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Some Canadian cities responded to this with a foreign buyers tax, notably in Vancouver. Florida has a method for balancing its "snowbird" population to do with

Some Canadian cities responded to this with a foreign buyers tax, notably in Vancouver. Florida has a method for balancing its "snowbird" population to do with foreign buyers. Personally, I think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and very poor people whose effect in concert squeezes out the middle who made the country desirable. The cynicism comes from the 90's where multinationals globalized and just became financial rails for stateless revenue flows, and now governments saw the opportunities and are globalizing their constituencies, where if they want to stay in power, all they need is money and votes that come from importing wealthy people in exchange for buying Gold visas and "donations," and poor people to depend on their extractive policies. What we're watching is the intentional dissolution of the nation state and replacement of relatively equal populations with polarized ones. It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end.

rmbyrro 4y ago
The Portuguese case is quite different, I think. Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to offer in exchange. They found something: their real estate and city center spaces. The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free. If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, one way is to study what else could they develop internally that would be attractive in the world trade market. Also, foreigners are looking for the European passport, not for Portugal per se. If Portugal were to follow UK's path, demand for their Golden Visa would drop dramatically. It doesn't benefit the rich, only. By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country.
- caycep 4y ago
  The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10 years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every country...
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They might have a credible claim to it.
  - rmbyrro 4y ago
    Look at Singapore, for example. Its situation was orders of magnitude worse than Portugal decades ago. Now they are probably twice as better. The key is: stop complaining about "the rich is this, the rich is that" and start thinking about how to be competitive in the 21st century. There are many opportunities, but are Portuguese citizens interested in taking the effort and sacrifice to explore them? The answer to this question is the real explanation for the hard time they're going through, not "rich-blaming".
    - notch656a 4y ago
      Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that they have a huge proportion of their population that are totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to obtain public housing. If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship, we would have a comparable public housing tax base.
      - rmbyrro 4y ago
        I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive economy in a few decades.
        notch656a 4y ago
        May want to go back and delete your comments about real estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to subsidize their housing, these tag line here would probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer Afford to Live in Singapore." If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively open borders and free market real estate, you have to get with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's a good thing, or a bad thing. ------------- >Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigner Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd claim.
- petre 4y ago
  > The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real estate market making housing unafordable to the general population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median rent as the tax base.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    If parking money is the problem, I guess an indirect solution would be to give people other places to park their money.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone wins.
    - petre 4y ago
      Not really, they're either retired or buying property to park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect time to extract taxes from them. The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I fully understand why a group of youths was protesting against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city like it's a theme park.
- jseliger 4y ago
  Portugal should just do what the U.S. and Canada should also do: built more housing: https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-services-a-huge-economic-opportunity.html https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-service.... It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.
  - tffcccdredf 4y ago
  - _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
    I remember travelling to Portugal in the early 2000's and our host describing Portugal's national bird as the (construction) crane. Not sure if the pun translates well to other languages. Are they not still doing that?
- vannevar 4y ago
  >By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country. Maybe, but only if the increase in wages paid keeps up with the rising rents. And remember that in unregulated capitalism, most of the income from increased economic activity is captured by the wealthiest tiers, with only negligible increases for the vast majority. The rising tide indeed raises all boats, but it raises some boats far more than most. If rent rises 10% but median wages rise only 2%, most people will be losing ground, not gaining.
- DrNosferatu 4y ago
  I disagree, Portugal does offer something interesting: Cheap labor. In fact, some of the cheapest in the EU - both qualified and non. It even can be said that the current Portuguese Economic Model is intra-EU salary dumping. (and a lot of rent-seeking)
- jollybean 4y ago
  Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a heavy tax on top.
  - 0x457 4y ago
    Foreigners buying land there are because it gives them a path to European passport or at very least nearly instant permanent residency. Not because they want to live in Portugal. Portugal requirement is "just" €280,000 which is extremely low - their neighbor's, Spain, requirement is €500,000. Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.
sieabahlpark 4y ago
jcfrei 4y ago
Absolutely now way that the "votes that come from importing wealthy people [...]" are going to be enough to get politicians elected - not enough wealthy people in the world. The real risk is the continued rise of populism which will result in cynical policies rather than real solutions for dealing with the increasing wealth gap.
- klabb3 4y ago
  Yeah, not to mention that people on visas can't vote. It's definitely a flaw in the causality chain, but at the same time I empathize with the frustration of the Portuguese people.
- kipchak 4y ago
  Not directly, but a extremely wealthy person without a vote who can make campaign donations directly or indirectly arguably has a larger impact than the average voter. For example 90% of house seats go to the person who spent the most, though causation isn't necessarily always the case.[1] [1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...
bengalister 4y ago
Truly agree. There are also countries like France which only imported cheap and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared to our neighbors and other western world countries). For instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani investors who made London their residence, not the case for Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent residency. And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.
danans 4y ago
> Personally, I think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and very poor people > It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end. These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active element back, it's very much a left/right difference. The left's solution to the problems brought about by globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market - evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and assembly location requirements, and income limits of the recently passed EV tax credits. The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial claim to make about the right, but today's right openly proclaims those ideas. Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many people alive today remember living under that. In my travel there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist dictatorship. Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while shutting down immigration.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  The "ethno-" in nationalism isn't silent or implied though. Canada has been a very heterogeneous nation for over a century, Israel is also very heterogeneous where people are bound by religion and not ethnicity, France and Spain have a huge and integrated north african populations and they are French and Spanish, full stop. Brazil, also a nation with as much global diversity as is available. This trope that nations as entities are somehow racist is more an artifact of the critical theory that calls everything racist by default, and not of how people actually live together.
  - danans 4y ago
jdmg94 4y ago
Vancouver is a disaster in housing affordability, economic opportunities (outside of real estate), and they have a very big and public homeless crisis.
- jollybean 4y ago
  Homelessness and home prices are actually separate problems, even though they feel linked, they are barely so. You can have a relatively affordable city like Montreal and still a lot of homelessness.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    They're very closely linked problems. The easiest way to solve homelessness is to give the homeless a place they can call home. Which is a lot cheaper if housing is already in abundant supply.
    - jollybean 4y ago
      About 1/2 of homelessness is not a money problem, it's a social/behavioural problem. The homeless people in my neighbourhood are all crack addicts. They get up and urinate/shit 3ft from where they are standing instead of walking 100ft to the park. They are 'feral'. If you gave them a 'home' it would immediately be a crack den for them and their buds. The bathroom or anything else would literally never get cleaned ever. It'd fall into disrepair quickly. There'd be no hope of them having any kind of job or anything like that. The other 1/2 are temporary homeless, usually due to some kind of calamity. Housing prices isn't so much the problem a they need to be 'stabilized'. A 20% shift in rental costs will not affect those people very much. Low housing costs can positively affect a huge swath of people, freeing up income for other things, but it won't change the number of crackheads on the street and probably not the % of people that 'fall out of the system' for a few weeks. High housing costs are mostly a strain on working people. w
huevosabio 4y ago
Just build more. If foreigners want to buy overseas property, then just increase the supply. Oh, and tax the unimproved value of land and give the proceeds to the Portuguese citizens. This will dampen the effect while supply of housing matches demand.

