"Anti foreigner sentiment"? Dear NYT, try to find an apartment in the EU or Switzerland. At best, you will get a furnished (to circumvent rent caps), overpriced 30 square meter dump that takes up 40% of your net salary.
Once that problem is solved, we can talk about "sentiments".
I doubt that very much. Sure there's places where the rent is less, but there's no jobs there. So a very low rent will still be over 40% of your pay (ie. nothing)
I am looking at a 4 room apartment in a very nice villa next to a small national park right now, for 560€, with a train going twice an hour 15 minutes ride to the town with my potential next job. (In germany)
So salaries there are lower, but so is apparently rent. Way less than 40%, more like 20%.
Yes, most cities are not cheap, but I am also not a city person so the place is in a remote village, but well connected. And no, not naming that concrete place as I really like to move there (again), but it is in western saxony so not that far from chemnitz (a town I don't like so much, the job itself is in a small town).
Ah, yes, as guessed: The region there is quite cheap - in Chemnitz there was a 2 room apartment for 350 EUR (including heating), fully furnished, at the city/castle pond: Excellent price, but the disctrict was not that great.
Commenting about downvotes usually does not help, but maybe they came because you said rents in cities are higher while I spoke of a place outside cities?
Don't take it too serious would be my advice, downvotes also sometimes happen by accident with a big thump on touchscreen.
Sure, I was just surprised :)
Its an online community and we should not put any attention in those, but I know the german situation very well, plus their current economic downturn
Sure, apartments in Paris are overpriced because of immigrants buying them all. Fuck, that is so stupid. The same people parroting this anti-foreigners hate are also completely indifferent to slumlords profiteering on housing, and will support politicians who consistently side with landlords and homeowners over tenants and first buyers. Housing has never become more affordable under a right wing government.
Explain how. All the anti-immigration guys I've ever met were right-wingers. And we know the right's position on housing: never do anything that would devalue housing, never anger homeowners, always side with landlords, etc.
I don't know whether I'd call myself anti-immigration, but I'm as left as they come and I don't think that being pro-immigration is a left/right value. You can be on the left and have objections to immigration, you can be on the right and welcome immigration.
Most people think that being anti-immigration equals being racist and wanting refugees to be turned away. And given your comment, that is also what you seem to believe. However, the large majority of immigration is state-sanctioned (so work visas, etc.), is not the immigration you hear about in the news or that racists talk about, and it's neither a left nor a right issue.
Immigration does have economic benefits, but I'm certain you'll agree nothing in the world is only good or only bad. Immigration does lead to larger competition on housing (more people = more demand), and generally this happens in the cities where the housing crisis is the worst. So more immigration undoubtedly benefits landlords.
Immigration also means more competition for jobs, which leads in practice to lower wages. So it also benefits capital-owners.
So you can be leftist, campaign to increase intake of refugees, campaign against the housing crisis and wealth inequality, and be against immigration.
As an example that might change your opinion (beyond talking to a leftist who does not think immigration is nothing but good): when the Tories came to power after Brexit, they implemented policies that greatly facilitated immigration (2-4 times yearly intake to what it was before Brexit) [0]. Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?
I would consider myself well on the left too, and I mostly agree with what you're saying. But I simply reject the premise that anti-immigration policies and the people who support them do anything to help curb the housing crisis or improve working conditions. Immigration can be a net positive for the general population, if it goes hand-in-hand with worker and tenant protections, etc.
> Corporations and the right are very much pro-immigration. Would you have expected that?
Corporations and the old right, maybe, but the new populist right is very much anti-immigration. It is their main talking point and platform in today's political landscape.
> I simply reject the premise that anti-immigration policies and the people who support them do anything to help curb the housing crisis or improve working conditions.
I think you're again fighting a right-wing anti-immigration stance. I'm talking about the opposite of that.
> Immigration can be a net positive [...] if it goes hand-in-hand with worker and tenant protections
I'm certain you can see that this is a huge if. In practice, limiting immigration can indeed avoid worsening the housing crisis or decreasing wages, which can indeed help the relevant unions/charities campaign more effectively.
