5 ms·

That is one of the given reasons the municipality pursues this. There is a housing crisis in the Netherlands, so that gives some context to this.

iso1631 5y ago
> There is a housing crisis in the Netherlands Is there any western city where there isn't a housing crisis?
- pastacacioepepe 5y ago
  Perhaps there's something deeply wrong with western housing systems? I don't want to sound too radical, but this seems to be inextricably connected to capitalism. We won't ever solve it without structural changes. What Amsterdam is doing is a decent start at least.
  - hatchnyc 5y ago
    It's old vs young, new vs established. For most homeowners, their home is their most valuable asset. It's just not possible to simultaneously maintain high property values and have affordable housing. Given this, any "solution" to housing affordability is "solving" a problem that a sizable and highly influential segment of the population doesn't want solved. On the contrary, you see real government action whenever home prices fall.
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      And that's what I think OP was alluding to about it being "inextricably connected to capitalism". As long as we treat housing like an asset, we'll have this problem. And I don't see how there's any other way to treat housing under a capitalist system.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        The problem isn't a result of treating housing as an asset, it's a structural regulatory problem. Housing is treated as an asset in Tokyo, but they don't have the same regulatory constraints on zoning, so they don't have outrageous housing prices.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        You mean an asset with a guaranteed return at the expense of late arrivals who must buy the asset from you. The vast majority of rent seeking is based around coercion. When people advocate for free markets nature seeps through. After all, coercion is completely natural. We don't have heaven on earth so why would a free market lead to the ultimate manifestation of heaven? Get rid of the coercion and you get rid of the problems.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      That's a good point. By some measures it isn't just the wealthy keeping the poor vulnerable; it's everyone who isn't poor. In this case, middle class voters. In the US, our shortsightedness has begun threatening the lower-middle class. People with some cash in the bank are facing homelessness, due to a historic lack of housing. The housing shortage came following dozens of contributors including NIMBY, AirBnB, single-use zoning, tunnel-vision'd pols/voters, corp house buyers, etc. Pointing to a single factor delays solutions.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        It's not really multiple factors. There was only one. Restrictive zoning. That constrained supply. Everything else is just the various parties fighting over the now-insufficient housing supply.
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        Single use zoning lives due to NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision. The former stays forever while the latter is in play.
        AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." Corporations that own houses don't want their value to decline. People renting properties out on AirBNB don't want their value to decline. They're just different categories of existing property owners who want property values to stay high or increase more. The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do. Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem. All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.
  - jupp0r 5y ago
    The discussion here is centered around very desirable centralized locations. Out in the countryside things look very different. You can buy surprisingly cheap houses 2h outside of Berlin. Nobody does.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      You also need an income to live.
      - iso1631 5y ago
        Buy a house 40 years ago, pay your mortgage like a good workerbee Finish paying mortgage, use the equity to buy a house 20 years ago and rent it out. Rent income > mortgage interest (and capital too) House price increases, use equity to buy a few more houses. Fast forward to today, you have 3 million in equity and 10k/month coming in after costs.
