This is what happens when you open your country to be bought by foreign "investors", as it happened with Portugal and Americans.
When you have countries much larger and wealthier than you, they will pump the housing market to unsustainability, driving the locals out of their houses.
But hey, GDP and the waiter wages have increased, so there's that.
It surpises me that only 6% of "the Dutch" report that housing is a financial burden. Ask anyone here and they'll all agree the housing market is fucked and everything is way too expensive.
- The elderly don't have a problem
- The seniors don't have a problem
- The millennials that bought in 2021 or before don't have a problem, in fact they made 200-300k tax free within 5 years
- The youths that still live with their parents don't have a problem
- The youths that still live their parents because they can't afford to move out don't have a problem making their mortgage because they don't have one.
It's the wrong statistic! Either you earn enough or bought early enough to afford the house and the mortgage is not a financial burden, or you're not getting the mortgage.
Heck, even in my life my 2700 euro mortgage (of a very regular house) isn't a financial burden. My partner and i just about make ends meet. But we can't divorce and we can't get cancer. If that happens then yes, it's back to our parents with a child at 38-years-old.
This article is illuminating in that it demonstrates something many of us may have been thinking for a long time; one of the big drivers has been job concentration. I guess the life-hack takeaway is to find a great job not near an urban center? Remote work from the sticks and you're rich!
I wrote this story. Thanks for reading. It is certainly not perfect but I hope it is useful. Would be good if our statistical authorities could read it and understand the data gaps that we face.
Thanks for doing it. I love your approach. I'd love to see something similar that looks more deeply at areas that have a much larger housing market available to a particular job due to a really integrated mass transportation network.
I think this is a key detail people often miss. In other words a particular job in a particular neighborhood is great but if it can only be accessed by a small number of people in that neighborhood then it's quite a different dynamic than if a whole metropolis can essentially work and live anywhere within commutable distance.
And there are secondary components of this.. for example access to people who provide child care is easier in a well integrated metropolis than a federated byzantine instead of neighborhoods.. and childcare, school access, secondary care options are all critical components similar to housing hosts for families
That would be an entire study in itself! I am for now trying to highlight that statistical authorities need to get their data act together at least for basic data. Potentially, they would do a much better job than I did.
Only suggestion is to ease the reader’s journey by telling them the entire journey as a summary of front. Not a tldr but a paragraph or two “overview” with the key points and conclusions.
I am happy that you find the analysis helpful. I would be very curious so see what comes out of your own analysis for California. Please do reach out when you publish it.
Which parts of the writing are yours, and which were by LLMs? The density of LLM constructs here is very high, and the style doesn't feel consistent with your old blog posts. (And I wish it was written in the style of those older posts, which read clearly human).
Like, did you write this in another language and use LLMs to translate? Write an outline and LLMs wrote out the rest? Write this amount of text that was then edited by LLMs?
My blog posts are written more slowly - they are smaller and have low frequency. I write them on my own.
This text was drafted by myself and Claude Code "improved" then English, with lots of interference and rewriting from me - I can see that you do not like the "improvements" and maybe the overall result is not as good as it should. Not being an English native it is harder for me to judge (it does look OK to me) but this comment of yours is important.
I will consider rewriting this calmly. But it was important to get that data out - we have a social emergency in several countries.
As a data point for you, using LLMs to "improve" your English nowadays has the opposite effect. I'd rather have spelling/grammar errors than read LLM output as an article.
For what it’s worth, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and tell you straight up that I would much rather read quirky ESL English than Claudish. Claudish gives me a strong impression of laziness/SEO/race-to-the-bottom/enshittification/slop. Quirky ESL English gives the opposite impression: there’s a real person on the other end who’s really trying!
(Also, your English is clearly very good, and doesn’t even need a cleanup.)
I read the entire article, and it was very well written. I had no problems reading any of it.
I have come to loathe the posts from people who are so filled with AI angst (hate) that they're looking to jump on anything they can. I would ignore the previous suggestion.
