In my country (slovenia, former yugoslavia) owning homes destroyed the housing market in the long run...

The government owned a huge percentage of homes and rented them out to people who needed them, and moved them around too (if they got a kid, they got a larger apartment).

Then after the breakup, the government didn't want to deal with that, and sold all those apartments to renters living there for peanuts.. so 'everybody' got a home, and in the meantime stopped the communist-style buildings. .. then nimbyism, and yeah.. same as everywhere.

Now the "boomers" have apartments and young people can't buy them, because we don't build stuff anymore. When a boomer dies, their kids inherit and lease it out, because selling it is pointless due to ever rising prices (again, nobody builds anything anymore... nimbyism and all that)

If the government kept the apartments, when a boomer died, someone else would get to rent it at the government-non-profit-rate, but nope... whole country paid for building those apartments, some people got lucky to keep them, and the others could fuck off.

Also, building a private house back then was easier.. you could basically build, and then deal with all the pesky stuff, such as permits and legalization... now, you can't build a dog house without building/construction inspectors there. On one hand, we now have improper owner-build buildings in inapropriate places... on the other hand, atleast those people got a house, which is impossible now.

Also, building a house isn't even so expensive here... especially if you do a lot of stuff alone... but just the project/permit costs are higher than the bricks and concrete, and buying a piece of land where you're actually permitted to build is impossible... but we do have literal fields in the prime locations of our capital - https://goo.gl/maps/YeoJMMGN2QhtZDLs8 (just rotate the view around to see what's next to that)

tldr: in socialist time, everybody was renting from the government, in capitalist time, those apartments were sold for peanuts to renters (and the rest of the taxpayers, who didn't get apartments, got fucked)

boomers is a largely american concept. i doubt eastern european people of same generation can be called boomers: having lived in a completely different system.

anyway you seem to say that owning houses resulted in a problem of not owning houses? seems to me a more simple explanation would be that slovenia became a capitalist society, and for-profit housing doesnt quite accomodate as many people as the socialist one. this is a problem that is faced in every capitalist country atm

and you seem to be misrepresenting what happened in former yugoslavia. basically it was not the government that gave you housing, but the state-owned corporation you worked for. and it wasnt for-rent, but to pay off as you work. which is WHY so many people were able to buy it for peanuts when the system collapsed. also to say it was the government is to grossly overestimate the centrality of the socialist yugoslav government. they simply were not that powerful

There was a (after war) baby boom here too. We didn't call them by that name, but there was a huge population rise in the late 40s and 50s.

In yugoslavia, you didn't own an apartment, but you rented it (from the government)... so almost noone had more than one apartment, noone had a too-large apartment, and if you got a job in trbovlje the government would get you an apartment in trbovlje (a city in the middle of nowehere). If you died, the apartment went back to the "pool", and someone else could get it. If you got a kid, you got a bigger apartment, and someone else got the smaller one.

But still, nobody owned those apartments, they just rented them.

The high ownership (the colored map from a post above) came only after they sold all those apartments to renters, and people started hoarding them, because they got them for very cheap and the prices could only go up. For "normal people" it would be better to have lower ownership and more renting from the government (if it was handled properly by the government.. a big if).. but then the colored would show different ownage percentages.

The biggest problem now is, that you're not allowed to build anymore, due to regulations and a lack of buildable land (in a legal sense... there is a lot of land, but the government doesn't allow building there, also in A LOT of areas, you can build a two apartment two story building max, instead of large apartment buildings that we need). "Back then", the government decided they needed more apartments, they took a piece of land and started building.. didn't matter if it was a pasture [0], a field, what the neighbors though (again, government buildings next door), they just built.

Now we have areas where we could build [1], but the government doesn't allow it... sometimes, if you're friendly with the mayor, you buy a farmland somewhere, and it suddenly becomes buildable, but this isn't true for "normal people". It seems a lot of people have invested interests to keep realestate prices high, and those people are in positions of power and can decide where we can or cannot build.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/zjfRsuw.png

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZVvHQmwzuX4VhLZ99 https://goo.gl/maps/dCoroKjHYs45dU8T8

> In yugoslavia, you didn't own an apartment, but you rented it (from the government)...

you paid it off to the corporation you worked for. it wasnt a lottery system. it was more like a generous homeloan

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2017.1...

>so almost noone had more than one apartment, noone had a too-large apartment

actually the apartments were reletively very good quality, and often buildings were made as part of a grander urban project

anyway im not saying the system was perfect. this shouldnt need to be said. but it did solve certain problems rather quickly

You didn't pay it off, the government (who also owned the corporation) was the owner of it. You could build your own house and own it though, but not the "social" apartments.

The option to buy the apartments from the government came only after the fall of socialism in 1991 (jazbinskov zakon/law)

> actually the apartments were reletively very good quality, and often buildings were made as part of a grander urban project

yes, the apartments were well built, but the aging reinforced concrete will be problematic very soon.

