Re:The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
by somewhereoutth on Friday September 02, 2022 @07:27PM
(#32696895)
Interestingly, building new houses won't necessarily make prices go down, as we'll all just compete for the more desirable ones, and pay whatever we can afford to 'get ahead of the Jones'. It might mean that the quality of what we end up living in is better though as the rubbish houses get left unfilled.
Anyway, the problems is not so much that there is not enough housing, but that it is on the wrong place.
Re:The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
by MrPatan on Sunday September 04, 2022 @12:36PM
(#32714816)
OK, so with 100m new houses in Lisbon, keeping up with the Joneses would keep the prices up, gotcha.
Re:The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
by galfarragem on Friday September 02, 2022 @05:37AM
(#32688694)
What works in theory doesn't work on reality. That's why I called it the ultimate illusion. With such a global demand for houses here is not feasible to increase the house supply fast enough to drop prices in a way that locals can afford them. You're just feeding the beast: globalization. The only way to tackle it is on the demand side.
Globalization is inevitable. What I don't buy is the rate of change, it _must_ be smooth or the system may implode. Blind and raw globalization is just a way to feed the nationalisms that most people are afraid of.
How do you arrive to that conclusion?
- If you built 100 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 10 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 1 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 100k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 10k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
- If you built 1k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall?
Even if you have a model that says that building more houses raises prices for some number of houses, surely increasing the number will eventually make prices fall, wouldn't you agree?
Where is that number? Shouldn't the discussion about how big is that number, and how to achieve building that many houses?
"Supply increses lead to price increases" is a pretty extraordinary claim, and the only charitable interpretation of it is with the addition of "up to a point". Where is that point? Why not make the charitable interpretation yourself that people recommending more housing are recommending more housing past the price increase point?
To be clear, I don't believe that the supply/price curve is anything but sloping downwards, but even if your one does have a hump, being against housing still sounds like a bad conclusion.