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We pay a rent for a small flat that used to be very expensive and now is on the cheap side in our quarter of the city Portugal should build more housing, which

• rcarmo 4y ago
  Nope. Zoning and licensing is in the hands of politicians and construction lobbies vying for the best places to build high-value housing, which is where they get the most return.
  • SyzygistSix 4y ago
    And those folks are voted in and supported by voters who like the fact that their homes quintuple in value. The same goes for any investment properties they buy.
• spaniard89277 4y ago
  You can induce demand too. Somehow they'll have to limit that demand.
  • hedora 4y ago
    By definition, functional cities induce demand.
• TulliusCicero 4y ago
  How this usually works: "I'd do anything for lower housing prices!" Build more housing. "...but I won't do that."
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    Meatloaf as an authoritarian city councillor. Seems legit.
  • stavros 4y ago
    Greece has the exact same problem. Rents are skyrocketing and people can't afford to live in their own cities. We're building more housing, but it doesn't seem to be helping. Maybe SF doesn't want to build more housing, but this isn't universal.
    • pyb 4y ago
      It's probably not enough new housing is getting built. People don't even remember what a real large-scale housing spree looks like, because these last happened generations ago. These are transformative events. eg in Athens in the 1950s-1970s : https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191011-the-surprising-story-of-athens-offbeat-architecture https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191011-the-surprising-...
      • somewhereoutth 4y ago
        Indeed - in fact I live in a suburb of Lisbon that was just fields maybe 30 years ago - I am continually astonished at the vast scale of reasonable quality high density housing, all with schools, parks, hospitals etc - there must be hundreds of thousands of people here, a miracle of urban planning. Apparently the Lisbon middle classes fled to these new suburbs to get away from their small damp draughty downtown apartments, which ironically have now become so desirable.
    • TulliusCicero 4y ago
      My experience with most people saying "we are building more housing" is that they drastically overestimate how much housing is getting built, especially relative to yesteryear. If you look at net increase in units YoY, it's usually quite modest even for booming, "in-demand" areas. The other part is that the same things that make it slower to build more housing also make it more expensive, all the various bureaucratic processes.
• JoeJonathan 4y ago
  In what way is building more housing simple? If it were that straightforward, California (which has much more space and money) would have done it, and Californians wouldn't be moving to Portugal.
  • notch656a 4y ago
    The physical building of houses and even raising the capital to buy the materials and labor to build some sort of house capable of housing people, is not anywhere near the choke point in California. Eliminate the zoning and building inspectors and associated enforcement mechanisms and the houses would pop up. I guarantee if California said tomorrow, "build what you like on your land, there will be no permits required!" People would flock to build on the land. Whether the dangers of that outweighs the dangers of homelessness and high price families spend on rent that makes healthcare, healthy food, and education less affordable, is an exercise for the reader.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • lthornberry 4y ago
    For many decades, California has had extremely restrictive building regulations, especially in the most desirable areas. That is slowly changing, but the actual building has always been straightforward. It is getting the permission to do so that is complicated, expensive, and often just impossible.
    • JoeJonathan 4y ago
      Agreed on all counts, but that doesn't make the problem of politics any less real. People problems are always the hardest to solve, especially when deeply problematic policies like Prop 13 are written into the state constitution.
      • TulliusCicero 4y ago
        You could say that it's technically simple but politically complex, sure. But what that amounts to is, "we could do it, but collectively don't feel like it."
• capableweb 4y ago
  > The nice thing about indoor space is that we can make pretty much as much of it as we'd like. What? Have you ever been in Lisbon? The city is pretty dense as it is. You could mostly just build higher, and that has its limits too, depending on the structure and foundation. Adding more housing outside the core of the city might not be attractive enough. And increasing the density of people also means you need to increase the density of services (public and private) and utilities, which also comes with its own problem.
  • FerociousTimes 4y ago
    Why does everyone want to live in Lisbon? There are other decent metropolises in Portugal and other fun spots around the country not to get crammed in the capital.
    • the_gipsy 4y ago
      That's where job opportunities are, and that's why more housing will increase the opportunities, and then the price of housing...