> You could build your own house and own it though, but not the "social" apartments

you could not "own" it but you had all the rights one might want for their dwelling

None of what you described is a consequence of capitalism and all a consequence or stupid government policies. Capitalism didn't force them to sell those properties for peanuts, nor did capitalism force onerous regulations to be put in place to prevent the market from building new supply after government messed up the situation.

Will someone please think of the landlords?

Back in socialist time, the government was the landlord for a huge percentage of that... they literally took peoples private houses away after WW2, and rented them out to people.

Only after the split of yugoslavia, they sold the taxpayer paid and built apartments to then-current renters for peanuts.

I know it's probably just a username, but you don't happen to be the real Ajs Nigrutin, do you?

No lol :D i just needed a throwaway to argue about something "back then", and guess what was on the radio :)

sure it was a landlord that had no right to kick you out

So.. basically the same as any other landlord in EU now? You signed a contract, and while it lasted, if you paid, they couldn't throw you out for the duration of the contract.

vastly different. you pay off your apartment as you work. the apartment is owned by the state corporation you work for. the corporation has very little power to let you go. its more like a very favourable home loan

> you pay off your apartment as you work

You do, if you buy the apartment and get a loan/mortgage. If you're renting from the government, you're just renting... you didn't become an owner of the apartment here, until the end of socialism, a new capitalist government, and politicians not wanting to deal with the upkeep of those buildings.

Before 1991, you were renting as you are renting now in any other (capitalist) country (although with proper rules and protections.. so like in eg. austria, germany, etc). You didn't get to keep it.

you keep repeating yourself without providing any sources. here is a quote from scholarly article on the topic that counters what you are saying

   Yugoslavia’s blue-collar workers were less likely to receive a socially owned flat than white-collar and skilled workers who were systemically favoured in the allocation process (Živković 1968; Bobić and Vujović 1985; Petrović 2004; Le Normand 2012; Archer 2016). Housing allocation thus forged novel social inequalities, a phenomenon observed by scholars in other state-socialist contexts (Szelenyi 1983; Bodnár and Böröcz 1998; Kulu 2003; Pelikánová 2012; Fehérváry 2013, 74–75; Gentile and Sjöberg 2013; Harris 2013, 112; Dalakoglou 2017, 137). In contrast to capitalist societies where wealthier strata were more likely to own their own home, in socialist states like Yugoslavia white-collar employees and managers were significantly less likely to own property than poorer workers, instead enjoying the more prestigious use of a socially owned flat. This was arguably more advantageous than property ownership as socially owned flats ‘ … were acquired without incurring personal costs, while in terms of their use, inheritance and even trading there were practically no differences between the holders of tenancy rights to state/socially owned housing and private owners’ (Petrović 2004, 270).

- Archer, Roy: The moral economy of home construction in late socialist Yugoslavia

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2017.1...

> were acquired without incurring personal costs, while in terms of their use, inheritance and even trading there were practically no differences between the holders of tenancy rights to state/socially owned housing and private owners’ (Petrović 2004, 270).

I have no idea where the author got this... this was maybe(!) true for very high ranking party members, but for normal people, there was no inheritance and trading, and the use was the same as with any other rental apartment. Also maybe only in what was left of yugoslavia in 1991 and then turned into 'serbia and montenegro'. If you died, the apartment went back to the state. To trade it (move elsewhere) you needed a good reason (usually, more kids or more rarely a new job).

I was born in yugoslavia and lived here/there until the fail, and now still live in the same city, just in a new country. My parents got a social apartment, I got born and they got another apartment and moved (1->2 bedroom apartment). They couldn't get a bigger one before, because 2 people meant 1 bedroom apartment, 3 people, two bedroom one. They couldn't even choose the floor (noone wanted the ground level or top level ones). No trading, no inheritance, no ownership until 1991 and the jazbinsek law, where every renter could buy off the apartment from the government.

so i know also from personal experience that inheritance existed. when my grandfather (certainly not some high ranking party member) passed away in the mid 80s the rights to the apartment went to my grandmother. she was in retirement at the time. my uncle also lived with her at the time. he was a university student. besides having this social apartment my grandfather and my grandmother also built a house in a village near by. when the system collapsed and after the war there was a buy program similar to what you describe and she was able to purchase the apartment

So, she lived in the apartment, and stayed there after he died?

Or did she live in another apartment, and when he died, she got his, better(?) apartment?

If someone dies and you get to stay in an apartment, that's not inheritance, just continuing to rent that apartment.

you said that once the owner dies the dwelling goes back to the state. in fact i dont know of any case of a family being kicked out of home after the principal holder died

You don't get kicked out. You get purged.

Housing and public transport are among the success stories of the Soviet Union. At least until the early 1970s, after that there was a lot of stagnation and decline.