- cross-posted to:
- portugal@lemmy.pt
- cross-posted to:
- portugal@lemmy.pt
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House price inflation (and along with it rents) has been stoked quite purposefully with measure after measure to increase demand and reduce supply, from Golden Visa in exchange for €500k in “realestate investment” and massive tax incentives for european retirees and digital nomads to move to Portugal (at some point Sweden had to intervene as its own citizens were fleing paying any and all tax via that scheme), to a refusal to seriously limit AirBnB (which in Lisbon took 10% of places out of the housing market and turned them into tourist accomodation) and pretty much no more public housing construction (Portugal has one of the lowest rates of public housing in Europe)
Even when price to income ratios balooned to many times the historical average governments activelly continued to act to increase prices.
Unsurprisingly, most members of parliament in Portugal from the 2 main parties have “realestate investments”.
Meanwhile yearly emigration out of Portugal is massive and now more than 50% of those leaving are young adults with university degrees (aka braindrain), the average age at which people leave their parent’s house is in the mid 30s and birthrates are well below replacement rates (if I remember it correctly the country has the 4th most aged population in the World) because the cost of living is too high for the salaries paid and most of that is housing costs which afects mostly those who don’t own their own place bought at 20-years-ago-prices, i.e. the just graduated and young adults right when they’re having children.
It’s a complete total fuckup which has already stored a decade or two of problems (thanks to braindrain and people being unable to afford having kids) all to make more money for a few politicians and politically connected assholes.
Add the forecasts for Portugal with Global Warming (it will basically become a desert anywhere but on the coast) and I think the country will be steadily collapsing in economic and quality of life terms for the coming decades.
All of this has been pretty visible for at least a decade, but portuguese management culture is complete total crap (as I can tell you from personal experience, here and by comparisson with Northern Europe) and politcians are the most incompetent of an incompetent bunch, so there is zero strategy, zero analysis and everything is an “unforseen problem” when things predictably blow up.
The problem is not politicians and politically connected assholes. You had a liberalization of the renting market done by the previous right-wing government, coupled with the appearance of Airbnb and low interest rates for a decade. This led to a situation where it was cheap (low interest rates) to invest in real estate, place your new apartment on AirBnb and easily recover the investment. Old landlords caught up to this and many preferred to evict tenants or increase the value asked to close to what they would get if they rented the apartment via Airbnb. And there was still the many years of golden visas for foreign investors, also implemented by the previous right-wing government. The left-wing government never did anything to change this, because all this real estate investment brought GDP growth to Portugal and when they proposed some semi-serious changes you had everyone benefiting from this status quo screeching that Portugal was becoming Venezuela.
But it’s now got to a point where the prices are unsustainable to almost everyone and as you said a lot of people are excluded from being able to buy a house. And the situation won’t improve in the next couple of years because interest rates probably will take a while to go down. As for the brain drain, that’s an old historical problem. Heck, I had to emigrate last year and I am almost 40. The lack of stable work contracts, the non-existent salary growth from both the public and private sector already made thinking about settling down and having kids hard. These housing prices are just the final blow to the situation.