Reasoning by extreme: would you agree that importing 2M people per year to the UK would make the housing market and wages worse, independent of any ifs? Then you agree that there is a threshold where there is too much immigration, even with perfect conditions.
> right is very much anti-immigration
The Tories were very much anti-immigration, if you looked at their talking points. They were very much pro-working class, and Labour is very-much pro-human rights and pro-democracy. What they do is different.
Being anti-immigration is actually left-wing and pro-labor in most functional countries in the EU. It’s only in the US and the UK where being left-wing also being means pro-open borders, however odd that may be.
Immigration is a broad topic. Immigration can be a valuable tool that benefits everybody, and it can destroy communities. Development has the same dichotomy (any kind - residential or otherwise). I'm certainly "anti-immigration" by some standards (i.e. "we're doing immigration bad", not "immigration as an idea is bad"). At the same time, I'm highly liberal (American).
(In case you're suspicious of other stereotypes: I'm not wealthy and have no interest in my home as an investment, and I don't live in California)
Stance on immigration and development is not nearly as strongly correlated with left/right as other wedge issues like reproductive rights, government secularism, etc.
You're stating this option like it's obvious and simple, but this all just amounts to choosing which of multiple ways to make one's country worse. While growth/immigration has macro-economic positives, it's not infinitely positive, so it doesn't justify ever-denser housing and ever-increasing cultural sub-dividing forever - and as people become less happy, they care less and less about "how the economy is doing".
Of course, nobody can agree on where the line is, or escape the shoulder-rubbing with racism and classism while trying to argue where the line is.
It's much easier to blame the out group for your issues. The US currently has a sizable percentage of people that believe ICE deportations are going to lower housing prices, for example.
Immigrants make up 32.5% of construction workers[0] so without them we're unable to build new housing unless you have a solution to the falling birth rate and human capital. Also, they're more likely to reside with extended family or non-family members[1] (i.e. not eating up single family home supply)
So yes, while they might have some effect on housing supply, deporting them won't make a dent in prices. If you believe that deportations = cheaper houses, then I have a bridge to sell you. Too many localities have strict building regulations that artifically keep housing prices inflated; deportations won't do anything to fix that.
Citizens can choose to prioritize quality of life over maximizing housing stock to increase the domestic population. “We’re all full up.” It is their country after all, it is their choice. Those who want in are not stakeholders nor have a vote.
For every other product the default stance is to try to get maximum features out of minimum price. With housing its the literal opposite. People take pride in how expensive houses are. Houses are treated as investments because houses are expensive. People won't worry about houses getting cheaper after they bought it if houses were like a toothbrush or a razor blade. Give me reasons why housing shouldn't be turned into a product so cheap and by default decent quality that people buy and throw it? You may say its hard or impossible, but would you say its a bad goal in itself?
I don’t have to give you reasons, those putting forth these proposals have their reasons and potentially the votes required to pass it. Economic rationality or consideration of potential immigrants wanting inexpensive housing somewhere they aren’t a citizen are not factors.
If Switzerland doesn’t want high population density throughout their country for quality of life reasons, that’s a choice, through their votes. If you don’t have a vote, you don’t get a say. There’s 8B+ humans on the planet and that will peak between ~9-10B before the end of the century, not everyone is going to get to live where they want to live during their life and runtime on the timeline. Is it sad and/or unfortunate? It just is.
Its the opposite of quality of life. Immigrants are irrelevant to it. Higher housing costs benefit nobody, local or immigrant. In no place in earth are housing costs coming down, so no matter immigrant or not we need to build housing at a mass scale just to have a fighting chance against rising prices. Making this about immigrants is bullshit. Refusing to build houses is utter bullshit, its the opposite of quality of life. It leads to crap quality of life and then people whine and cry and ask for more self destructive crap further spiraling into crap. Making houses cheap benefits everyone, keeping houses expensive harms everyone.
Let us amend the plan of action. People proposing this policy should lead by example and kill themselves to show commitment to keeping population in check.
Then they should make death chambers for people if they think they are full. At 9 million people, they could choose to live nicely with 4000 sq m lots per person or they can keep crying about housing prices while not doing the one tried and tested solution capitalism offers to high prices. Even if we take out untenable mountain land, how much does that leave us? There is no place on earth that is lacking land for housing. Its a self created problem.
