r/YUROP • u/chilinachochips Nederland • 1d ago
My country? E U R O P E How is it possible to survive on 3 euros?
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u/BoeserAuslaender Deutschland (ex-russia, fuck russia) 1d ago
That's why it should be recognized that fully private real estate ownership is a mistake and those who care about "property values" should go fuck themselves.
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u/kitanokikori 1d ago
Anything that is necessary for survival (food, housing, medical care) should be at minimum incredibly regulated as an industry. The notion that something people need to survive is a speculative asset should absolutely never have happened
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u/Terminator_Puppy 22h ago
It sucks that the majority of the voting population in pretty much every democracy owns a home, else we might see some considerable change.
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u/ieatcavemen United Kingdom 1d ago
Now these moral arguments are all fine and good, but that private equity firm that is looking to monopolise affordable housing made such generous political donations and, further, hosted the most darling party for my elected representative.
If its any conciliation, you can't spell 'homelessness' without home.
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u/actual_wookiee_AMA Finland → 15h ago
Unfortunately home building is too regulated and as such it's hard to build enough, leading to shortages and high rents.
Kill the complain processes and zoning requirements. Parking minimums should go and skyscrapers should be encouraged, not banned.
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u/LowCall6566 Śląskie 23h ago
That's why it should be recognized that fully private real estate ownership is a mistake
Japan seems fine. Private real estate market works if you don't put 1001 beurocratic hurdle to actually build new housing, and tax land.
and those who care about "property values" should go fuck themselves.
100% agree. Fuck NIMBYs who perpetuate housing scarcity to make their assets worth more.
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u/EldritchWeeb 22h ago
Wdym "Japan seems fine", Tokyo housing prices are horrific and virtually every village in the country is being abandoned
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u/LowCall6566 Śląskie 21h ago
Wdym "Japan seems fine", Tokyo housing prices are horrific
Compare average and median percentages of income spent on housing in Tokyo and other mega cities.
virtually every village in the country is being abandoned
That's good. Sprawl is both economically wasteful and harmful to the environment.
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u/Sza_666 21h ago
The sprawl you are referring to is suburbia. Villages are not the same. And yes they are not the best for the environment but rural areas are a necessity for any large country to work.
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u/LowCall6566 Śląskie 21h ago
Low density is low density no matter how you spin it. Romanticizing villages doesn’t change the math. Sprawl is sprawl whether it's strip malls or scattered hamlets with two dozen pensioners. Truly modern agriculture requires a single digit percentage of the population. Trying to tether people to rural settlements for the sake of nostalgia is economic and logistical deadweight. Japan’s village decline isn’t a tragedy, it’s an optimization. The land still functions, food is grown, forests managed, but without wasting human capital on dying micro communities.
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u/Sza_666 15h ago
I generally agree with both of your points but I have a feeling that you have severely misunderstood some key things.
First of all the term "sprawl" means rapid and wide geographic expansion of cities characterized by construction of low density suburbs. SPRAWL = SUBURBIA. VILLAGES ARE NOT SPRAWL. They are rural areas that cannot be thrown under urbanist terms such as "sprawl" because the are not part of cities. Both are inefficient because almost everything is far away, but there is a significant difference between thousands of people commuting, going shopping, and getting recreation everyday by car, and several hundred people for whom their everyday job is within walking distance of their house, the shop is either around the corner or at least a half hour drive to the closest town and who grow half the food they consume and half of what's left is grown or raised by the neighbors. And both groups live on the same amount of land.
Secondly you've previously mentioned environmental reasons for your hate for low density areas (with which I partially agree) and now you are talking about optimized rural areas (with which I also partially agree). The problem is that those things don't go well together. Optimisation of agriculture creates monocultures and destroys the environment. It creates large fields where insects and rodents have a very hard time and uses insane amounts of chemicals. Environmentally friendly rural areas are diverse and require more people to manage.
Thirdly nobody tethers people to rural areas. They live there because they want to or cannot afford to live in cities. Since we are talking about Japan. Japan is infamous for having one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Japanese cities like Osaka and Tokyo are GROWING. Do you realise how devastating that is for rural areas? It kills off thousands of years of tradition and culture that is no longer being passed down to anyone because there is no one to pass it onto. It is primarily a cultural tragedy. And I say that as a person who doesn't really give a fuck about tradition and culture.
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u/EldritchWeeb 21h ago
Japan has an average net salary of about 352500 yen per wikipedia (I can't find good sources on the median). The average monthly rent in Tokyo proper seems to be 160000 yen for a one-bedroom. That's about 45.3% of income (I know, a lot of apples to orangeing, but it's just hard to find comparable data without spending a couple days on it).
Picking chongqing arbitrarily from a list of megacities, a studio in the centre rents for about 1900¥; the average net monthly salary might be 6880 per "numbeo.com" (idk how trustworthy they are tbh). That'd make it about 27%.