I'm certain that your first draft would have read better than the Claude-edited version, no matter how sloppy and raw. When the text is obviously AI-generated, it is impossible to tell whether you're reading a human's thoughts and original research or if you're reading the result of a three sentence prompt.
It is in general very hard to obtain feedback for something like this - so thanks a bunch for the positive and negative feedback.
From the feedback, I adjusted several parts of the text manually without changing the meaning of anything nor touching the data.
That said, it was not my intention to produce this text with the informal tone I use on my blog. My blog has a very nichy audience whereas I expected (hoped) that this text would reach a wider population. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
What I don't understand is why the post is flagged :-\
> Worse, the statistic counts rents and mortgage interest but not mortgage repayment. A household paying €1,500 a month on a mortgage - of which €400 is interest and €1,100 is principal - shows up as spending €400 on housing. The other €1,100, the part that actually hurts, is invisible.
This guy lost me here, with the assertion that increased equity "hurts" / vanishes.
Presumably its AI slop? It's certainly a lot of charts / "effort" that have gone into analyzing some random datasets with no real revelation or conclusion.
The story is talking about the portion of your monthly budget occupied by housing. If you only "count" the interest on a mortgage payment, then you're ignoring a material amount of money out the door every month, and that would render the whole dataset questionable.
The only honest way to discuss "is housing too expensive?" is to ask "how much do you pay someone on the first of the month to live in your home or apartment?"
This can take several forms, but the majority are either:
* "My rent is $X;" or
* "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X;" or, in some cases,
* "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X, and I also have to pay $Y in condo fees / HOA fees / building fees."
That last category might just be an American thing; I have no idea. I just know that many if not most condo developments/buildings have an additional fee you have to pay even if you own your unit outright, and it can be significant.
yeah most countries have version of that: service charge (and ground rent) in the UK. Not usually supposed to be very expensive, but service charge can be predatory: in London it can be in the thousands of £ for no apparent reasons. There's all sorts of messed-up incentives driving up this service charge, too:
- The freeholder (owner of the building itself) is in charge of the maintenance of the building, usually delegating it to a management company
- However the freeholder is not responsible for _paying_ for maintenance, that's what service charge for the flat owners (leaseholders) is for.
- So the freeholder has no incentive to look for a cheap management company, or to do preventative work, as they don't pay for maintenance
- The management company does not have incentives to be cheap and do preventative work either, as their client (the freeholder) is not the payer.
- Where it gets really fun is that management companies actually _give a kickback_ to freeholders on maintenance costs, to get their business. So when leaseholders are charged £100 for maintenance, £2 of that goes back to the freeholder!
- So the freeholder actually has an incentive for maintenance to be _expensive_, it's a source of income.
It's incredibly fucked up, I don't understand how it's legal. Add onto that building insurance shenanigans and you get service charges of £3k or £4k for a one-bed flat (I've seen up to £8k). Which makes the flat entirely unsellable of course, so the flat owners are stuck in sometimes _very_ desperate situations.
I really like this article is focusing on the root cause, which is employment being more and more centralized towards big cities and the snowball effect this has which makes big cities more attractive for people looking for employment. If you don’t read the whole article at least read the conclusion part, which is very illuminating.
"there is no obligation to move to major cities" but counterargument is "there is no obligation to create jobs only in major cities". Everyone monetizes this phenomenon, no one is stopping it.
This sort of distribution effect is true in the US too. We have many rust belt cities that are shrinking. You would think that if people and the government cared about affordability then they would take measures to decentralize the jobs and spread them to shrinking cities through a density tax or job creation credit in specific zones, etc.
Unfortunately there isn't a single cause. Some people say we should create more jobs outside of cities. Some say we should build more flats inside cities. Some say we don't actually need to build more at all, but to distribute housing in a better way (some people own two houses, other own none).
I think it's a bit of everything, but if we decentralize too much, it becomes less energy efficient, and energy costs more in Europe compared to a lot of countries. If you decentralize, you need more fuel to get groceries, to go to work, to heat your home etc.
