4 ms·

This story is the same nearly all over the world. The earth is getting pretty full.

• vsuperpower2020 2y ago
  Where did you hear that house prices are expensive because the "earth is full"? Did you notice that housing prices doubled and almost tripled in the last 4 years alone?
  • gyudin 2y ago
    A lot of units are straight empty, but large landlords just refuse to lower rent prices.
    • somnic 2y ago
      If I recall correctly, what's happening here is that a property is valued at a particular level based on the rent, and the owner can borrow against that to make other investments. Demand drops, and lower rents would affect the valuation of the property, the owner wouldn't be eligible to borrow as much against it any more and may not have the liquidity to readjust things. So it's more profitable and secure to keep the rents at a higher, but vacant, level. It kind of suggests the solution here is more regular and rigorous revaluations of property, or limits on how much it can be leveraged.
    • pas 2y ago
      Vacancy in areas where people want to live are historically low. Bad valuation in contracts doesn't change the big picture. (As it mostly affects office buildings.) Urbanization is ongoing for hundreds of years (and got absolutely turbocharged since agriculture productivity skyrocketed), but a sufficiently high number of incumbents/voters in cities don't want their city to densify, so they have the resources to block most effective redevelopments. States, governments, politics mostly managed this by providing more cheap loans/mortgages, and mostly by ignoring the problem, or even by not even believing that the demand is real. (Remember when housing was called a bubble because prices were rising too fast? Yeah, prices are much higher.) A very significant portion of young people's economic output is basically converted into spending a lot of money on shitty inefficient and extremely uneconomic housing and its consequences. (More and more and more .. and more suburbs, roads, cars, etc.)
• reverius42 2y ago
  The Earth might be getting full, but the (western) US is not... lots of cheap land just waiting for settlers. Not so different from the days of the Old West. What is different is that these days, the gold rushes always seem to happen in the already-crowded places.
  • supportengineer 2y ago
    Serious challenges getting water.
• sdsd 2y ago
  I think it's mostly empty, but everyone is cramming into the same few places. Eg I don't think rural Japan has this problem. But then you have to give up on high paying jobs, live standup comedy, lots of matches on tinder, or whatever else people do in cities (tbh I've never lived in one for a long time so idk)
  • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago
    Exactly, you can pick up a rural house in France 4 hours from Paris for €100k. 2 hours away it's a different story, and obviously within Paris itself the same affordability issues are evident as in the article.
  • Gigachad 2y ago
    The value of living in cities is constantly going up. Loads of rural areas are just collapsing because they have hollowed out to the point there are no jobs or stores left. Italy has been giving out houses for $1 in rural areas but they are basically worthless.
    • weweweoo 2y ago
      The winning move is to work remotely/hybrid from the countryside (close enough to a city though), and invest all the savings in housing to stock market. I can't see the value in pure city-living when quality of housing keeps going down, and prices go up. Better salary alone doesn't mean anything.
      • Glyptodon 2y ago
        I agree that for remote workers being near enough to a major airport (not exactly sure how near near enough is) should open up cheaper housing that's not regular commute convenient, but if you have another household member who needs to work somewhere in person you're kind of stuck.
      • rightbyte 2y ago
        > (close enough to a city though) Well that is a problem. I dunno why small town or village grocery stores worked perfectly fine until syddenly they started to close down one by one. There has to be some oligopolly or something at play.
• codebolt 2y ago
  The earth is far from full. It just needs more houses.
  • lifestyleguru 2y ago
    Over here 20% of apartments in capital city stay unoccupied. The owners don't even need to rent, prices increase alone is ridiculous. The earth is neither full nor we need more houses.
    • lanewinfield 2y ago
      Over here != everywhere
      • lifestyleguru 2y ago
        In most EU capitals it's true.
        • Aeolun 2y ago
          In every place people want to live it’s true. I’m not sure why this has changed so much on the past 30 years.
    • troad 2y ago
      You hear this kind of thing constantly, but it's such an absurd claim. Imagine being a property owner and having two choices: (a) having a property you own accrue value over time, and (b) the exact same thing as before, but also getting paid hard cash by renters. And the claim is somehow that you will, because of your landlord greed (?!) take the door with less money. We need to have fewer conspiracy theories about landlords and immigrants, and we need to build more bloody houses.
      • Aeolun 2y ago
        Probably can’t sell a house with people in quite as easily as one without.
• softsound 2y ago
  Actually population world wide is dropping considerably and there are more empty houses per person then ever. Just almost no one can afford to live in them (only building expensive) or like rural they are just too expensive to repair. Some places are selling for $1 or giving away free houses because they know no one can afford them. Japan, Italy, Midwest America sometimes even pays you to move there out of desperation.
  • Ekaros 2y ago
    1€ houses were not because no one can afford them. It was because no one wanted them. And they were crap. For slightly more(tens of thousands) you could get something at least habitable. These schemes are not to combat prices, but desirability of area due to things like no opportunities.
• bfung 2y ago
  If you take a step back and look at the earth via satellite layer via Google maps, it’s not as full as it feels on the ground. Quite the opposite. A sibling comment about people cramming into the same area seems way more accurate. Also, look up the population density of different countries: * China has ~4x the people of the U.S. with similar land area * India also ~4x US population and has 1/3 of landmass * Russia has ~2x landmass of US, but only ~1/2 population. There’s plenty of space for more people. Just gotta be less lazy and destructive and build, build, build. Finding how incentives align & not as game-able would also help.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Arable land is a problem. Most of China lives in one third of the country, and even in that one third there are a lot of mountains that keep population even further concentrated. Russia has never figured out how to really population Siberia and it’s FarEast, it’s sort of a hostile area, although the areas next to China could easily be as populated as the adjacent areas in China. India has a lot of arable land for its size, which is why it is populated the way it is, and see Bangladesh for an extreme take on how dense a country can get with enough arable land.
    • bfung 2y ago
      Arable land is only to grow food. > Most of China lives in one third of the country Right, so U.S. has PLENTY of space ;) I’ve been to rural China (village where my family and ancestors are), there’s tons of space to modernize and build still, China def not out of livable space.
      • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        Arable land probably has to do more with carrying capacity in terms of agriculture and water resources. Yes, you could build a huge city on the Tibetan plateau but you would have to truck in a lot of stuff to keep people alive. Even the rural areas, you have to decide whether to keep them growing food (low density for China) or turn them into dense cites. Do too much of the latter and your cities starve. But you can’t really build cities on land unsuited for farming, since again you have to truck a lot of stuff in from far away.
• Ekaros 2y ago
  There are quite many places that are still reasonable. I live in globally small city. It is not entirely unaffordable. Current "condo" slightly outside downtown is reasonable enough in price. And even near it is not bad. Going even further would make it entirely payable. Worst thing is that in some places you do not even get loans to buy or repair property anymore as it is expected to be worthless...