Alexis wrote:
You maybe don’t get the core of the problem. Many people simply don’t – and will never have – the possibility to buy an appartment or a house.
The core of the problem (particularly in Europe) is the land being owned by relatively few people who pass it on to their heirs, creating an underclass of permanent renters. The renters contribute to their own situation by their refusal to move where market conditions would allow them to invest in their own lives. I see the acceptance of a permanent renting underclass as the moral issue, and the protection of its existence as a benefit to landowners – like many things in Europe what on the surface seems to protect an underclass is in reality a benefit to an aristocracy.
I see, houses are not left to children in the USA. Completely new to me.
A Munich policeman should move to East Germany where real estate is cheap? Is that what you are saying?
Silvaire wrote:
Its clear to me that in such areas “normal people trying to live and work there” will eventually be doing that somewhere else, where land values match their income…
Between my last posting and this one I have been to the nearest bakery. I am pretty sure that the girl who sold me the bread does not live here. She must commute for an hour in the morning and another one in the evening every day from the suburb or village where she can afford the rent. There is no work there for her because the bakeries and bank outlets and small shops in the countryside all closed down decades ago. And no, she had no chance to buy her own property anywhere.
I myself (ATPL & ph.d. in engineering) would not have be able to buy the property where we live if I didn’t inherit something. This is the situation in sought-after places in Germany. “Normal people”, even upper middle-class (as I would call myself) are not able to purchase the land/flat/house they live in with the money they can earn themselves. Therefore renting otherwise affordable space via airbnb instead of letting it to the people who actually live here creates hatred all across society.
Alexis wrote:
A Munich policeman should move to East Germany where real estate is cheap? Is that what you are saying?
Nobody should be so unwise as to live in an area where their pay, or likely future pay, does not allow for investment. I would never, ever do it.
We’ve actually been though this in my area recently, with police pay rising because they were leaving for better offers from outlying police departments. That then led to local police pay rising. In the end the policeman living in a less desirable outlying area gets a bigger, nicer house, and the policeman in a more desirable, wealthier area lives in an apartment that he owns.
Silvaire wrote:
and the policeman in a more desirable, wealthier area lives in an apartment that he owns.
You really telling us that a policeman in Manhattan lives in an appartment in Manhattan that he owns? Not even stock brokers from Wall Street can afford to live where they work…
what_next wrote:
You really telling us that a policeman in Manhattan lives in an appartment in Manhattan that he owns? Not even stock brokers from Wall Street can afford to live where they work…
Obviously in NYC people commute to work, making a compromise between the quality of their home and the distance they commute, just like everywhere else. Pay rises to the extent necessary to create a compromise acceptable to those taking and keeping the job.
Silvaire wrote:
…just like everywhere else.
Three postings ago you were trying to tell us the exact opposite. BTW: In Europe, “quality of life” is inseparable from “no need to commute”.
Since few people work at home, there is always a commute involved – its just a matter of how far. I think intelligent people move to an area where somewhere they can find a job, and somewhere else within reasonable commuting distance they can buy a home they like. Where they currently sit may be a desirable place for others, particularly others with more money, but if its not within an area containing both those locations its not where I think they would be wise to live. Being educated and responsible includes accepting this reality, or alternately accepting being a member of a permanent renting underclass – which is the wrong choice.
NYC, and especially Manhattan, is an extreme example.
But that a Munich Policeman has no chance to live in the city whose people he protects, is not only a shame, it’s a social scandal. By accident I know two of these guys. They rent a one room appartment and they use it together – one works in the night shift, on during daytime.
It’s even worse for nurses and many other people. I wonder why it should be okay that a society where soccer players are sold for € 200 M and managers who actually destroy their companies (look at VW) still make millions, treats these people like garbage.
Silvaire wrote:
I think intelligent people … educated and responsible …
Believe me, I am all of these – as are at least 80% of the people around me. Yet “buying a home that they like” is far away for a vast majority of people around here (and even more so in Switzerland, the richest country in Europe, where the fewest people live in houses that they own). We did not create this society, we were born into it. All we can do is (slowly) change it. And one way to change it is to oppose parasites like airbnb and Uber who do all they can to make things even worse.