There is a good middle ground. Probably by creating more jobs and flats in cities with 50-200k inhabitants.
In my experience with Poland the entire housing is purchased by medical doctors whose salaries had skyrocketed during covid and continue as if the pandemic still existed. That's the last thing keeping this country's economy afloat. Everyone else without real estate is hopelessly screwed. Recently even doctors having portfolio of high tens of units domestically, they start purchasing in Spain and Italy.
The data shown here makes the situation in the Netherlands look a lot better than reality:
the number of months of gross salary needed to buy a single square metre (0.86 - 1.8)
18 years to repay, Amsterdam, 50m²
The average selling price in Amsterdam is €8,600/sqm against a €2,600 minimum wage and €4,500 average, so that ratio is actually 2x - 4x. A 50m2 apartment is going for 400k-500k, repayment will take 30+ years. Better family housing with two or three bedrooms crosses >600k.
Yes, salaries in NL can be much higher but it's still a bleak picture. Almost every young professional is priced out of the market.
From your numbers, the Amsterdam housing purchase effort is 8600 / 2600 = 1.91
But the article calculates averages at a NUTS-3 region level. It would be region NL32B (Greater Amsterdam) where the ratio is 1.1. That explains the difference.
As for the mortage:
8600*50 = 430k.
As you say, this does not fit repayment in 30 years for a single payer receiving 4500 gross.
It is borderline doable in 40 years with 3% interest rate.
So reality in an area with this price is different from the reality of the surroundings. This gets averaged at NUTS-# level. But hey, Eurostat averages it at a country level. So this is progress, I guess.
- Not building enough (= insufficient supply). The reasons vary per country.
- Too many people, mostly due to immigration (= excessive demand, with supply failing to keep up... in some cases, it's virtually impossible to meet demand).
- Competition from outsiders e.g. wealthier people from richer countries and/or large investment funds.
Some countries have all three problems, while others may have only one or two. However, it seems that many governments continue to misdiagnose the problem, placing too much emphasis on factors that in reality contribute very marginally to the problem. This may be due to incompetence or simply whatever agenda they have at the time.
If I had to make a wild prediction, I'd say the problem will continue to get worse until the whole system (not just housing but many critical parts of the country) eventually collapses in many places.
A really big part of the increased demand is the number of people per household decreasing, in large part driven by the expectation of people moving away from their family and living in their own (some of this is just a desire to do so, some of this is a requirement to do so in order to get a job, especially in a chosen career).
But why aren't we building enough? House prices as high as what we've been seeing in NL, with a 109% rise in 10 years, should make it enormously profitable to build new housing!
The problem is excessive regulation, and excessive land prices, due to zoning restrictions.
I would say there are several major reasons for ineffective government action:
- the wrong level of government has the power and the money. Housing is generally a local problem, but in many countries the cities are chronically underfunded -- higher levels of government have significantly more taxing power.
- misalignment between levels of government. Higher levels of government may be incentivized to increase housing stock. City governments are captured by NIMBY's.
- trying to do "easy" fixes. This is a hard problem; proper fixes are difficult and expensive.
- trying to preserve property values. People get really angry when their property values go down so governments try to have their cake and eat it to. They design programs that make it easier for people to buy houses. If those programs are successful, they increase house prices, making the problem worse.
Canada tried the "have cake eat it too" approach for 20 years and ended up with insane housing prices. The current government has finally adopted effective programs, addressing all 3 of your points. House prices are down this year in Canada; 1.9% overall, down 3.4% in the two most overheated markets.
What Canada has done:
- tying money for cities to zoning reforms
- vacant house taxes
- cut back on immigration
- directly building affordable housing
Notice that the above includes both the "right" and "left" proscriptions for reform. Both sides will claim that it's their proscriptions that's the effective one.
Huh? Did we read different articles? The main conclusion of OP is that your points aren't the whole story, in fact they are merely consequences of the main culprit: Centralization of jobs. In order words: if you had a magic wand with which you could sustainably smear out jobs away from the capital across the country, then above problems almost disappear.
