“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.
This is a big topic here in the UK. A lot of people get very heated about it, but it has always been thus. I bought my first place for 18k. I was on 6k – a 26 year old “company director”. I could only just afford it. 10 years before that, my parents bought a house for 18k. Their combined income was 5k. Only just affordable (both working). I bought my present house 18 years ago for what was then 3x a good executive salary. In all these cases, you needed two working people to get onto the property ladder if you had no deposit.
Then, interest rates dropped and property values rocketed and now much of it is even less affordable. But it was always impossible for a single person on the national average wage to buy a house – because house prices are driven by supply and demand and the demand is controlled by what people can afford and if houses were affordable for one person then their supply would dry up.
Expensive houses are bought by people who have already built up assets, usually over many years.
So I don’t see how airb&b plays a part in this. In a free country, you can’t prevent the “buy to let” business model.
Uber is something else. Uber is the direct result of taxi drivers taking the absolute and total p1ss, in every place they can get away with it. Especially in certain countries. Most people don’t bother to use Uber below a certain threshold of “p1ss”. The p1sstaking has to be more or less in your face. Also many taxi drivers are on Uber… it improves their utilisation.
what_next wrote:
We did not create this society, we were born into it. All we can do is (slowly) change it.
I’d suggest that the best slow change would be to educate in opposition to stubborn immobility of individuals and businesses.
That’s a very elitist comment. I also don’t like your comment that “intelligent people” do this or that … it is NOT a prerequisite for a decent human existence.
It is precisely not an elitist comment – everybody is subject to the same rules of supply and demand and refusing to take action to improve your own life within those rules presumes that somehow you are special – and nobody is.
I bought my first property by partnering 50% at age 25 to buy a place that cost five times my then salary, after saving the down payment (I have never inherited a penny from anybody). I could see that unless I did that I’d be locked out eventually. More recently, I’ve used the assets accumulated over the decades since to buy a house outside of the more ‘desirable’ local areas… because in spite of taking action at age 25 and onward, I am locked out to that limited degree. My office location was also moved out of the ‘highly desirable’ area for the same reason and because new employees could no longer afford to live in the area. Tough, that’s life and I’m happy to have done what I’ve done. At every stage we figured out the best compromise, and took what the housing market had to offer us, wherever it was offered, and now we have substantial assets.
That’s exactly not true. Not everybody has the same chances in live – and for the US that’s even more true than for Europe. Still, believe it or not, there is no way a Munich nurse can buy her own appartment, the math simply does not work. Many of these people cannot afford a car and I personally know people who were never on vacation – their whole life. I guess it’s not a great solution that all nurses, policeman and kindergarters move away from the big cities.
There’s only one solution: Society has to change some of its values and pay these people according to what they really do for society. and it is not helpful if a couple of rich people buy appartments to rent them out via airbnb because they are so greedy that a normal and very high German rent is not enough for them, while the appartments, many times built with subventions get 20 percent more precious every year. That’s not our idea of a society. There have to be laws against these extreme forms of greed. In Munich you will pay a fine of up to € 50.000 if you rent an appartment only and exclusively via airbnb, in NYC (that’s in the USA) the fines are even higher.
Society has to change some of its values and pay these people according to what they really do for society.
“Society” has money for paying people? It’s an interesting economic model. Definitely worth discussing!
In Munich you will pay a fine of up to € 50.000 if you rent an appartment only and exclusively via airbnb
The workaround for that one must be terribly hard, given the word “exclusively”.
Alexis wrote:
There’s only one solution: Society has to change some of its values and pay these people according to what they really do for society.
The only way that happens is when people refuse to take those jobs, and instead go somewhere else and/or do a different job. Nurses and policemen have demonstrated that that won’t live and work in this area unless they get a reasonable pay rate. Both policeman and nurses make between roughly $60K to start – $130K per year gross, depending on seniority. Obviously those are not executive salaries but in this area they support reasonable housing ownership after a decade or less in the job.
I guess if you think about it for a couple of minutes you will understand it. Should not be a problem for you.
The Society as a whole has an amount X of money. This money is not distributed in a fair way and the wages do not reflect the performance people in many jobs deliver, day in, day out. An assistant doctor in a German hospital many times works 80 hours per week and makes less than € 2000. A nurse in an emergency room makes too little money to live in the city where she works. Same is true for policeman, kindergartners and for many other jobs. A VW manager who almost ruined a worldwide company otoh makes € 15 mn, and there’s many example where managers who actually ruined their companies were paid off with millions. I remember one case where it was 60 millions (Vodafone manager Esser) although he almost ruined the company.
@Silvaire
In America, where an average house (countrywide average) is $ 200.000 this can work. In Germany house are much more expensive on average, and a german nurse makes between 25-40.000 Euros, before taxes that is.
OTOH there are many, many more poor people in America than in Germany, it is actually breathtaking when you drive through some parts of L.A., how poor it is, no difference to the – poor – parts of Mexico City. All people not intelligent enough? I have just seen it 4 weeks ago. Long streets in downtown full of tents and people sleeping on the sidewalk. And once the first real healthcare system is finally ruined again there will be any more of these people. They are your fellow Americans.
Silvaire wrote:
Both policeman and nurses make between roughly $60K to start – $130K per year gross, depending on seniority.
Where ? I’m an aeronautical engineer (3 years expirience) and I far from 60K ! My manager too !
