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.
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!
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.
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
You’ll have to convince the politicians to give up their real estate portfolios. Address the fact that politicians are allowed to profit off of insider trading and policy making that directly affects their other investments, then we might see some willingness to go after the Blackrocks and Vanguards.
Funny. All of the politicians in Canada have homes and make way more money per year than their salary, and we keep bringing in more immigrants despite the fact we aren’t building new homes. I’m sure the 2 things are unrelated.
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!
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.
We need to stop using the term “middle class.”
Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.
Today it’s two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.
We’re in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.
Yeah the press’ve been claiming it’s dying for 40+ years. y’all… It’s dead
The middle class has always been a myth to get people to work harder and for a homogenized society where everyone’s got that “all-American” family with a white picket fence. We can once again blame fucking Henry Ford. See Ford’s sociological department for the literal enforcement of this ideal in exchange for his touted “$5 a day!” lure. Company people came around to your house to check what you were eating, how you were dressed, how your kids were doing in school, and if you were an immigrant, how assimilated you were becoming and if it was acceptably quick enough.
No. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.
Look up “Hells Angel’s” by Hunter Thompson. There’s a chapter where he runs down the economics of dropping out circa 1970. A biker could work a Union stevedore job for six months and earn enough to live on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her musicain boyfriend.
That was before Nixon started printing paper dollars to pay for Vietnam and Ronald Reagan cut taxes for the rich.
I have read Hell’s Angels, and while Hunter S. is always interesting, I wouldn’t really trust him to get his facts straight on anything except Nixon or college football. Blue collar work and trades are not necessarily what you’d call “middle class” in terms of performativity. You can have money, but middle class is about that idyllic myth being pushed. You can always have people living outside of the myth, but the Hell’s Angels lifestyle on the road is not for the 99% of people who are cultured to need the suburban 9-5er. Adorno writes extensively about the Culture Industry and being endlessly cheated out of promises that the (entertainment) media sells us, like as previously mentioned, sitcoms showing what a family ought to look like and their means. Also, fuck Reagan.
. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.
In 1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average US home was $11,000.00.
I wanna see those college graduates struggling with the bills. I know artists, PhD students, unqualified workers and else who have this problem to some degree. I don’t know anyone with a college degree and 3+ years of private sector experience struggling. We can debate wth is with the stagnant real wages, but certainly nobody with a decent degree is struggling. Or only by choice.
What I know contrary is people with any IT related degree, or businessy degrees, or STEM grads going into consulting, etc. And all those people earning enough to support a family of 3 way before hitting their 30s, yet being single and enjoying that income all by themselves . They then pay insane rents in the cities, travel, go out for dinner every other night, maintain some random portfolio of ETFs, buy groceries at organic-only groceries, and so on.
So, yeah, wages been stuck for a looong while. But if you struggle to make the ends meet with a college degree it’s on you.
if you struggle to make the ends meet with a college degree it’s on you.
Counter example: teachers
Yeah. Al sold shoes. Unreal.
A bunch of people complaining about a show they clearly never watched.
He barely supported a family of 4 on that pay. Especially the early seasons make running gags that they’re all on the brink of starvation as in fighting over an m&m they found in the kitchen to a tiny scrap of food elsewhere in the house, and skipping out on checks if they are out. Marcy had often complained the Bundy household was an eyesore for the neighborhood and was dilapidated. Plus his Dodge which was in constant disrepair, and was so old the odometer had rolled over from 999,999. Even more running gags about how Al only owns 3 pairs of underwear, all his socks are falling apart and have holes in them, and his generap wardrobe is cheap and out of date even for the time period. Al and Bud are often looking for some kind of side hustle while Kelly likely gets a lot of stuff bought for her from all the guys she dates.
But let’s not forget an the important fact…it’s a fictitious TV show made for the purposes of entertainment about a lower class family and anyone who tries to use it as examples of affordability or someone living beyond their means should have lost all credibility to their argument.
It was also a work of fiction.
Or propaganda.
A lot of 80s/90s TV was selling a lie because it was primarily written by the upper middle classes portraying the lives of the working class.
They had little idea how things actually worked.
And had money to go to the nudie bar…
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.
You guys have a middle class?
The middle class is a myth so newspapers can pander to you by letting you pretend you’re better than the working poor. Half of food stamps are in the “middle” class these days.
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.
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.
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.
How? There is just too many people, too few houses here in Australia. Not enough materials to build them or tradespeople.
If a government can’t organize the population towards building then what you got ain’t a functional government. A society that fails to build is a society that soon will fail to exist. History supports this.
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
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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