I you are correct, but I needed to back the story with data. Because everybody has opinions but the data gaps are huge... and that prevents less analytical people from building the kind of opinion you are posting. The majority of the people is not analytical to this degree.
Well the other side of RTO is if you're going to live in a lower cost of living place you should expect that you'll get paid less because it's not fair that you just get to pocket the savings and be a less effective teammate
Well then you need to bring down the salary in the major metro which exasperates the cost of living crisis there and/or causes flight of people out to the cheaper places causing the people previously in them to report a cost of living crisis
My relatives who are nurses/tradespeople don't earn much, but since they live in LCOL/MCOL areas, most of them have always owned houses with hot tubs and garages in nice quiet areas. Meanwhile my big fancy tech job netted me roommates or small apartments in areas with frequent vehicle break-ins, otherwise I'd have needed to spend 50% of my TC on housing or commute 3 hours a day.
I finally got a job in a MCOL area and it's such a breath of fresh air. Yes my TC is lower, but for <$4k a month, I have a house in a nice area 30 minutes from the office AND I'm allowed to have pets. In the Bay Area or NY, pet friendly 3000sf houses like mine are rare, especially if you're filtering out long commutes and high crime areas. At best, I'd be getting a $2.5M mortgage or spending $8k on rent for a smaller house with a smaller yard, and my commute would be 90+ minutes a day.
It absolutely sucks that so many companies think it's impossible to open smallish offices in MCOL/LCOL areas that would transform their employees financial lives. Guess they're always optimizing for overhead cost per employee.
Do you own the house or rent a house? If you own, what's the issue with dogs? Just curious. I rented a $4K/m 4000 sq ft house in Charlotte from a private equity group in a very mellow neighborhood, there never was anything about my 2 large dogs.
Now renting in Miami in "no dogs" condo, all I had to do was get an emotional support doc, which is a $50 joke. The condo admin can't refuse that, at least by local laws. I did have to put it in writing with the owner of the condo that if the dogs will scratch up the wooden floors and it would be on me to fix it up. This "no dogs" condo has several dozen of dogs, what do you know!
It was a bit of a long read and started losing focus towards the end and goes around the same concept in different words. It is not clear to me if wages are adjusted every year (e.g. 2-4% to adjust for inflation) during the mock example calculations of repaying a 50m2 apartment. The odd thing about most mortgages is that they lock in a price of today for 5-30 years, but typically your wage does increase, hence the years to pay back the mortgage might technically be lower than calculated. Even if the current analysis does not cover this, I actually thought the years to pay back the mock loan are not that bad in most of these places. Sure 50m2 is small, but it uses only a single income and does not include any non standard income.
> I actually thought the years to pay back the mock loan are not that bad in most of these places.
But people don't live in most places - most people leave in the worst places, when it comes to purchasing houses.
The number of years calculated per NUTS-3 region does not include the years one needs to save for the 10% deposit plus taxes plus safety cushion. It is written in the article.
I should have clarified in most of the high density areas except Paris. The annual income adjustment question relates to the years to payback the loan, which does not affect the 10% upfront deposit. The way you calculate it now I think is using 45% of net salary (70% of gross) to repay the loan, but is this based on a static current wage applied across the entire annuity of the loan?
TFA totally misses the elephant in the room: deregulation and the financialization of housing. I.e. allowing housing to turn from a commodity into an investment vehicle.
I can see at least four ways how this is happening today:
(a) Allowing private equity to accumulate large swathes of housing. No explanation needed. These purchases are made to turn a profit, and they will do. Whatever that takes: bribe, extort or steal.
(b) Banks giving individuals cheap financing for a second, third or fourth house. This was very common in the Netherlands. I.e. if you're reasonably well-off, a bank would give you a huge loan for your second house while you still haven't paid off the first one. Your first house becomes a rental, and you pay off the second with your earnings. This effectively means that lower-income households are forced to rent perpetually.
