The solution to house prices increase is to build more houses, but the protests demand to freeze prices instead of building more. Are they dumb or is it intentional to keep their cities small and exclusive?
> Are they dumb or is it intentional to keep their cities small and exclusive?<p>Madrid has 3.4Mln people and is the second-largest city in the EU. How big do you want it to become?<p>I disagree on "just build more". There was a time where salaries moved more or less line with cost of living, and especially rents, but with AirBnB and estate funds sucking up any and all places they find, there's an enormous pressure that drives up rents for common people, which already struggle as-is to make ends meet. "Just build more" would simply keep pushing those towards the edges of town over time, while the city becomes a glorified luxury hotel that only rich people can afford. I welcome new regulation to combat this.<p>I just hope this event shatters any hope for the ultra-right parties that voted against it, and that people remember this. Ultimately, if anyone will build more, it'll still be the large real estate companies and funds that keep increasing rents on their tenants.
Last time they touched the housing laws one of the brilliant things they did was to force the owner of the flat to pay the expenses for signing the leasing contract of their tenants, before that change this was paid by the tenant. What happened is the landlords switched from long term rentals to short term rentals because they did not modify that clause for those type of rentals, so the tenants got the worse outcome: rental contracts of 11 months instead of 5 years, which also opens the door to massive rent increases every 11 months or eviction instead of just the inflation rate of the year under the other contracts.<p>They also keep increasing the difficulty of evicting non paying tenants, taking a lot of rentals out of the market because owners are simply afraid of not being to evict a non paying tenant, or making prices increase to account for that risk.
> <i>Madrid has 3.4Mln people and is the second-largest city in the EU. How big do you want it to become?</i><p>Bigger, obviously. Because the number of people who want to live in Madrid or visit it is higher than that. This can create a lot of economic surplus. Part of that surplus can be used to pay off locals (e.g. with housing in the newly built stock) so they win too.<p>The only problem, as far as I can tell, is that there's no system for paying off locals. So they end up resisting growth because there's nothing in it for them except higher rents, and everyone loses.
Build more and higher. Often times people don't want to build higher although they really need to, I hope Madrid is not one of those places.<p>Ban AirBnB's and ban estate funds from owning homes.
The solution is never MORE.<p>Look at traffic jams, if what you claimed was true, then traffic jams in LA should never happen.<p>Building homes and all the supporting infrastructure from roads, schools or even parks takes a lot of time and money. The movement of tourists for example is always going to be significantly quicker, because its very easy to move a bus of people to Madrid, while it takes years to build a home for them.
From experience, a lot of older people do not understand how hard it is to get an in-demand apartment, especially if rent controlled. They get the price/rent and they know that they personally dont want to pay for more housing (by having said housing built in their backyard). So this aligns with their personal preferance.
Unlimited growth always is the answer. murica!!
And unlimited growth is why America has no $40T debt or did i get that wrong ?
Capital class is hungry for perpetual growth and profits (which came from a continually growing population over decades). Only lasts so much longer with fertility rates in terminal decline globally. It’ll be icky until we get to the point where deaths outnumber births forever into the future, but all countries will reach peak population eventually.<p>In this context, you only need a housing supply curve that stays slightly ahead of domestic population demand and can follow fertility rates down over the next century. Spain’ population will drop by a third by 2100, for example, and reached peak population in 2023.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-passed-peak-population-and-when-will-the-rest-do-so" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-pass...</a>
So you want cheap housing, for more people, with no-one forced to leave and no growth (which given the post you reacted to means no or limited building of houses/apartments)?<p>Should we paint the moon a more romantic pink color too?
There is a lot of empty housing in this cities, and big real state corps have fiscal advantage to take over any new building so that would not fully solve the problem in Spain at least.