Comment by krthat1
4 months ago
"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".
Immigrants must have an immense power over these countries if they are able to forcibly prevent the construction of new housing.
im not sure about Switzerland, but there are areas in Germany, where you can.
Not middle of nowhere Germany either, rents in Berlin are shockingly reasonable from an outside Germany perspective
Because they all moved to Switzerland?
https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-news/which-national...
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)
Then maybe actually check places yourself?
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%.
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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.
This is a particularly egregious case of the "same people" fallacy.
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.
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Maybe work on changing zoning laws instead of pandering to farmers and rural cantons?
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?
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Building more houses would help domestics too. Otherwise tell me how keeping housing artificially low will benefit the locals?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Does supply and demand apply or not? Building houses increases supply. Deportations reduce demand.
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Social housing programs have historically doubled or tripled housing construction.
Has changing zoning laws historically ever boosted housing construction by more than 10%?
> 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?
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Why would they want to do that?
So what you are saying is that these places have not built enough housing. That sounds like the actual problem, not the population size.
“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.
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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.
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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
Only the market can decide what's better or worse. Revealed preference is truer than words.
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