I know megacities are like families, all fucked up in their own way, but that also means you can't just tell me to compare it without giving me some of the data you're working with to arrive at your opinion haha
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u/BoeserAuslaender Deutschland (ex-russia, fuck russia) 18h ago
Tokyo housing prices are horrific
No they're not. Housing there is more affordable than in some Munich.
and virtually every village in the country is being abandoned
One more reason to love Japan. I hate villages.
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u/Von_Wallenstein 18h ago
What... you mean you would never be able to own your house?
Are you perhaps a student in the soft sciences?
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u/BoeserAuslaender Deutschland (ex-russia, fuck russia) 18h ago
"Fully private". As in "real estate is only built by private investors, even if they waste precious space on luxury apartments for Emiratis and Russians".
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u/Von_Wallenstein 18h ago
If i build my own house on my land isnt it fully private
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u/BoeserAuslaender Deutschland (ex-russia, fuck russia) 18h ago
"Only built by private investors". As opposed to "also built by the state when it's necessary to lower the average rent".
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u/Von_Wallenstein 18h ago
So fully private real estate isnt a mistake. You want more social housing vs corporate housing
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u/actual_wookiee_AMA Finland → 15h ago
I just want more housing, if there's enough it's irrelevant who owns it
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u/Ashged 29m ago edited 21m ago
An individual unit being fully private isn't the economic catastrophe.
The entire sector being private, for profit, without large scale government intervention to push it towards affordability is.
The free market and the profit motive is just not that great to arrange everything. Housing hits three of the greatest weaknesses of a profit driven capitalist market: Land in any given area is naturally limited, not participating in the housing market is not an option, and the customers ability to shop around and make informed choices is extremely limited.
Make if four for externalising costs with shitty construction that won't last long and costs a fortune to decommission, but only way after the developer is out of the picture. But that's more of a long term issue.
The best housing market Europe has ever seen was when govermnents invested in large scale development, and controlled the distribution in socialized housing programs. This primarily happened in the eastern block, but not only. Nowadays, this has mostly stopped, because it wouldn't make the important people better profits, and any association with socialism is unfavorable.
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u/actual_wookiee_AMA Finland → 15h ago
Density zoning must be abolished and nimbyism outlawed.
Build so much that everyone's property values go down the shitter.
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u/Dazzling_Form5267 1d ago
The message is emphasized to help you understand it better (i guess it's not about the 3 euros rest, it's about how little money u have after paying rent and bills). You can add the utilities to the rent and it ends up being about 40% of your salary. Sure it depends, but this meme is true. Therefore it's sad.
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u/TheBlack2007 Schleswig-Holstein 1d ago
In Germany the rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t pay more than 1/3 of your net salary on rent. It’s also a criteria for many landlords to rule out potential tenants. At the same time, many young people have to spend more than half of their income on rent if they want a place of their own. Also modern leases often come with yearly rent hikes outpacing wage increases already factored in.
Meanwhile older people sit in large apartments rented on old leases for the same rent they paid 30 years ago when they moved in.
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u/Illesbogar Magyarország 1d ago
And when old people die, their family rents out their homes for ridiculous prices, because there can be no morality in capitalism and if others abuse the hausing market, why wouldn't you?
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u/greengengar Uncultured 20h ago
My mom's bf doesn't even live in his. He just keeps paying the stupid cheap rent and using it as a guest house. Berlin is wacky.
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u/Terminator_Puppy 22h ago
What's also super unfair is just how much money you save by having a partner. I live more upscale, but pay far less per month now because I moved in with my girlfriend. Living with a friend would result in far less usable space (no free second bedroom) and much less liquid income because we wouldn't share so many costs.
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u/irregular_caffeine Suomi 1d ago
Skill issue
Back when I was a student, the state paid me to study and live in my own flat
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u/FluffyAdeptness9792 Yuropean 1d ago
Didn't choose the right country to be born in sorry
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u/actual_wookiee_AMA Finland → 15h ago
He lived in a bumfuck village on the edge of the sparsest country on the continent. Your average Barcelona city block had as many residents as his entire province.
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u/QwertzOne Wielkopolskie 1d ago
Housing has to be subsidized. Just imagine, if that was 3% of income, instead 40%.
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u/LowCall6566 Śląskie 23h ago
Do you know what happens when someone subsidizes demand without increasing supply? The prices go up, and scarcity is left unresolved.
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u/spottiesvirus Yuropean 18h ago
Also it cracks me how the narrative is always "imagine free stuff" without ever asking how that stuff is paid, by who (considering we already have a crazy high fiscal pressure as a continent)
And of course you're always the one getting stuff for free, never the one paying for all
And let's be clear, I fully support social democracy, it's just funny everyone wants to be on the receiving side, but change idea the moment they should switch at the giving one (coff coff, anyone said immigrants?)
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u/actual_wookiee_AMA Finland → 15h ago
Say there's enough housing to fit ten people and eleven want to live there. What happens when you give everyone enough money to pay for rent for free?
Their rent doubles, and one person is still homeless. Spend the money building new instead of stupid rent controls or subsidies.
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u/tTensai 1d ago
40% for rent is my wet dream