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On April 17 2025 22:26 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2025 22:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 17 2025 22:04 Uldridge wrote:+ Show Spoiler +And these villages dying out are really fine imo. They're like an optimization thing in the long run. Yes, sucks for people sometimes, but some people will cope and even thrive, living alone in a ghost town, or with 3 other people. You have these remote islands in Ireland where just a single farmer lives for example. They're fine. People don't need or even want all the things modern society and standards dictate all the time. In Europe we're more in tune, seemingly, but I might also be wrong about that.
I still think the biggest devil is social media, at least in its current iteration, so we need to get rid of it or reshape it completely. @GH, I don't think Europe has a problem with telling the US to fuck off when push comes to shove and we can then just reorient ourselves with China some more. In fact, I think it's going to be the actual strat going forward. China will ease up, we extend our soft power to them (even though they claim they don't give shit, if we can even instill a bit of empathy in the regime it's a win) and then there has never been a more powerful axis in the world. It all depends on how willing the US is in cooperating. Everyone seems to be willing except the US. If there wasn't already a rising right wing in Europe it'd be easier for me to buy into this. It seems currently that Europe is going to follow the US until it's too late not to (if that moment hasn't already occured). A lot of Euope is not as 2 party focussed as the US. which means the far right has to cooperate with other parties that are not far right and that can't just throw their support behind said alt right party without serious backlash. Which is not to say it can't happen because it already has to some countries (Hungary) but there are a few more breaks on the car.
I'm not sure brakes do you much good if they would just stop you on the train tracks. How many parties did Germany have in 1930?
I'm really just trying to see if there is something significant behind this idea that Europe won't also be in the shitter (possibly worse for many Europeans than for a reasonably skilled white guy in the US) if the US continues down this fascist path of self-destruction.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93g12g38n4o
Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and top diplomat Marco Rubio will hold talks with European counterparts in Paris later on Thursday to discuss efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine's foreign minister and defence minister have arrived in the French capital to take part in the discussions.
The talks, hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, form the highest level of transatlantic engagement about the war since February.
European diplomats have said they will urge the US to put more pressure on Russia to agree an unconditional ceasefire.
"We want the US to use a bit more stick," one official said.
If you want the US to use a bit more stick, why not just make a public statement questioning why Trump is so afraid of Putin?
Just mention 3 or 4 times that America is scared of Russia and watch Trump change course.
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On April 17 2025 22:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
If there wasn't already a rising right wing in Europe it'd be easier for me to buy into this. It seems currently that Europe is going to follow the US until it's too late not to (if that moment hasn't already occured).
The right wing has its ebb and flow in Europe. Right now it's still a consequence of how we dealt with the Syrian refugee crisis, with a mix of Russian propaganda and hint a Musk.
But there are other deeply flawed problems as well which give rise to these issues, like traditionalism being overlooked in favor of modernity and technology for one.
Neoliberalism (with a hint of Green power, how I still don't know) set the stage for all this and I resent them a little for it. Going all out on free markets when you have such disparities between cultures and people is just a recipe for disaster it seems.
One thing the EU does quite well at the moment is keeping everyone more or less in line. We're managing 27 different cultures with different resources, not an easy task. The US is actually quite similar, so we'll see how it evolves in 20+ years. A project like this is just too young to say how successful it's going to be, but I seem to be quite optimistic about it.
One note of importance: Europeans seem to think the US is behaving completely batshit insane and has been for a while now. Even for some extreme right wingers, the lack of nuance is incomprehensible. You don't have many extreme right wingers celebrating the way it's going at the moment and the fact that some of them were associated with Musk, or Trump is going to do them in hard, or they're going to have to pivot a bit softer it seems for the next cycle it seems.
But we also have the advantage of the US going batshit mode first. Could've been us who were now overrun by a neofascist cult and perhaps then the tables would be turned in this conversation.
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On April 17 2025 22:36 Broetchenholer wrote:
Yeah, that's why i asked my big question o the last page. Let's say Germany intentionally craters the market by trying to remove the aspect of investment from it. What would the consequences be? I am genuinely interested in it.
2008 "housing crisis(which really was a banking regulation crisis)" levels of market crash? Or worse? Or simply a lot of people already very rich losing in the ability to become even richer without having to work for it? I 100 % believe the housing market needs to be cratered to better correlate with median income again and i am willing to eat some rich pople for it, just not enough of them to cause a greater depression because usually it's then not the rich that are being eaten...
