[1] https://sqmresearch.com.au/weekly-rents.php?region=nsw-Sydne...
They’re nice to live “if” you could afford to.
Everyone loves whining about finding a place to rent in both places, but in Berlin it's about finding anything at all whereas in Zurich it's usually about finding something cheap and ideally in a desirable Kreis 3 or Kreis 4 neighborhood. Yes it's competitive, but you will find something with realistic expectations + budget.
NB: I don't earn a big tech salary either. If you land a Google/Meta/IBM/Disney/adjacent job, the (rental) housing market should not give you any headaches.
> Berlin where housing is not too expensive, but almost non available to newcomers even on skilled jobs?
It's not available to long term residents either. In Berlin one has to compile and update monthly the application portfolio. Good luck having a landlord who'll issue debt free certificate more often than once a year. Think will get away without debt free certificate? Someone else will have it, sorry.
Say you are single, have some experience and get low-balled into a CHF 100k contract. Not counting 13th salary this translates to CHF 7.7k per month gross / CHF 6k net (before health insurance). I.e. at up to 1/3 of your monthly net you can spend up to 2k per month on an apartment. There are plenty of those to choose from inside Zurich city, even if some might be small for the price or have other drawbacks. You can find cheaper/bigger/nicer easily by expanding your search radius to the (extremely well-connected) suburbs.
Only if you're a relentless hunter. Otherwise it looks more like >2.5k CHF monthly. 400-500 CHF monthly on health insurance, 500 CHF monthly for random tickets, fees, fines, and other "disciplinary measures". Suddenly you find yourself being poor in Switzerland. Being poor among rich hurts multiplied.
Depends. Sure, it hurts your ego being "poor" in a super rich country, but that has the advantages of being safe everywhere, not being stabbed for wearing a nice watch, having access to the best medical care in the world, a reliable insurance and justice system for when things go wrong, clean air and drinking/bathing water, a high trust society where you're not afraid of being scammed everywhere, not afraid that anyone will shoot you in your school, etc.
Some people would rather be poor in Zurich, than rich in Africa.
Ultimately it's supply and demand. It's the consequence of everyone wanting to be a latte sipping WFH laptop worker, instead of a contractor/handyman.
Also, you made me consider maybe I should become a locksmith.
In life you often have to choose the least worst option for you out of two bad ones if you want to survive. It's rare to have your cake and eat it too, especially when it comes to housing in desirable metro areas and you not being wealthy. Beggars can't be choosers.
Granted, nobody put a gun to your head and said you must live in Zurich, London, Dublin, Berlin, or any other city with a housing shortage, it's your own voluntary decision to do that, but doing so you must be mindful of the compromises and sacrifices such a choice requires.
I heard this in Germany a lot in various circumstances while seeing on my monthly payslips deductions totalling well over 40%.
> nobody put a gun to your head and said you must live in Zurich, London, Dublin, Berlin
I didn't force myself to that bloody miserable country either, but got qualified job and was granted relocation there. At which point I'm not a beggar anymore and can start posing even a smallest demand?
That's the situation with social welfare states. They're not the USA. Everyone contributes as much as they can while receiving benefits per their needs. It's a social contract where people, for better or for worse, give up their individual opportunities for wealth generation, for the sake of collective wealth and welfare safety nets. Germany is not the place to move to, if you want to make wealth and pay as little taxes as possible.
>I didn't force myself to that bloody miserable country either, but got qualified job and was granted relocation there.
You could have gotten a qualified job in any other country, nobody dragged you into forced labor to Germany kicking and screaming I assume. Once you saw the situation you could have packed up and moved.
> At which point I'm not a beggar anymore and can start posing even a smallest demand?
You are free to make as many demands as you want, most likely nobody in Germany will care. If you want change, the best way is to vote with your feet and move to a country that's already built on your beliefs (tax heavens). Trying to change a country, as na individual, is like trying to move the planet.