  - rocqua 5y ago
    Houses are assets. Houses were the most commonly owned assets, so governments that increased the price of housing made most of the middle class richer, making those policies popular. Re-formulating the above, making housing expensive is popular policy. Doing that policy long enough causes new entrants into the market to not be able to afford housing. So yes, there is something wrong with our housing system. Part of that is that we marketed 'own your house' as a great way to earn money, and then made good on that promise at the expense of new entrants into the market.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    The US was the land of the free because there wasn't an existing land owner dynasty. Now there is.
- mrep 5y ago
  Pretty much the entire midwest and southern US [0]. Granted, they benefit from basically having no geographical barriers to sprawling and building out ever more subdivisions and americans don't seem to mind suburbs. [0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/ https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
  - drdec 5y ago
    Don't forget about the rust belt. Our problem is no one wants to live here.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Why wouldn't American's mind the burbs? In the midwest you get a huge really nice house with a garage, with as much storage and rooms as you could ever desire for hobbies and/or children, lots of land for pets and gardening on the cheap. Like half the cost of a run-down shack in a place like Boston cheap. All ~20 minutes from downtown where there is plenty of parking and a 10 minute walk to your suburb's satellite "downtown." You won't make SV money but cost of living is unreal. I pull well over the 6 figure mark while getting to put ~60% of my take-home pay straight into savings and investments. And I'm not even close to frugal.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      This whole COVID crisis has rekindled what I think many already knew. That neighbors and the overall community as a whole contribute to the value of the house. The crisis is basically over in the urban areas and the blue suburbs. Not so for rural. You can't change how other people think but you can choose to live near like minded people(which is what seems to be happening). Today its dealing with the crisis, tomorrow its something else. I don't know how prevalent this thinking is but it could be on peoples minds as they look at property.
    - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
      It depends on the suburb. Midwestern suburbs don't really have the downtown in the same way large cities do. IME they are either just glorified strip malls or touristy places. (TBH I'd really like to know how so many chain restaurants can remain in business... is it just a real estate investment?). Once you account for some states have terrible weather, dysfunctional state governments, higher property taxes, etc. it might not make sense to trade a a net 20% change in overall CoL if it means you have significantly less to do. If your first thoughts are kids, pets, and gardening than sure the midwest is pretty good. If your primary concerns are career advancement, educated social/dating pool, variety in food and music, niche/luxury hobbies like skiing or surfing, etc. then your options for places to live becomes essentially drastically smaller and more competitive. That said there are certain midwest cities that might strike a good balance.
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  Finland is ok. A square meter in the capital area goes for about 1.5 months of net average wage, and about a monthly income in other provincial towns. A decent house can be had for ~10 years of single income The benefits of not being a tourist destination
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    10 years considering the taxes still makes it pretty bad... Really why I don't want to live there. Other cities are somewhat more sane, but still should be cheaper.