Hard to crater something as high in demand as real estate in countries that manage to keep their shit together.
The reason prices would be high is because the surroundings are safe, well organized and offer high paying jobs.
I think speculation doesn‘t play as much of a role. You can‘t crater a market unless you create a sudden demand for as much money as possible for people who already have lots of it.
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On April 17 2025 22:36 Broetchenholer wrote:
Yeah, that's why i asked my big question o the last page. Let's say Germany intentionally craters the market by trying to remove the aspect of investment from it. What would the consequences be? I am genuinely interested in it.
2008 "housing crisis(which really was a banking regulation crisis)" levels of market crash? Or worse? Or simply a lot of people already very rich losing in the ability to become even richer without having to work for it? I 100 % believe the housing market needs to be cratered to better correlate with median income again and i am willing to eat some rich pople for it, just not enough of them to cause a greater depression because usually it's then not the rich that are being eaten... 2008 was something completely different. It was people failing to pay their mortgages cascading through the economy. The crash you would want to create is just a complete overabundance of houses bringing down the price the damage would be to construction companies not being able to sell said houses for what they were expecting.
You would have people with mortgages on their house that are worth more then the house itself is worth, so called underwater mortgages, which makes it much more difficult for those people to sell their house, because the sales price would repay the outstanding mortgage, so they would be forced to stay put until they pay off more of the mortgage.
I don't know if there would be any actually 'real' economic fallout beyond people with houses crying that their investment now has less worth on paper. But I am by no means knowledgeable on the subject.
I just know prices are crazy.
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On April 17 2025 22:59 Vivax wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2025 22:36 Broetchenholer wrote:
Yeah, that's why i asked my big question o the last page. Let's say Germany intentionally craters the market by trying to remove the aspect of investment from it. What would the consequences be? I am genuinely interested in it.
2008 "housing crisis(which really was a banking regulation crisis)" levels of market crash? Or worse? Or simply a lot of people already very rich losing in the ability to become even richer without having to work for it? I 100 % believe the housing market needs to be cratered to better correlate with median income again and i am willing to eat some rich pople for it, just not enough of them to cause a greater depression because usually it's then not the rich that are being eaten... Hard to crater something as high in demand as real estate in countries that manage to keep their shit together. The reason prices would be high is because the surroundings are safe, well organized and offer high paying jobs. I think speculation doesn‘t play as much of a role. You can‘t crater a market unless you create a sudden demand for as much money as possible for people who already have lots of it. Housing prices are high because there is more demand then there is supply. Like in the Netherlands we estimate we need 1.3 million new homes by 2030 and there currently is a shortage of around 400k homes, which is about 5% of the total amount of homes in the country.
By creating an abundance of supply, rather then a shortage, prices naturally drop but that requires building a lot of new houses quickly.
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Demand‘s going to rise further. I wouldn‘t give away real estate unless someone was willing to overpay for it.
You don‘t meet those often but there‘s enough people in the EU for whom a million or two are a drop in the bucket.
Prices would be even higher without government intervention when it comes to rents. Some prices might seem crazy but they‘re more likely to be an underestimation.
When construction markets struggle, owners profit. The state doesn‘t. It wants turnover to earn taxes.
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I mean, if i simply build more houses now, all that will happen will that the new supply will be used to cater to those with the most money. There is a reason why every new residential area here is low density with the occasional bigger building sprinkled in. The people that have the means will then buy up the lots and ad a few people leave the market for apartments because they now found something to buy. The rent for these apartments then go up being filled with more wealthy people. The market alone won't fix this becaue even if it becomes more sane due to a lot of more private housing, it will only reduce the prize someone like me has to pay for property but the low income family rent will go down last. Which is why i would nationalize real estate companies first and then use their workforce to build medium and high density residential while enacting rent limits.
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On April 17 2025 22:36 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2025 22:26 Gorsameth wrote:On April 17 2025 22:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 17 2025 22:04 Uldridge wrote:+ Show Spoiler +And these villages dying out are really fine imo. They're like an optimization thing in the long run. Yes, sucks for people sometimes, but some people will cope and even thrive, living alone in a ghost town, or with 3 other people. You have these remote islands in Ireland where just a single farmer lives for example. They're fine. People don't need or even want all the things modern society and standards dictate all the time. In Europe we're more in tune, seemingly, but I might also be wrong about that.