The third bomb, a classic, bringing up comparisons with the USA. Listen, I'm EU citizen relocating within EEA and I don't care about your US fetish or complex. I turned around and moved away indeed. Now Germany will be more preoccupied in vetting boat immigrants.
I was trying to explain things to you respectfully, and using the US was an easy way to exemplify an extreme, and you go straight to the throat with bullshit accusations. Lovely. Cheers mate!
Obviously. People and individuals value completely different things for their personal quality of life than whatever variables, weights and values The Economist uses to calculate their scores.
Their formula constantly puts Vienna at the top, a city which also comes out at the top of the least friendly cities for expats surveys, which is an important metric for many expats.
I don't give a damn how livable a city is on paper in some random statistic, and especially if the computed livability is disproportionately biased towards the locals and against the foreigners (FPÖ, the far right party in Austria founded by Nazis, keeps getting 22% to 32% votes lately, and in Austria you can't vote in national elections if you're not a citizen and it's also disproportionately difficult to become a citizen to vote them out, compared to all other EU countries, so you'll be stuck in "taxation without representation" limbo, working to fund the coffers of a country where nearly a third of citizens hate your kind)
My point is, livability means far more for most people than whatever The Economist measures, and I'm tired their trope keeps being regurgitated every year everywhere like it's some ground truth on livability. It's not. Livability means so much more, that The Economist doesn't talk about.
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that it is norm for significant majority of countries in the world. Personally, I think that non-citizens should be allowed to vote on local elections (up to the city level), as they're impacted by local policies as residents, but on national level it is ok if only citizens can vote.
Citizenship (able to be gained after ~6 years of residency) is required for national elections.
Need to correct that the following is how this works in Iceland:
- Icelandic citizen, at least 18 years of age with legal domicile in the municipality in question
- They are either Finnish, Norwegian, Danish or Swedish citizens and fulfill later half of first requirement
- Any other citizen of another state that has had residency in Iceland for 3 years consecutively and fulfills the later half of the first requirement.
So any scandinavian, of age, who moves their domicile to Iceland can immediatly participate in the municipality votes, while others require a 3 year wait.
In Austria that's not the case. Any talks about easing up the restrictions on gaining citizenship, allowing dual citizenship or removing mandatory military service for citizens, end up smothered quickly by nationalistic and populist arguments along the lines of "foreigners should have to walk through glass to prove they're worthy for the privilege of becoming one of us".
Becoming a citizen in the UK or Belgium is a rubber stamp in comparison.
Check Austrian tech wages and number of successful Austrian tech companies to see what I mean. Anti-immigrant policies and conservative attitudes towards foreigners, cut both ways. There's a reason big-tech opened offices in Switzerland and Germany but avoids Austria.
Besides ETH, low corporate income taxes and one of the most secretive banking systems ... what? On open minded society? You've obviously never been to Switzerland. Swirzerland is one of the most cohesive and closed societies in the world.
But for Vienna specifically, it has a sizable Turkish population as well (didn’t find a chart about ethnicity-based geographics). I also think (having visited it, but not having lived there, but a culturally similar capital) that while there are definitely some stereotype issues, it is definitely less pronounced in capitals where people actually can occasionally meet with people of color (certain ethnicities are extremely rare in this part of Europe) - but I can’t answer it any more than that.
And the OECD argues that major world cities often have more in common with each other than other cities and towns in their own countries, in both demographics and challenges, and I find Vienna to be less of a world city in the demographic respect.
Assuming you're anyway not contemplating moving to Nairobi or Tehran I don't think this really gives much useful info as you can't really say you'd like life in a city with a slightly better score than another, it only matter if the gap is large.
E.g. I spent 8 years living in Vienna followed by 10 years in Berlin (a bit further below in the rating) and I don't feel my quality of life is at all lower here (I much prefer living in Berlin)- the main difference I notice is that Vienna is much better at cleaning up the trash from public spaces than Berlin, and a smaller city is generally easier to navigate.