The fix is to enable builders to build enough housing, and not just single family detached housing, by removing regulations which allow NIMBY-ism. At the same time, prevent investors from hoarding houses and jacking up the prices. I find it similar to scalping GPU's and reselling them for more money, which was a common practice in the past few years during the chip shortage and crypto mining boom. This kind of investment provides very little value to consumers, and in my view only serves to extract money from the poor to the rich.
LOL, I wish. Renting in Munich for enough money that I'll never be able to save enough for a downpayment. If I ever want to own my home, I'll have to move to the German equivalent of Alabama, with all the issues that come with that.
> The fix is to enable builders to build enough housing, and not just single family detached housing, by removing regulations which allow NIMBY-ism.
Where? Seriously, where?! Urban areas literally don't have enough space left any more to build any kind of building at affordable prices (plot values have sometimes doubled over four years here [1]), not to mention the associated followup costs of high-density populations (you need expensive subways as public transport at some point, denser / more anonymous populations leading to lower societal cohesion and rising crime as a result) or the fact that most urban areas simply are unsustainable regarding climate change in the long term (no trees to provide shade = lots of heat).
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-grundstueckspr...
Agricultural land here in the Netherlands sells at 6 euro per m2. With a single stroke of a pen that ground can become 300 euro per m2, when the municipality decides you can build a house there.
Same process in Germany. There is more than enough space. Problem is the price of plots is kept artificially high by municipalities, because they rely on the easy money it provides to finance their projects.
Hard disagree here. Munich, Berlin and Hamburg simply don't have much land in their borders any more. In Munich, we only have two major unpopulated areas left - the SEM Nord (900 ha, 50.000 people) and SEM Nordost (600 ha, 30.000 people) [1], and the currently under construction projects Freiham (25.000 people) and Bayernkaserne (15.000 people).
The opposition to these projects does have valid points, too: a city as large as Munich absolutely needs recreational areas for the populace as well as green areas for micro-climate and recreation, and the amount of both is really really low - the traffic to the existing lakes or the nearby Bavarian Alps is already immense and the areas are all struggling with the regional-tourist population issues like overcrowded trains, trash being left everywhere including in natural reserves or on farm land [2], overcrowded parking lots and vandalism [3], leading to sometimes outright violence against tourists from Munich [4].
"Just build more dense housing" may sound like an easy way out, but (too) dense housing has immense followup costs as well as all these people have to have other options in their lives than slave away as corporate drones and sleep. Otherwise, you end up with Japan-style psychological issues.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A4dtebauliche_Entwicklun...
[2] https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/umland/ausflue...
[3] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/region-tegernsee/dasgelbeblatt...
[4] https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/bayern/tourismus-in-bay...
Then again those prices are in dying areas with little going on.
I remember when Mayor DeBlasio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_de_Blasio) was running for Mayor in NYC. He was hugely against high-rise high-density condos in Brooklyn adjacent (4th Ave) to expensive $2M+ brownstones (incidentally where he lived, in Park Slope!)
He was the "left" candidate and didnt seem to understand the concept of supply and demand. Nor the concept that no every city dweller can afford a $2M brownstone.
The problem is that Left and Right alike wants to perpetuate the system because they are all so fully bought into the system. I'm sure Mayor DeBlasio fully understood the economics here, but supported NIMBYism because he and his money base wants to keep their wealth.
That also means this isnt a left or right issue, its more of a hopeless issue. The only way out is to buy into the system and join them.
This is the short term fix, and I completely agree with you.
The long term fix is, aside from letting local governments make minor regulatory changes to facilitate denser urban construction, to simply do nothing.
Cities are expensive. People will (and are) moving away from HCOL areas because of this. Businesses are adapting (e.g., with remote work) to hire people living in MCOL and LCOL areas. At the same time, new economic agglomerations are springing up in these areas to support growing populations.
Given enough time, two things will happen. Many of these MCOL and LCOL areas will become more expensive. Some will urbanize. Some wont. Second, eventually, people living in the areas that don't urbanize will realize that they actually would enjoy living in a HCOL area. And the cycle will continue.