(c) Counting the purchase of a house as an "investment" towards Golden Visa eligibility. This is very common in Portugal and Greece and effectively sets a floor for house prices. Everything else is then adjusted accordingly.
(d) Short-term rentals in popular destinations. Enough said.
Imagine housing in these markets was like cars (or housing in Japan). Houses are worth less every year, no one wants to buy a old house for full price, housing is relatively plentiful + cheap, rents are low.
Private equity wouldn't buy houses even if there was financing since they would lose money. No one would keep their first house and rent it out as they accumulate more houses, because they'd lose money.
In fact if you started doing those activities it wouldn't change the housing market, you'd eventually lose enough money that you would have to stop.
Given a fixed housing supply, increasing demand, and no ability to increase the housing supply, removing market speculation may produce some changes in price, but they're not causing the underlying lack of houses, merely profiting off of if. An effective way to drive them out is to build a lot of housing (aka fix the market).
> Given a fixed housing supply, increasing demand, and no ability to increase the housing supply
The housing supply is naturally inelastic, meaning, the ability to increase it is limited. For example, currently a significant part of the US construction capacity is tied up in building data-centers, increasing it is near impossible at anything approaching a reasonable cost, and even if it was possible, doing it would create problems in the future - this is a proven fact, not a conjecture.
> removing market speculation may produce some changes in price, but they're not causing the underlying lack of houses, merely profiting off of if.
You aren't connecting the dots. As it is today, both housing and data-centers are largely driven by speculation - on a mass scale. You severely underestimate the scope and role of speculation in today's markets - yes, we can dream about some imaginary world where competition, demand and supply solve everything but the reality is very different.
I _feel_ it's more the lack of housing. Especially in America the Zoning laws make it impossible to build middle housing. I would maybe agree with the private equity part when considering the number of apartment / condo complexes being built.
But where is the lack of housing substantiated? I think there's mostly lack of affordable housing, and that is a direct result of the de-commoditization of housing: allowing housing to be an "investment opportunity" which attracts speculation and incentivises artificial scarcity.
The zoning laws you mention may even be part of the plan to maintain artificial scarcity and maximize profits.
54 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 40.4 ms ] threadWhen you have countries much larger and wealthier than you, they will pump the housing market to unsustainability, driving the locals out of their houses.
But hey, GDP and the waiter wages have increased, so there's that.
The following expat groups buy the MOST property in Portugal, according to the country's housing transaction stats:
1. Brazil (9,808 homes purchased)
2. Angola (4,145)
3. France (3,765)
Brazilians accounted for almost 1/4 of purchases by foreign-buyers.
If we focus on just luxury property demand in Q4 2025, it is: UK, USA, Germany, France, Spain...
Just for the record.
It's the wrong statistic! Either you earn enough or bought early enough to afford the house and the mortgage is not a financial burden, or you're not getting the mortgage.
Heck, even in my life my 2700 euro mortgage (of a very regular house) isn't a financial burden. My partner and i just about make ends meet. But we can't divorce and we can't get cancer. If that happens then yes, it's back to our parents with a child at 38-years-old.
This article is illuminating in that it demonstrates something many of us may have been thinking for a long time; one of the big drivers has been job concentration. I guess the life-hack takeaway is to find a great job not near an urban center? Remote work from the sticks and you're rich!
I think this is a key detail people often miss. In other words a particular job in a particular neighborhood is great but if it can only be accessed by a small number of people in that neighborhood then it's quite a different dynamic than if a whole metropolis can essentially work and live anywhere within commutable distance.
And there are secondary components of this.. for example access to people who provide child care is easier in a well integrated metropolis than a federated byzantine instead of neighborhoods.. and childcare, school access, secondary care options are all critical components similar to housing hosts for families
Only suggestion is to ease the reader’s journey by telling them the entire journey as a summary of front. Not a tldr but a paragraph or two “overview” with the key points and conclusions.
Like, did you write this in another language and use LLMs to translate? Write an outline and LLMs wrote out the rest? Write this amount of text that was then edited by LLMs?