I still think the biggest devil is social media, at least in its current iteration, so we need to get rid of it or reshape it completely. @GH, I don't think Europe has a problem with telling the US to fuck off when push comes to shove and we can then just reorient ourselves with China some more. In fact, I think it's going to be the actual strat going forward. China will ease up, we extend our soft power to them (even though they claim they don't give shit, if we can even instill a bit of empathy in the regime it's a win) and then there has never been a more powerful axis in the world. It all depends on how willing the US is in cooperating. Everyone seems to be willing except the US. If there wasn't already a rising right wing in Europe it'd be easier for me to buy into this. It seems currently that Europe is going to follow the US until it's too late not to (if that moment hasn't already occured). A lot of Euope is not as 2 party focussed as the US. which means the far right has to cooperate with other parties that are not far right and that can't just throw their support behind said alt right party without serious backlash. Which is not to say it can't happen because it already has to some countries (Hungary) but there are a few more breaks on the car. I'm not sure brakes do you much good if they would just stop you on the train tracks. How many parties did Germany have in 1930? I'm really just trying to see if there is something significant behind this idea that Europe won't also be in the shitter (possibly worse for many Europeans than for a reasonably skilled white guy in the US) if the US continues down this fascist path of self-destruction.
I'm fairly pessimistic in general and even I don't think the likelihood of a major European country becoming like the US is very high.
For one, when the weird right gets in power they're usually kept in check by having to work in a coalition (see Netherlands or Austria some years ago) and on the rare occasion where they get control of everything (see Hungary) they do quite a bit of damage but it's not comparable to what's going on in the US.
Hungary has elections in a year and at this point the opposition has a huge lead despite the best efforts of Fidesz to use state resources agains them. There's gonna be others going through that phase, my country has a high likelihood of becoming the next black sheep of the EU but that's mostly going to manifest in stupid foreign policy decisions, damage to our economy and some social regress but we're talking about one step back rather than full on paradigm shift.
The other problem that fascists in the EU have is that the US is making it look extremely unappealing. If the US fascists focused on anti-immigration and traditionalism without taking a sledgehammer to the economy or doing Nazi salutes or having such dumbass spokespeople it might have been different.
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You don't have to crash the market to deal with housing shortages. If you create a small tax on entities owning more than X apartments it won't change a thing. If you make that tax huge, it will crash the market. There has to be some value that's in between those two extremes. I'm not saying this will fix the problem completely, but it can help enough that people will be able stop calling the situation a "housing crisis".
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On April 17 2025 23:48 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2025 22:36 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 17 2025 22:26 Gorsameth wrote:On April 17 2025 22:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 17 2025 22:04 Uldridge wrote:+ Show Spoiler +And these villages dying out are really fine imo. They're like an optimization thing in the long run. Yes, sucks for people sometimes, but some people will cope and even thrive, living alone in a ghost town, or with 3 other people. You have these remote islands in Ireland where just a single farmer lives for example. They're fine. People don't need or even want all the things modern society and standards dictate all the time. In Europe we're more in tune, seemingly, but I might also be wrong about that.
I still think the biggest devil is social media, at least in its current iteration, so we need to get rid of it or reshape it completely. @GH, I don't think Europe has a problem with telling the US to fuck off when push comes to shove and we can then just reorient ourselves with China some more. In fact, I think it's going to be the actual strat going forward. China will ease up, we extend our soft power to them (even though they claim they don't give shit, if we can even instill a bit of empathy in the regime it's a win) and then there has never been a more powerful axis in the world. It all depends on how willing the US is in cooperating. Everyone seems to be willing except the US. If there wasn't already a rising right wing in Europe it'd be easier for me to buy into this. It seems currently that Europe is going to follow the US until it's too late not to (if that moment hasn't already occured). A lot of Euope is not as 2 party focussed as the US. which means the far right has to cooperate with other parties that are not far right and that can't just throw their support behind said alt right party without serious backlash. Which is not to say it can't happen because it already has to some countries (Hungary) but there are a few more breaks on the car. I'm not sure brakes do you much good if they would just stop you on the train tracks. How many parties did Germany have in 1930? I'm really just trying to see if there is something significant behind this idea that Europe won't also be in the shitter (possibly worse for many Europeans than for a reasonably skilled white guy in the US) if the US continues down this fascist path of self-destruction. I'm fairly pessimistic in general and even I don't think the likelihood of a major European country becoming like the US is very high. For one, when the weird right gets in power they're usually kept in check by having to work in a coalition (see Netherlands or Austria some years ago) and on the rare occasion where they get control of everything (see Hungary) they do quite a bit of damage but it's not comparable to what's going on in the US. Hungary has elections in a year and at this point the opposition has a huge lead despite the best efforts of Fidesz to use state resources agains them. There's gonna be others going through that phase, my country has a high likelihood of becoming the next black sheep of the EU but that's mostly going to manifest in stupid foreign policy decisions, damage to our economy and some social regress but we're talking about one step back rather than full on paradigm shift. The other problem that fascists in the EU have is that the US is making it look extremely unappealing. If the US fascists focused on anti-immigration and traditionalism without taking a sledgehammer to the economy or doing Nazi salutes or having such dumbass spokespeople it might have been different.