rmbyrro 4y ago

The Portuguese case is quite different, I think. Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to offer in exchange. They found something: their real estate and city center spaces. The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free. If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, one way is to study what else could they develop internally that would be attractive in the world trade market. Also, foreigners are looking for the European passport, not for Portugal per se. If Portugal were to follow UK's path, demand for their Golden Visa would drop dramatically. It doesn't benefit the rich, only. By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country.

caycep 4y ago
The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10 years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every country...
- outworlder 4y ago
  > The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation? They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They might have a credible claim to it.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  Look at Singapore, for example. Its situation was orders of magnitude worse than Portugal decades ago. Now they are probably twice as better. The key is: stop complaining about "the rich is this, the rich is that" and start thinking about how to be competitive in the 21st century. There are many opportunities, but are Portuguese citizens interested in taking the effort and sacrifice to explore them? The answer to this question is the real explanation for the hard time they're going through, not "rich-blaming".
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that they have a huge proportion of their population that are totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to obtain public housing. If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship, we would have a comparable public housing tax base.
    - rmbyrro 4y ago
      I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive economy in a few decades.
      - notch656a 4y ago
        May want to go back and delete your comments about real estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to subsidize their housing, these tag line here would probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer Afford to Live in Singapore." If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively open borders and free market real estate, you have to get with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's a good thing, or a bad thing. ------------- >Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigner Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd claim.
petre 4y ago
> The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real estate market making housing unafordable to the general population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median rent as the tax base.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  If parking money is the problem, I guess an indirect solution would be to give people other places to park their money.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone wins.
  - petre 4y ago
    Not really, they're either retired or buying property to park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect time to extract taxes from them. The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I fully understand why a group of youths was protesting against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city like it's a theme park.
jseliger 4y ago
Portugal should just do what the U.S. and Canada should also do: built more housing: https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-services-a-huge-economic-opportunity.html https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-service.... It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.
- tffcccdredf 4y ago
- _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
  I remember travelling to Portugal in the early 2000's and our host describing Portugal's national bird as the (construction) crane. Not sure if the pun translates well to other languages. Are they not still doing that?
vannevar 4y ago
>By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country. Maybe, but only if the increase in wages paid keeps up with the rising rents. And remember that in unregulated capitalism, most of the income from increased economic activity is captured by the wealthiest tiers, with only negligible increases for the vast majority. The rising tide indeed raises all boats, but it raises some boats far more than most. If rent rises 10% but median wages rise only 2%, most people will be losing ground, not gaining.
DrNosferatu 4y ago
I disagree, Portugal does offer something interesting: Cheap labor. In fact, some of the cheapest in the EU - both qualified and non. It even can be said that the current Portuguese Economic Model is intra-EU salary dumping. (and a lot of rent-seeking)
jollybean 4y ago
Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a heavy tax on top.
- 0x457 4y ago
  Foreigners buying land there are because it gives them a path to European passport or at very least nearly instant permanent residency. Not because they want to live in Portugal. Portugal requirement is "just" €280,000 which is extremely low - their neighbor's, Spain, requirement is €500,000. Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.

