Prices have risen by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and nearly 15% in the European Union between 2015 and 2024. Though policies have been implemented to increase supply and regulate rentals, their impact has been limited and the problem is getting worse
Housing access has become a critical issue worldwide, with cities that were once accessible reaching unsustainable price points. Solutions that have been proposed, like building more houses, capping rents, investing in subsidized housing and limiting the purchase of properties by foreigners have not stemmed the issue’s spread. Between 2015 and 2024, prices rose by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and by nearly 15% in the European Union (including by 26% in Spain), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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Salaries have not grown apace with real estate prices. In the EU, the median rent rose by 20% between 2010 and 2022, with rental and purchase prices growing by up to 48%, according to Eurostat. Underregulated markets are wreaking havoc, and in the United States and Spain, 20% of renters spend more than 40% of their income on housing, while in France, Italy, Portugal and Greece, that percentage varies between 10% and 15%, according to the OECD. Many countries have created programs aimed at increasing the future supply of public housing, but their effectiveness has yet to be determined and analysts say that results will be limited if smarter regional planning decisions are not made.
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You guys have a middle class?
The governments solution will be to start offering 40 year mortgages. Do nothing to make housing affordable, just extend the time to pay it off like they’ve done with auto loans going from 60 months to 72 months terms.
At some point we need to have a grown up conversation about the finite nature of land, specifically land that people can live on and find work from.
This “the rich make up the rules and lets pretend land will never run out” nonsense clearly isn’t working for anyone but the rich.
This is part of the plan to keep crushing the middle class. The powers that be would be able to change this situation within weeks if they really wanted to.
How? There is just too many people, too few houses here in Australia. Not enough materials to build them or tradespeople.
I’m on my thirties, I don’t know a single person that can afford to live alone, they are either sharing with a stranger/spouse or still with their parents.
We need to stop using the term “middle class.”
Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.
Today it’s two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.
We’re in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.
Yeah the press’ve been claiming it’s dying for 40+ years. y’all… It’s dead
The middle class has always been a myth to get people to work harder and for a homogenized society where everyone’s got that “all-American” family with a white picket fence. We can once again blame fucking Henry Ford. See Ford’s sociological department for the literal enforcement of this ideal in exchange for his touted “$5 a day!” lure. Company people came around to your house to check what you were eating, how you were dressed, how your kids were doing in school, and if you were an immigrant, how assimilated you were becoming and if it was acceptably quick enough.
Yeah. Al sold shoes. Unreal.
It was also a work of fiction.
Or propaganda.
A lot of 80s/90s TV was selling a lie because it was primarily written by the upper middle classes portraying the lives of the working class.
They had little idea how things actually worked.
And had money to go to the nudie bar…
Supply and demand. Stop letting people (or corporations) buy more than one house and watch prices fall. I own a home, and I’m perfectly willing to see it lose value in order to avoid seeing my country turn into some modern feudalistic hellhole.
My condo has gone up at least $100k in value since I bought it just before shit went crazy, but that value is meaningless if I can’t afford to capitalize on it and move anywhere. I feel like I’m basically trapped in this house, since everything else has gone up so much more than my place.
Same. If Zillow is correct my house is worth 90k more than we paid for it, but I can’t sell it because everything else went up with it, and I’m locked into a stupid low interest rate. It’s like someone gave me a beer that never gets empty, but I also have to hold it forever. If I want to switch to a different drink I’m shit outta luck, but I can’t really complain because I always have the beer 🤷♂️
If only other people saw it the same. Property/homes should’ve never been an investment asset.
Wait, what?
Hold on. Around here, house prices have falled, dramatically recently.
In fact, 54% increase from 2015-2024 is low. When my house was appraised a year ago, it was +72.5%, it is now +54.5%.
Housing prices, anecdotal as it is, are going in the right direction.
Your house matches their estimates and you’re questioning their numbers?
No, they aren’t talking about the sudden drop, they’re talking about the rapid increase. Which I get the point but we may finally be looking at a true correction, which is hopeful more than anything
Or it was just your area reverting back to the prevailing trend. Microeconomics vs macro.
Where is “here” for your buddy?
Upper Midwest.
Zillow is months behind, but you can find chunks where they’ve fallen 10-50k since first listing for houses under $500k.
In Canada in top of that, we have 500k-1 million new people entering the country, per year. We have no housing, and not enough services, schools, healthcare, etc.
Canada is about the same population than California, imagine California going from 39 millions people to 40 next year, then 41 the year after, then 42 the next year, etc. Is it sustainable?
Great if you own property and or buy labour though.
Somehow they’ve got the world convinced that its “tha left”, and not wealthy businesses, who want and benefit from this, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Why are you trying to hijack the thread to make it about your xenophobic hot take on immigration?
Having 500K-1M new people could mean having as many as 500K-1M new construction workers to build more housing, if that’s what the zoning code and the market (etc.) allowed. That that isn’t happening is a failure of those things, not the fault of the immigrants. There is absolutely no reason a properly-functioning society would be unable to keep up with the demand from population increases, and scapegoating immigrants will do absolutely fuck-all to fix any of the real causes of society’s failure to function properly.
Lol I’m a Canadian immigrant, and regular population has something like 4% of people working in construction, new immigrants has something like 2% of people working in construction, so no, they will not build more housing. The problem is not immigrants, it’s a system/society problem, like you wrote, Canada is not a properly-functioning society.
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