I think it happens by way of neoliberals just not sufficiently breaking from the US and making compromises that empower the far-right elements in their societies. I'm not nearly as versed in European politics as many of you are in US politics, but I'd wager you're looking at more of Reagan-like figures that collaborate with Trump/his successors than your own Trump's (at least at first).
Israel is probably one of the weathervanes for this.
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On April 17 2025 23:49 Sent. wrote:
You don't have to crash the market to deal with housing shortages. If you create a small tax on entities owning more than X apartments it won't change a thing. If you make that tax huge, it will crash the market. There has to be some value that's in between those two extremes. I'm not saying this will fix the problem completely, but it can help enough that people will be able stop calling the situation a "housing crisis".
I do not want to crash the market, i want to create enough breathing room to allow a baseline social housing net at least für the bottom 20% of households. The market has no interest in that though. I currently feel like the housing market is less efficiently protected from capitalism then it should be and i consider it one of the most important ones to be protected.
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We could tie the massive building boom to migration, which should help with demographic problems in a decade or two. If we want to speed up the process, we could lower some building standards in some cases. Also, educating thousands of new foreign builders about the standards would be hard. All of this would, of course, be hugely unpopular considering the current political climate regarding immigration. I also think that we would need the buildings anyway, as climate change will worsen in the future, and people will not wait for job offers in North Africa.
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Belgium has quite a bit of low height build even in relative metropolitanic areas. Although you might debate Belgium doesn't really have metropolitan areas other than Antwerp en Brussels. So we could nassively increase our height and skyline, but will be extremely divisive. People give way too many shits about who lives where tbh
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NIMBYism is a huge problem for housing. Recently there was an uproar in some town in the east of the Netherlands, because they had to put social housing in the town, which was basically exclusively large freestanding houses for rich people wanting to live away from the cities. Spain has plenty of places like that too. Migrant centers are another issue, and was a huge political issue a few weeks back when the government agreed with the Canary Islands to redistribute underage asylum seekers from the Canary Islands to the mainland, because the Canaries couldn't cope with them. There was a bunch of uproar: everybody agreed that something needed to be done, but Madrid had already done its share, and Catalonia took them in last time, and Valencia had problems enough with rebuilding from the flood, etc. etc. etc.
In other words, everybody agrees poor people, immigrants, etc. deserve a place to live. Just not here.
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NIMBYism is one of the largest problems yes. Nobody wants to build 48 identical 11 floor apartment buildings in one area. Then move that crew to another area and repeat for 3 years. If you put that method into practice with enough volume you solve the housing shortage. Why they need to be more or less identical is due to many reasons. Just to mention a few:
Employee training, they basically start doing assembly style construction and thus can be trained in the best way to do their task since it is the same next time. You can also more easily put in low skill labor since there are fewer variations to teach.
Cost of components such as doors, windows, frames and even beams drop if you build and man factories for years producing the same thing. Produce 1 million railings for stairs and you can get cost down.
Getting approval of the building. It is a pre-approved design and thus you can build it as long as the ground is suitable (THIS is the biggest blocker). Even in countries that try this cities are allowed to overrule it for, often, quite random reasons.
Equipment such as cranes and concrete pourers. Do your task at building one, move it over to building two. Zero downtime and thus reduced cost.
Employee movement and retention. If you know you are doing the job for a minimum of 5 years you probably stick around. Instead of a contractor scrambling to find jobs that line up.