This text was drafted by myself and Claude Code "improved" then English, with lots of interference and rewriting from me - I can see that you do not like the "improvements" and maybe the overall result is not as good as it should. Not being an English native it is harder for me to judge (it does look OK to me) but this comment of yours is important.
I will consider rewriting this calmly. But it was important to get that data out - we have a social emergency in several countries.
(Also, your English is clearly very good, and doesn’t even need a cleanup.)
I have come to loathe the posts from people who are so filled with AI angst (hate) that they're looking to jump on anything they can. I would ignore the previous suggestion.
From the feedback, I adjusted several parts of the text manually without changing the meaning of anything nor touching the data.
That said, it was not my intention to produce this text with the informal tone I use on my blog. My blog has a very nichy audience whereas I expected (hoped) that this text would reach a wider population. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
What I don't understand is why the post is flagged :-\
This guy lost me here, with the assertion that increased equity "hurts" / vanishes.
Presumably its AI slop? It's certainly a lot of charts / "effort" that have gone into analyzing some random datasets with no real revelation or conclusion.
The story is talking about the portion of your monthly budget occupied by housing. If you only "count" the interest on a mortgage payment, then you're ignoring a material amount of money out the door every month, and that would render the whole dataset questionable.
The only honest way to discuss "is housing too expensive?" is to ask "how much do you pay someone on the first of the month to live in your home or apartment?"
This can take several forms, but the majority are either:
* "My rent is $X;" or * "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X;" or, in some cases, * "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X, and I also have to pay $Y in condo fees / HOA fees / building fees."
That last category might just be an American thing; I have no idea. I just know that many if not most condo developments/buildings have an additional fee you have to pay even if you own your unit outright, and it can be significant.
I think it's a bit of everything, but if we decentralize too much, it becomes less energy efficient, and energy costs more in Europe compared to a lot of countries. If you decentralize, you need more fuel to get groceries, to go to work, to heat your home etc.
There is a good middle ground. Probably by creating more jobs and flats in cities with 50-200k inhabitants.
Yes, salaries in NL can be much higher but it's still a bleak picture. Almost every young professional is priced out of the market.
Author here.
From your numbers, the Amsterdam housing purchase effort is 8600 / 2600 = 1.91
But the article calculates averages at a NUTS-3 region level. It would be region NL32B (Greater Amsterdam) where the ratio is 1.1. That explains the difference.
As for the mortage:
8600*50 = 430k.
As you say, this does not fit repayment in 30 years for a single payer receiving 4500 gross.
It is borderline doable in 40 years with 3% interest rate.
So reality in an area with this price is different from the reality of the surroundings. This gets averaged at NUTS-# level. But hey, Eurostat averages it at a country level. So this is progress, I guess.
- Not building enough (= insufficient supply). The reasons vary per country.
- Too many people, mostly due to immigration (= excessive demand, with supply failing to keep up... in some cases, it's virtually impossible to meet demand).
- Competition from outsiders e.g. wealthier people from richer countries and/or large investment funds.
Some countries have all three problems, while others may have only one or two. However, it seems that many governments continue to misdiagnose the problem, placing too much emphasis on factors that in reality contribute very marginally to the problem. This may be due to incompetence or simply whatever agenda they have at the time.
If I had to make a wild prediction, I'd say the problem will continue to get worse until the whole system (not just housing but many critical parts of the country) eventually collapses in many places.
The problem is excessive regulation, and excessive land prices, due to zoning restrictions.
- the wrong level of government has the power and the money. Housing is generally a local problem, but in many countries the cities are chronically underfunded -- higher levels of government have significantly more taxing power.
- misalignment between levels of government. Higher levels of government may be incentivized to increase housing stock. City governments are captured by NIMBY's.
- trying to do "easy" fixes. This is a hard problem; proper fixes are difficult and expensive.
