So there’s a ton of countries that I’ve heard have had truly unaffordable housing for decades, like:
- The UK
- Ireland
- The Netherlands
And I’ve heard of a ton of countries where the cost of houses was until recently quite affordable where it’s also started getting worse:
- Germany
- Poland
- Czechia
- Hungary
- The US
- Australia
- Canada
- And I’m sure plenty others
- It seems to be a pan-Western bloc thing. Is the cause in all these countries the same?
- We’ve heard of success stories in cities like Vienna where much of the housing stock is municipally owned – but those cities have had it that way for decades. Would their system alleviate the current crisis if established in the aforementioned countries?
- What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again? Is there any silver bullet? Has any country demonstrably managed to reverse this crisis yet?
Most definitely. Southern California in general has some of the highest housing prices in the US. I think the AirBnB regulations are only part of the equation. They need to drastically reduce the barriers to construction of higher density housing, for instance.
LA actually has “vanlords”, people who rent out old, beat up vans parked on the street to homeless people, for hundreds of dollars a month. Some real dystopian shit if I’ve ever seen any.