      • FerociousTimes 4y ago
        For a post-Covid world where remote job opportunities are on the rise, this is becoming less and less of a pressing matter. People can work from nearby towns where housing costs are relatively moderate and just hit the head office in Lisbon one or two times a week. Corporations and people need to adapt to the changing circumstances and to be open to make the necessary adjustments to advance in this world.
        • Elinvynia 4y ago
          Not all people can work remotely! This is the exact way that janitors and baristas and everyone servicing those 100k+ a year software engineers is priced out.
        • the_gipsy 4y ago
• ephbit 4y ago
  Yeah, Portugal should simply tear down all the old mouldy buildings of Lisbon and replace them with shiny skyscrapers, so each and every Portuguese can have their very own flat in Lisbon. Or if they're crazy enough to want to keep these old buildings they could just build all the skycrapers in the park surrounding peak Monsanto, easy. /s
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    The purpose of housing is to house people. Historical buildings are nice, but for apartment blocks at least, yes, the priority has to be actually housing people. You can always require historical-looking facades if looks are a concern.
    • ephbit 4y ago
      > You can always require historical-looking facades if looks are a concern. I assume you have actually seen the inside of old buildings with your own eyes. In no way is the look & feel of the inside of an old building comparable to a modern one. Yes, old buildings sure have downsides. But pretending nobody looses anything when you only keep historical (or even just historical looking) facades is eyewash. I bet there are ways for the Portuguese Gvt to encourage renovation of all the dilapidated old style buildings instead of encouraging speculators to wait for them to collapse so they can build new and cheap and with loosing every bit of charm a building can have.
      • qu4z-2 4y ago
        The grandparent does rather seem to want to replace Lisbon with Disneyland.
• WheatM 4y ago
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  It gives me pause when an obvious action is actively rejected for decades, but still is asserted as a "simple" solution. It might be the _right_ solution, but if it failed to be adopted for so long it can't be that simple, isn't it ?
  • hugh-avherald 4y ago
    In this case, it really is simple. It's just the opposition is vehement.
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      Then it doesn’t satisfy the opposition’s requirement, and they happen to be stronger than the ones behind the “simple” solution. They are an active party, so you can’t just say “it works, but only if these people don’t exist”. This means the “simple” solution only applies to an imaginary world, and an actual solution requires a lot more thought and adjustment to accommodate for the reality of the problem.
  • sashahrzg 4y ago
    There is a profit incentive to increase housing prices for developers. Doing something to decrease prices will hurt their bottom line, so they just let the prices rise
• galfarragem 4y ago
  Nope, that’s the ultimate illusion. Portugal is already one of the EU countries with more houses per capita. More houses means more houses for foreigners. Locals would never be able to afford them. This is just the dark side of globalism cheered by Portuguese politics for decades. Competition is global now. Local middle class is having their lunch eaten by foreign rich people or even middle classes from wealthier countries while the unrestricted influx of emmigrants from poorer countries keep sallaries down. Suck it up and enjoy.
  • MrPatan 4y ago
    > More houses means more houses for foreigners. Locals would never be able to afford them How do you arrive to that conclusion? - If you built 100 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 10 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 1 million new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 100k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 10k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? - If you built 1k new houses in Lisbon, would prices fall? Even if you have a model that says that building more houses raises prices for some number of houses, surely increasing the number will eventually make prices fall, wouldn't you agree? Where is that number? Shouldn't the discussion about how big is that number, and how to achieve building that many houses? "Supply increses lead to price increases" is a pretty extraordinary claim, and the only charitable interpretation of it is with the addition of "up to a point". Where is that point? Why not make the charitable interpretation yourself that people recommending more housing are recommending more housing past the price increase point? To be clear, I don't believe that the supply/price curve is anything but sloping downwards, but even if your one does have a hump, being against housing still sounds like a bad conclusion.
    • galfarragem 4y ago
      What works in theory doesn't work on reality. That's why I called it the ultimate illusion. With such a global demand for houses here is not feasible to increase the house supply fast enough to drop prices in a way that locals can afford them. You're just feeding the beast: globalization. The only way to tackle it is on the demand side. Globalization is inevitable. What I don't buy is the rate of change, it _must_ be smooth or the system may implode. Blind and raw globalization is just a way to feed the nationalisms that most people are afraid of.