- trying to preserve property values. People get really angry when their property values go down so governments try to have their cake and eat it to. They design programs that make it easier for people to buy houses. If those programs are successful, they increase house prices, making the problem worse.
Canada tried the "have cake eat it too" approach for 20 years and ended up with insane housing prices. The current government has finally adopted effective programs, addressing all 3 of your points. House prices are down this year in Canada; 1.9% overall, down 3.4% in the two most overheated markets.
What Canada has done:
- tying money for cities to zoning reforms
- vacant house taxes
- cut back on immigration
- directly building affordable housing
Notice that the above includes both the "right" and "left" proscriptions for reform. Both sides will claim that it's their proscriptions that's the effective one.
I finally got a job in a MCOL area and it's such a breath of fresh air. Yes my TC is lower, but for <$4k a month, I have a house in a nice area 30 minutes from the office AND I'm allowed to have pets. In the Bay Area or NY, pet friendly 3000sf houses like mine are rare, especially if you're filtering out long commutes and high crime areas. At best, I'd be getting a $2.5M mortgage or spending $8k on rent for a smaller house with a smaller yard, and my commute would be 90+ minutes a day.
It absolutely sucks that so many companies think it's impossible to open smallish offices in MCOL/LCOL areas that would transform their employees financial lives. Guess they're always optimizing for overhead cost per employee.
Now renting in Miami in "no dogs" condo, all I had to do was get an emotional support doc, which is a $50 joke. The condo admin can't refuse that, at least by local laws. I did have to put it in writing with the owner of the condo that if the dogs will scratch up the wooden floors and it would be on me to fix it up. This "no dogs" condo has several dozen of dogs, what do you know!
But people don't live in most places - most people leave in the worst places, when it comes to purchasing houses.
The number of years calculated per NUTS-3 region does not include the years one needs to save for the 10% deposit plus taxes plus safety cushion. It is written in the article.
I can see at least four ways how this is happening today:
(a) Allowing private equity to accumulate large swathes of housing. No explanation needed. These purchases are made to turn a profit, and they will do. Whatever that takes: bribe, extort or steal.
(b) Banks giving individuals cheap financing for a second, third or fourth house. This was very common in the Netherlands. I.e. if you're reasonably well-off, a bank would give you a huge loan for your second house while you still haven't paid off the first one. Your first house becomes a rental, and you pay off the second with your earnings. This effectively means that lower-income households are forced to rent perpetually.
(c) Counting the purchase of a house as an "investment" towards Golden Visa eligibility. This is very common in Portugal and Greece and effectively sets a floor for house prices. Everything else is then adjusted accordingly.
(d) Short-term rentals in popular destinations. Enough said.
Imagine housing in these markets was like cars (or housing in Japan). Houses are worth less every year, no one wants to buy a old house for full price, housing is relatively plentiful + cheap, rents are low.
Private equity wouldn't buy houses even if there was financing since they would lose money. No one would keep their first house and rent it out as they accumulate more houses, because they'd lose money.
In fact if you started doing those activities it wouldn't change the housing market, you'd eventually lose enough money that you would have to stop.
Given a fixed housing supply, increasing demand, and no ability to increase the housing supply, removing market speculation may produce some changes in price, but they're not causing the underlying lack of houses, merely profiting off of if. An effective way to drive them out is to build a lot of housing (aka fix the market).
The housing supply is naturally inelastic, meaning, the ability to increase it is limited. For example, currently a significant part of the US construction capacity is tied up in building data-centers, increasing it is near impossible at anything approaching a reasonable cost, and even if it was possible, doing it would create problems in the future - this is a proven fact, not a conjecture.
> removing market speculation may produce some changes in price, but they're not causing the underlying lack of houses, merely profiting off of if.
You aren't connecting the dots. As it is today, both housing and data-centers are largely driven by speculation - on a mass scale. You severely underestimate the scope and role of speculation in today's markets - yes, we can dream about some imaginary world where competition, demand and supply solve everything but the reality is very different.
The zoning laws you mention may even be part of the plan to maintain artificial scarcity and maximize profits.