Moving to London recently was an eye-opening experience. I came from Frankfurt (one of the most expensive German cities), yet finding a place was astronomically harder and in the end we pay around twice what we did for a similarly located (but smaller!) flat.
In general most housing seems to be much worse quality as well. Our current place is actually quite nice and feels very solid/well insulated, but many places that I viewed (or briefly lived in) were really run-down, poorly insulated, or clearly just poorly-built.
I’m not sure if it is one of the causes, but we were also looking into buying a place here and found that owning (and presumably building) anything other than single-family houses is a bit of a clusterfuck (here in England at least, I’ve heard it’s better in Scotland) with the whole “leasehold” system.
Our current place is actually quite nice and feels very solid/well insulated, but many places that I viewed (or briefly lived in) were really run-down, poorly insulated, or clearly just poorly-built.
Even when I visited England and Wales in 2013 the whole place gave me the impression that a lot of buildings (especially commercial ones but not just) were closed, abandoned or otherwise just a relic of the past.
But a popular location for people to buy investment properly from abroad and a lot of wealthy people have two or more homes - bits of Cornwall are so overtaken by second homes they’re ghost towns most the year, locals priced out of the market end up having to live in illegally located caravans or with their parents in a run down mundic crumbling house.
London is like it too, every new apartment block we’ve worked at has been half sold to overly rich people using it on the weeks they come in to work or socialise in the city while the other half gets sold to an over seas investment company for rental.
Personally I think our government should do deals with other countries to try and unload some of us
The solution is a second home tax, which is to be paid, if you do not live in a house for a given period every year. Obviously it needs to be high enough.
This would still allow the super rich to take over a town. So, another idea: A second home cap, which must not be exceeded. Say a village decides they can handle 1% of their houses owned by the 1%, but not more. Once these two houses found their part-time inhabitants, #3 must wait, or go somewhere else. A bit like garden plots, or boat piers. Naturally, this would also drive prices due to scarcity.
I’d rather have a per-person cap. 1 Home + 1 Vacation Home are free. Every Home after gets taxed to oblivion.
I’m surprised that Canada doesn’t have the #1 spot in housing unaffordability. Things are grim here.
On a national level there’s a lot of cheap places in sparsely populated areas. Just like the US.
England has some “country” but it’s a much smaller percentage so city prices aren’t offset as much.
