The problem isn’t a lack of “cute little lake houses”. The problem are is a lack of “affordable homes”. Or any home.

And adjusting to what exactly? Living in squalor way outside of what you call home because some parasite gets to live in a furnished and unaffordable temp home, payed for by a relocation package?

If you care at all about convincing others of this point, I think you should know that when you use words like “parasite” to describe people engaging in ordinary economic activity my eyes roll back in my head and I don’t hear anything else you have to say.

I think the wealthy are already well beyond the denial phase and that is part of the problem. There might be a global panicked landgrab being undertaken by those who control large amounts of capital. Because if they dont, someone else will.

The underlying issue is wealth inequality. There's a glut of capital chasing returns internationally that grows bigger every year.

If 10 people with $1 to spend on an apple, and one person suddenly had $11 you could say demand for apples had "doubled", implying that this the result of an implacable, impersonal, unchangeable force but it absolutely isnt.

This is a bit of a shell game. What you describe is just another way to say that demand has increased. And your reframing doesn’t help us much, because there’s nothing in the short term you’re going to do to drastically change the global inequality landscape. So if we accept your explanation we’re actually worse off than where we started.

I reframed it in such a way to make it abundantly clear that the problem can be solved at any point with the judicious application of new taxes.

That guy with $11 just needs to lose most of it or not be able to spend it and then there is no more apples shortage "due to high demand".

Portugal cant tax an overly rich canadian living in canada but they can absolutely cut the bottom out of the portuguese-property-market-as-a-bitcoin-like-store-of-wealth. This would not only free up land for portuguese habitation it would help fill the portuguese budget hole.

However, for some reason that is probably more about a variety of property owning portuguese politicians getting very rich and not attracting useful investment, the Portuguese government encouraged this with the golden visa. They only cut porto and lisbon out of the program after a steep backlash.

Land value tax solves this (as they say).