell here their first day
I don’t see actual stats, but the internet has l plenty of anecdotes like
Edit: data is mostly by state, but does show rural states have th highest percentage of vacant homes. Looks like about 7.5 million “permanently vacant” homes in the US, or 5% of the market, and some percentage of those just won’t sell
However,Alasaka is a great example, listed as one of the highest percentage of vacant homes - but not one of the highest rates of homelessness
Only put a tax on vacant homes where there is an active housing crisis, rural areas should be excluded
I don’t see anything here that supports the idea that a vacancy tax would “hurt people who can least afford it”. Even if we go the anecdotal route, the location of vacant homes says very little about their owners.
Thats why we don’t make decisions on these sorts of things or wild declarations about them based on anecdotes.
Your reply may have come between my original wording and an edit that I thought was “quick enough”
The edit doesn’t really show why it would effect poor people disproportionately. Also, no one should be surprised that vacant homes in the ass end of alaska have very little effect on rates of homelessness.
Homes where noone wants to live don’t count towards relief for a shortage unless you can figure out how to make those places at least baseline attractive to people. Jobs, schools, parks, a sportsball team, all that stuff.
Exactly. Passing a tax on empty homes will disproportionately hurt people who can’t sell for homes that can’t solve the problem
Still makes sense in places with tight housing markets, though. Triply and quadruply so if it’s infested by speculative investment. Then make sure that short-term rentals require a hotel license if it even smells of being a commercial short-term rental (couch surfing is completely fine, doesn’t take up a housing unit) and last, but not least: Public housing. Look at Vienna as to how to do it but that can literally take the better part of a century to do because land. Specifically in the US, you also need to build tons of public transit don’t worry even if you make your metro free at the point of use it’s cheaper than road/sewer upkeep in suburbia. Suburbia is a financial graveyard for municipalities, they just don’t generate enough tax revenue for the infrastructure they demand.
Seems like a solvable problem. If the home isn’t livable, have it condemned. Now it’s a tax write off.
I subscribe to the newsletter for BIG by Matt Stoller and he’s been writing about corporate slumlords and housing cartels lately. Shit’s fucked.
In my city, there’s a bunch of vacant homes that end up becoming crack dens because some out of state financial company bought it hoping to make bank and then forgot about it or defaulted on it.
My city is spending years in court trying to take the property back from these shitty companies.
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