by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-18 16:02:04+00:00
All of that probably. Also not that familiar with Spain. But the same issue is visible all over Europe. Basically apartments in nice areas are rented out to tourists for much more than would be affordable for locals. The advantage for the property owner is that these are short term rentals that are very lucrative. With long term renters, they basically the rental prices are highly regulated and in many countries it's very hard to terminate rental contracts. In some places renting out property is now so unattractive that landlords just sell off the property which removes it from the market entirely. That's what happened in the Netherlands in recent years.

And meanwhile, getting any kind of building permits is super hard so there's only a trickle of new property being built that lags behind demand.

There's a real estate bubble where real estate value outgrows inflation structurally. So housing is getting more and more expensive. To the point where a normal person with a normal income has basically no chance at all at finding anything decent on the market.

The solution of building more housing and making it easier for property owners to rent out their property are consistently not happening. The Netherlands actually has large amounts of empty property where the owners prefer to not rent it out and keep their investment liquid because it's such a PITA to get out of an agreement. There's also a history of privatized housing corporations selling off their property to make some quick money for the share holders. The net result is a huge mess of private property that is either not rented out or rented out at extortion prices. At the same time there's also growing amount of empty commercial real estate. Because people work from home now. Converting that for housing is another regulation challenge.

The problem isn't greed but broken policy. The reflex of "protecting" renters has had the opposite negative effects on the rental market. Things like Airbnb are more like a symptom than the cause of this.

The way I see it, house construction should not be expensive. It's artificial scarcity. A 50K camper can be pretty comfortable. But forget about having the right to use that as a place to live. You are instead expected to pay extortion rents or buy your own 500K piece of shit tiny apartment that is actually smaller and less comfortable than the bloody camper. A camper is just a house with wheels. Those are mass produced in factories. Houses without wheels should be much simpler to make. This never was a technical problem. Prefab housing is kind of a solved problem. It's not that hard. Any idiot can construct a garden shed in an afternoon. If the rules were different, most big cities would have huge slums with campers and other improvised housing. Regulation is what keeps this under control. But when policy breaks down, slums like that become the next logical level of this crisis.

A good example of exemptions in the Netherlands are so-called holiday homes where people live permanently; despite this clearly being illegal. Evicting people would create an unsolvable problem for bureaucrats. So, a lot of people that live like that got their situation legalized. And of course recreational units tend to be in nice places too. So, it's a popular thing. If tens of thousands of people start parking their campers on the edge of town bureaucrats would struggle to address the issue without creating a bigger crisis.

Probably something like this will force a solution eventually.