It's amazing how quickly globalists were able to get the ideological left to switch from having riots protesting against globalism to declaring it racist to have any anti-globalist thoughts. Even more amazing are the intellectual knots they'll tie themselves up into when explaining how this came to be. The participants of the Battle of Seattle in 1999 now would be considered Nazis.
> The participants of the Battle of Seattle in 1999 now would be considered Nazis.
Given that I participated in that back in 99, and have been called a Nazi three times over the past two weeks for anodyne views, you’re literally not wrong.
The problem is that most people want to live in cities for whatever reason and, lo and behold, if one wants to buy regional and biological the grain has to grow somewhere on the countryside.
But yeah, most people have lost touch with where food comes from originally, before it's in the shelves of your supermarket.
> Has changing zoning laws historically ever boosted housing construction by more than 10%
Certainly has in New Zealand - particularly in Christchurch and Auckland. The local politics are against densification - but the national politics have been ascendant. Over the last decade, New Zealand’s housing stock has grown by approximately 16%.
Densification has gone up in city centres - with broad political support from our left and right parlimentarians.
We must have more houses because our population is rising through immigration. Like many countries, we have too many retirees and not enough workers: so New Zealand is using immigration to patch that problem (particularly in healthcare and elderly care). Currently about 30% of our population was born in another country (gained residency or passport). It isn't a stable solution since working immigrants eventually get old too. The alternative is population growth which is also unstable in the long term (plus population growth is harder for the government to encourage).
There are many issues, and a lot of the same rhetoric you see in the US, but broadly immigration seems to be helping our economy.
If you're from the US, the state closest to NZ for population, size and weather would be Oregon (to give you a comparison).
I am happy with any method that increases housing, whether its government made housing programs or easing of zoning laws. Why see a conflict when both are contributing to the same goal?
I would prefer it if solutions which doubled housing constuction rates were promoted above solutions which housing developers lobbied the hardest for but which will barely move the needle.
They are also competing for the same land, which is the commodity that is actually in short supply.
“We will do literally anything to make housing more affordable except build more of it.”
Forget where I first saw that but it’s absolutely true.
The left will try rent control, subsidies, taxes and prohibitions against speculation, banning AirBnB, etc. The right will try mass deportations and population caps.
Nobody will build more housing because that would work, and home owners are incentivized not to do anything that would work, and homeowners vote in much larger numbers.
The problem won’t be solved until renters out vote homeowners and until everyone who wants more affordable housing stops advocating the solutions that will not work.
How? I can't seem to affect any control the factors that constraint housing. I want to build more, but short of becoming a developer myself, I'm powerless. Even if I were a developer, I'd likely be subject to the same structural forces.
In Switzerland most people rent, in Zurich/Geneva it's more than 80% of inhabitants, doesn't help one bit. I kid you not, we have the renter association that is working tirelessly to prevent new construction.
I guess the motives are not just financial. They’re also just general opposition to change.
There was this weird period after WWII where we built tons of housing. It was a major factor in building the largest middle class in human history. Then we stopped.
I support YIMBYism for ones own countrymen but I don't see the need to fit as many people as possible in your country. A Switzerland with 25 million people will be a worse place to live regardless of whether the housing supply keeps up
Wouldn't a referendum to limit immigration be the way to reveal their preference? Obviously immigrants would tautologically prefer to move there. How is a citizen to "vote" against that via the market? Discriminate and refuse to rent/sell to any immigrants? Charge them more to try to offset their perceived loss of utility? What portion of the country is even in a position to be asked the question via the market?
Again, how is money supposed to measure value here? Are people supposed to look into whether every company interacts with immigrants in any way and then boycott them if they do? The only avenue I see is for people to look at the aggregate economic benefits of immigration and then decide to limit it anyway, effectively treating the opportunity cost as the price they're willing to pay.
Using the market as a revealed preference indicator is a disaster. There are too many perverse incentives and indirect causes-and-effects. It's like the scene in Battlefield Earth where they decide a human's favorite food is rat by observation.
Once that problem is solved, we can talk about "sentiments".
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