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New Refrigerators, Washing Machines, Furniture and Tires Will All Have to Last Longer, Europe Mandates
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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Then you want to regulate the market such that there's a surplus of ordinary apartments and a relative lack of luxury ones. People are free to furnish theirs more luxuriously, that's not an imposition, but not having affordable ones would be. No need to get into fixing absolute prices all you need to control for is relative availability.
The market is not a good in itself. It is a mechanism to attain good things. To do that, in the real world, to actually approach the free market ideal (perfect resource allocation by perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information) you have to enact regulations because, as we already discussed, both rich and poor folks alike are idiots: The rich invest in stuff based on hype, creating real estate bubbles, the poor tolerate 120 buck fridges even though they want 150 buck fridges.
Again we're in /c/europe, here, not in the US. Also why should irrational investors deserve protection. "Socialism for the rich but not the poor"?
Rent increases are capped. Not rents for new construction. Rents that the welfare system will pay are capped, not the ones on the open market.
...and yes there are plots. There's actually a shortage of construction capacity, not in the least because politics just won't commit to firm targets, something that construction companies can work with, make sure they don't overshoot when growing. They'd rather not go bankrupt so they only increase capacity conservatively.
There is no shortage of capital flowing into the market, there has never been a shortage during all of this. The issue that noone wants to, or can, pay the rents that those people demand. We've been over this. The same investment at a more moderate ROI expectation would've built everything we need multiple times over.
Oh sure some municipalities will tell you that your roof needs to be at a certain angle. That's peanuts compared to the overall costs and believe it or not, there's generally a reason for those requirements -- it may seem cultural but if you e.g. get a lot of snow you either want all snow to come down as fast as possible, or not at all. People weren't stupid 500 years ago when everyone started to angle their roofs like that.
They're absolutely allowed to be built, you can still build the same kind of housing stock as was done after the war during reconstruction.
Lastly, beware of looking at all this in isolation: Getting rid of regulations that ensure that the city looks nice, is liveable, is walkable, that housing is healthy to live in, the whole shebang, would have untold macroeconomic costs down the line.
The market doesn't achive that. There need to be inefficiencies like the surplus for the market to work. Regulations can improve the efficiency, but too many regulations kill the market. Then it's better to change to government services, with their own inefficiencies.
Forbidding luxery apartments is a bad regulation. Who is judging that? But introducing a tax on unrented apartments is good. People will rent out their luxery apartments to regular people to still be profitable.
Because there is no surplus. Empty apartments already cost money because the renovation has to be refinanced. If prices don't go up, it would be foolish to not offer them for less rent to minimize losses.
The bottleneck is not greedy investores. It's the approval process and lack of plots. If the snow safe roof is needed, then allow it everywhere. Every regulation has its use, but the approval process must be fast.
https://tageswirtschaft.org/warnung-vor-zunehmendem-engpass-auf-dem-wohnungsmarkt
This is just a random link from searching for the bottleneck in construction.
That's a different, even more important issue. There can be costs but there are also many opportunities. That debate will never happen because it is stuck here, at single housing problems, between believers in regulation and free markets.
To bring us back to appliances, there are also many opportunities like unified standards for their network connections or solid lifetime statistics. Ultimately citizens themselves have to organize and demand it. Letting the EU regulate the market prevents the citizens from organizing. Likewise, if the housing market would deteriorate more, those syndicates would be common and not the exception. I would expect a much better housing situation and a platform to discuss better city development.
I wasn't talking about inefficiencies. Try again.
I just did. And I gave a reasoning. You also judged it, but came to the opposite conclusion, and gave no reasoning.
I can't be arsed you're a hopeless case. Learn to care about the shit you argue about.
Thanks for the conversation.
I may have used the wrong word, though. By judging I mean that somebody has to decide if an apartment is a luxery apartment that is not allowed to be built. If that's done by price, then you just don't allow the price to rise until there is an equilibrium of supply and demand, for all housing.
That kind of judgement already exists in the form of what rents social services are willing to pay (the personal allowance is the same everywhere, allowed rent varies by location). As far as building permits go you can always build luxury housing, it's a question of how much social housing you're required to build alongside. Municipalities have been way too lax on that in the past, social housing status was allowed to lapse, pretty much no municipality makes use of their right of first refusal for land sales, etc.
The trouble with allowing the market to come to an equilibrium at its own pace is where are people going to live in the meantime. If this was about avocado toast, no problem, let them eat brioche, but basic human necessities being in undersupply has potentially catastrophic outcomes. As in: People are going to vote for Nazis because they don't trust any party to solve their issues catastrophic.
The limiting factor is not construction crews but plots and approvals. If people could build, the market would quickly adjust. The problem is that the market is supposed to stay high.
I forgot to reply to this:
Because every regular citizen who owns their house or appartment will lose half their wealth or more when the housing market goes down.
Everybody who bought a house above construction costs will lose. People in poorer countries can afford houses because construction can be cheap. It's artificially increased and can be brought down in the same way that European farmers can compete with third world countries, by using automation and reducing manual interference.
If it is not the circumstances, of course the problem must be the investors and their unreasonable ROI expectations. But it's the circumstances that limit supply and thus keep prices high. If established parties would suggest to change that they would massively lose voters.
People who understand this, and see that the old parties don't change this, have strong incentives to vote for the AfD.
Which is of no consequence when you're living in it.
[citation needed]. There's plenty of land left and right, it's almost trivial to re-designate agricultural land as residental, but who the fuck is going to build all the streets, tram line, all the houses. A stroke of a pen on the one side, actual training and logistics on the other.
It's not. Unless you're someone with multiple properties trying to profit off it, then you want it to raise. Otherwise, everyone benefits from low prices.
I agree with you that everybody profits because a liquid housing market will make life much easier.
But people plan to sell their house, or appartment, either to have money to travel when they retire, or for their children to inherit, or for many other reasons.
It can be argued that they already lost the money when they bought the house, so they shouldn't worry when prices come down now. But I am very confident that whichever party approves the laws that change the market will not be elected for decades.
There was a quote some comments ago about the main factors to change for a better housing market.
The designation of the land is the point. It is trivial but it doesn't happen.
Actually I approve that it doesn't happen because agricultural land shouldn't be destroyed unnecessarily, especially when there is still hunger in the world. However, there are many areas with single family housing. Those could be repurposed.
It's right that there are some logistics to settle. To me, they are small compared to the magnitude of the housing problem. If they are not approached then I think that's on purpose, with the main goal of keeping the housing market high.