iso1631 5y ago

> There is a housing crisis in the Netherlands Is there any western city where there isn't a housing crisis?

pastacacioepepe 5y ago
Perhaps there's something deeply wrong with western housing systems? I don't want to sound too radical, but this seems to be inextricably connected to capitalism. We won't ever solve it without structural changes. What Amsterdam is doing is a decent start at least.
- hatchnyc 5y ago
  It's old vs young, new vs established. For most homeowners, their home is their most valuable asset. It's just not possible to simultaneously maintain high property values and have affordable housing. Given this, any "solution" to housing affordability is "solving" a problem that a sizable and highly influential segment of the population doesn't want solved. On the contrary, you see real government action whenever home prices fall.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    And that's what I think OP was alluding to about it being "inextricably connected to capitalism". As long as we treat housing like an asset, we'll have this problem. And I don't see how there's any other way to treat housing under a capitalist system.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      The problem isn't a result of treating housing as an asset, it's a structural regulatory problem. Housing is treated as an asset in Tokyo, but they don't have the same regulatory constraints on zoning, so they don't have outrageous housing prices.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      You mean an asset with a guaranteed return at the expense of late arrivals who must buy the asset from you. The vast majority of rent seeking is based around coercion. When people advocate for free markets nature seeps through. After all, coercion is completely natural. We don't have heaven on earth so why would a free market lead to the ultimate manifestation of heaven? Get rid of the coercion and you get rid of the problems.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    That's a good point. By some measures it isn't just the wealthy keeping the poor vulnerable; it's everyone who isn't poor. In this case, middle class voters. In the US, our shortsightedness has begun threatening the lower-middle class. People with some cash in the bank are facing homelessness, due to a historic lack of housing. The housing shortage came following dozens of contributors including NIMBY, AirBnB, single-use zoning, tunnel-vision'd pols/voters, corp house buyers, etc. Pointing to a single factor delays solutions.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      It's not really multiple factors. There was only one. Restrictive zoning. That constrained supply. Everything else is just the various parties fighting over the now-insufficient housing supply.
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        Single use zoning lives due to NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision. The former stays forever while the latter is in play.
        AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        It's not just "NIMBY and voter/pol tunnel vision." Corporations that own houses don't want their value to decline. People renting properties out on AirBNB don't want their value to decline. They're just different categories of existing property owners who want property values to stay high or increase more. The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do. Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem. All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.
- jupp0r 5y ago
  The discussion here is centered around very desirable centralized locations. Out in the countryside things look very different. You can buy surprisingly cheap houses 2h outside of Berlin. Nobody does.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    You also need an income to live.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      Buy a house 40 years ago, pay your mortgage like a good workerbee Finish paying mortgage, use the equity to buy a house 20 years ago and rent it out. Rent income > mortgage interest (and capital too) House price increases, use equity to buy a few more houses. Fast forward to today, you have 3 million in equity and 10k/month coming in after costs.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Houses are assets. Houses were the most commonly owned assets, so governments that increased the price of housing made most of the middle class richer, making those policies popular. Re-formulating the above, making housing expensive is popular policy. Doing that policy long enough causes new entrants into the market to not be able to afford housing. So yes, there is something wrong with our housing system. Part of that is that we marketed 'own your house' as a great way to earn money, and then made good on that promise at the expense of new entrants into the market.
- imtringued 5y ago
  The US was the land of the free because there wasn't an existing land owner dynasty. Now there is.
mrep 5y ago
Pretty much the entire midwest and southern US [0]. Granted, they benefit from basically having no geographical barriers to sprawling and building out ever more subdivisions and americans don't seem to mind suburbs. [0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/ https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
- drdec 5y ago
  Don't forget about the rust belt. Our problem is no one wants to live here.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Why wouldn't American's mind the burbs? In the midwest you get a huge really nice house with a garage, with as much storage and rooms as you could ever desire for hobbies and/or children, lots of land for pets and gardening on the cheap. Like half the cost of a run-down shack in a place like Boston cheap. All ~20 minutes from downtown where there is plenty of parking and a 10 minute walk to your suburb's satellite "downtown." You won't make SV money but cost of living is unreal. I pull well over the 6 figure mark while getting to put ~60% of my take-home pay straight into savings and investments. And I'm not even close to frugal.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    This whole COVID crisis has rekindled what I think many already knew. That neighbors and the overall community as a whole contribute to the value of the house. The crisis is basically over in the urban areas and the blue suburbs. Not so for rural. You can't change how other people think but you can choose to live near like minded people(which is what seems to be happening). Today its dealing with the crisis, tomorrow its something else. I don't know how prevalent this thinking is but it could be on peoples minds as they look at property.
  - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
    It depends on the suburb. Midwestern suburbs don't really have the downtown in the same way large cities do. IME they are either just glorified strip malls or touristy places. (TBH I'd really like to know how so many chain restaurants can remain in business... is it just a real estate investment?). Once you account for some states have terrible weather, dysfunctional state governments, higher property taxes, etc. it might not make sense to trade a a net 20% change in overall CoL if it means you have significantly less to do. If your first thoughts are kids, pets, and gardening than sure the midwest is pretty good. If your primary concerns are career advancement, educated social/dating pool, variety in food and music, niche/luxury hobbies like skiing or surfing, etc. then your options for places to live becomes essentially drastically smaller and more competitive. That said there are certain midwest cities that might strike a good balance.
thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
Finland is ok. A square meter in the capital area goes for about 1.5 months of net average wage, and about a monthly income in other provincial towns. A decent house can be had for ~10 years of single income The benefits of not being a tourist destination
- Ekaros 5y ago
  10 years considering the taxes still makes it pretty bad... Really why I don't want to live there. Other cities are somewhat more sane, but still should be cheaper.