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On April 18 2025 05:28 Yurie wrote:
NIMBYism is one of the largest problems yes. Nobody wants to build 48 identical 11 floor apartment buildings in one area. Then move that crew to another area and repeat for 3 years. If you put that method into practice with enough volume you solve the housing shortage. Why they need to be more or less identical is due to many reasons. Just to mention a few:
Employee training, they basically start doing assembly style construction and thus can be trained in the best way to do their task since it is the same next time. You can also more easily put in low skill labor since there are fewer variations to teach.
Cost of components such as doors, windows, frames and even beams drop if you build and man factories for years producing the same thing. Produce 1 million railings for stairs and you can get cost down.
Getting approval of the building. It is a pre-approved design and thus you can build it as long as the ground is suitable (THIS is the biggest blocker). Even in countries that try this cities are allowed to overrule it for, often, quite random reasons.
Equipment such as cranes and concrete pourers. Do your task at building one, move it over to building two. Zero downtime and thus reduced cost.
Employee movement and retention. If you know you are doing the job for a minimum of 5 years you probably stick around. Instead of a contractor scrambling to find jobs that line up. Its not a new concept either, we did it after WW-2. neighbourhood after neighbourhood of identical houses that helped fix the housing problem at the time (as a result of damage and the post war population boom.
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On April 18 2025 05:49 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On April 18 2025 05:28 Yurie wrote:
NIMBYism is one of the largest problems yes. Nobody wants to build 48 identical 11 floor apartment buildings in one area. Then move that crew to another area and repeat for 3 years. If you put that method into practice with enough volume you solve the housing shortage. Why they need to be more or less identical is due to many reasons. Just to mention a few:
Employee training, they basically start doing assembly style construction and thus can be trained in the best way to do their task since it is the same next time. You can also more easily put in low skill labor since there are fewer variations to teach.
Cost of components such as doors, windows, frames and even beams drop if you build and man factories for years producing the same thing. Produce 1 million railings for stairs and you can get cost down.
Getting approval of the building. It is a pre-approved design and thus you can build it as long as the ground is suitable (THIS is the biggest blocker). Even in countries that try this cities are allowed to overrule it for, often, quite random reasons.
Equipment such as cranes and concrete pourers. Do your task at building one, move it over to building two. Zero downtime and thus reduced cost.
Employee movement and retention. If you know you are doing the job for a minimum of 5 years you probably stick around. Instead of a contractor scrambling to find jobs that line up. Its not a new concept either, we did it after WW-2. neighbourhood after neighbourhood of identical houses that helped fix the housing problem at the time (as a result of damage and the post war population boom.
Sweden built 1 mn homes in 10 years (the million program) from 1965-1974.
They were good homes but the areas themselves are depressive and many of our problem areas comes from that era. People generally do not want to live there if they can avoid it, but at the same time they are a nice starter home for many people as the quality is good, the apartments are well planned (better than the modern crap), large, cheap and the infrastructure with public transit, healthcare etc was built in.
Anyway solving housing cost is not rocket science.
You build more housing (primarily what's in demand) than you have population growth. In Europe this mainly means zoning places to build the "right" things and reducing immigration.
It's one of the few areas where trickle down economy actually works because as people move out others move in so as long as you are building something decently space and infrastructure effective it's fairly straightforward.
It helps if you actively try to get people to move to parts of the country that are not popular by investing in infrastructure and moving government work there. We used to have a system where government agencies were not all placed in Stockholm but it's almost dead now. But it does work because if you put a couple of thousand jobs and some solid infrastructure in a smaller town somewhere it boosts the attractiveness immensely.
Of course you can regulate parts of the market if there are problems with people owning multiple homes (especially for renting) but in general that solves itself if there are enough housing.
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Brb.... Gotta go find these "not popular" places that aren't on a mountaintop or in some forgotten valley 1h from the next town with actual infrastructure.
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Well there is also, at least in Poland, a problem of investment buying. Many people realized that buying flats and houses is a better investment than buying shares or keeping your money in a bank. And since in last 10 or so years some jobs had a huge increase in salaries many people started to buy and rent flats as a side hussle. I work in IT and it is not uncommon for my collegues at work to own 3-4 flats. The taxes are really low so even some invesment funds got into that and started to buy flats in bulks only to rent them. This doubles the demend and makes prices to rise even further.
IMHO the part of problem is that there is too much money in circulation. Or too much money in hands of small number of people. And money doesnt like to sit in a bank, it needs to work, be invested. In essence people who try to buy their first property are competing with people who have too much money to just sit on it, and thus they have it invested.
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EPT