sieabahlpark 4y ago

jcfrei 4y ago

Absolutely now way that the "votes that come from importing wealthy people [...]" are going to be enough to get politicians elected - not enough wealthy people in the world. The real risk is the continued rise of populism which will result in cynical policies rather than real solutions for dealing with the increasing wealth gap.

klabb3 4y ago
Yeah, not to mention that people on visas can't vote. It's definitely a flaw in the causality chain, but at the same time I empathize with the frustration of the Portuguese people.
kipchak 4y ago
Not directly, but a extremely wealthy person without a vote who can make campaign donations directly or indirectly arguably has a larger impact than the average voter. For example 90% of house seats go to the person who spent the most, though causation isn't necessarily always the case.[1] [1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...

bengalister 4y ago

Truly agree. There are also countries like France which only imported cheap and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared to our neighbors and other western world countries). For instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani investors who made London their residence, not the case for Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent residency. And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.

danans 4y ago

> Personally, I think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and very poor people > It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end. These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active element back, it's very much a left/right difference. The left's solution to the problems brought about by globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market - evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and assembly location requirements, and income limits of the recently passed EV tax credits. The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial claim to make about the right, but today's right openly proclaims those ideas. Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many people alive today remember living under that. In my travel there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist dictatorship. Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while shutting down immigration.

motohagiography 4y ago
The "ethno-" in nationalism isn't silent or implied though. Canada has been a very heterogeneous nation for over a century, Israel is also very heterogeneous where people are bound by religion and not ethnicity, France and Spain have a huge and integrated north african populations and they are French and Spanish, full stop. Brazil, also a nation with as much global diversity as is available. This trope that nations as entities are somehow racist is more an artifact of the critical theory that calls everything racist by default, and not of how people actually live together.
- danans 4y ago

jdmg94 4y ago

Vancouver is a disaster in housing affordability, economic opportunities (outside of real estate), and they have a very big and public homeless crisis.

jollybean 4y ago
Homelessness and home prices are actually separate problems, even though they feel linked, they are barely so. You can have a relatively affordable city like Montreal and still a lot of homelessness.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  They're very closely linked problems. The easiest way to solve homelessness is to give the homeless a place they can call home. Which is a lot cheaper if housing is already in abundant supply.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    About 1/2 of homelessness is not a money problem, it's a social/behavioural problem. The homeless people in my neighbourhood are all crack addicts. They get up and urinate/shit 3ft from where they are standing instead of walking 100ft to the park. They are 'feral'. If you gave them a 'home' it would immediately be a crack den for them and their buds. The bathroom or anything else would literally never get cleaned ever. It'd fall into disrepair quickly. There'd be no hope of them having any kind of job or anything like that. The other 1/2 are temporary homeless, usually due to some kind of calamity. Housing prices isn't so much the problem a they need to be 'stabilized'. A 20% shift in rental costs will not affect those people very much. Low housing costs can positively affect a huge swath of people, freeing up income for other things, but it won't change the number of crackheads on the street and probably not the % of people that 'fall out of the system' for a few weeks. High housing costs are mostly a strain on working people. w

huevosabio 4y ago

Just build more. If foreigners want to buy overseas property, then just increase the supply. Oh, and tax the unimproved value of land and give the proceeds to the Portuguese citizens. This will dampen the effect while supply of housing matches demand.