Comment by donkeybeer
4 months ago
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.
And building over every piece of land available diminishes quality of life in someplace like Switzerland with physically constrained geography.
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