This lady was living in a very desirable, central area of Madrid, paying peanuts for rent. Think Central Park rent for $500.
The spanish public generally doesn't want to, "build more", as they reject megacities. One of the biggest problem is there are no good, viable second and third-tier cities that have jobs. While there are very cheap places on the countryside, no one wants to live there as there are no jobs.
A complex solution would help: Canada-style ban of non-resident ownership, at least in stressed areas, "building more", but not in Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia, and in parallel, boost small businesses and remote work to help de-centralize living. However I don't think any country really cracked the code how to fix housing.
We have a very strong culture regarding office work, meaning those in charge.
When I see news or talk to friends, relatives, it seems the daily reality is eons away from central, northern Europe regarding remote, even after covid.
So it is back to either living on the city center, or spending 4 hours a day commuting from the city outskirts, with several connections, and various timetables.
While at the same time, we have those sponsored housing, and gold visas, for digital nomads with US salaries, which make natives very unhappy not being able to afford rentals priced for foreigner purses.
Those making TikTok and YouTube Shorts videos how living in Portugal and Spain is so great, the food and the "cheap" prices.
Why? Is it the law that governments have to a) be on your side? Or b) be effective?
Your underlying assumption is completely
I empathize with a universal right to housing, but is that a universal right to a house in East village NY, Marina SF or El Retiro Madrid?
For everybody?
Or only for those who got in, in the 90’s?
How does that seem fair?
These details have to be worked out before you can get the public to commit to one of these and just rioting in response will only get you so far.
But that’s still not enough, you also need preferential rent control for wherever you want to live for the remaining few of boomers who don’t already own the largest swath of real-estate.
Madrid has 3.4Mln people and is the second-largest city in the EU. How big do you want it to become?
I disagree on "just build more". There was a time where salaries moved more or less line with cost of living, and especially rents, but with AirBnB and estate funds sucking up any and all places they find, there's an enormous pressure that drives up rents for common people, which already struggle as-is to make ends meet. "Just build more" would simply keep pushing those towards the edges of town over time, while the city becomes a glorified luxury hotel that only rich people can afford. I welcome new regulation to combat this.
I just hope this event shatters any hope for the ultra-right parties that voted against it, and that people remember this. Ultimately, if anyone will build more, it'll still be the large real estate companies and funds that keep increasing rents on their tenants.
They also keep increasing the difficulty of evicting non paying tenants, taking a lot of rentals out of the market because owners are simply afraid of not being able to evict a non paying tenant, or making prices increase to account for that risk.
Bigger, obviously. Because the number of people who want to live in Madrid or visit it is higher than that. This can create a lot of economic surplus. Part of that surplus can be used to pay off locals (e.g. with housing in the newly built stock) so they win too.
The real problem, as far as I can tell, is that there's no socially accepted system for paying off locals. So locals end up resisting growth, because there's nothing in it for them except higher rents, and everyone loses.
The Dutch government designed entire cities and reclaimed land from the sea in the 1970s and it's already full. Human civilization is endless growth or death.
Ban AirBnB's and ban estate funds from owning homes.
Should we paint the moon a more romantic pink color too?
Look at traffic jams, if what you claimed was true, then traffic jams in LA should never happen.
Building homes and all the supporting infrastructure from roads, schools or even parks takes a lot of time and money. The movement of tourists for example is always going to be significantly quicker, because its very easy to move a bus of people to Madrid, while it takes years to build a home for them.
I understand everyone has an opinion about housing prices, but your intuitions may not be well adjusted to Spain's circumstances.
The reality is, anyone renting in Spain can readily tell you things don't work this way, if you query this, they go with someone else. Tenants paying the contract fee has an enormous momentum and it's way to easy for landlords to ignore it, in our hot housing market.
Secondly its very easy for people to move, while homes are fixed to the ground.
These are just too examples why in this modern age of constant change, there will always be a housing crisis. Looking at the world, its not only Spain with a housing crisis - its basically every single country and the cause is "change".
THis "change" and movement of people means the building of homes can never win, because it takes years to build a home and the supporting community of schools and hospitals.
In this context, you only need a housing supply curve that stays slightly ahead of domestic population demand and can follow fertility rates down over the next century. Spain’ population will drop by a third by 2100, for example, and reached peak population in 2023. If migration is causing housing demand to exceed supply, impair migration demand until housing supply catches up, if it can.
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-pass...
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...
Its that simple.