Prices have risen by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and nearly 15% in the European Union between 2015 and 2024. Though policies have been implemented to increase supply and regulate rentals, their impact has been limited and the problem is getting worse
Housing access has become a critical issue worldwide, with cities that were once accessible reaching unsustainable price points. Solutions that have been proposed, like building more houses, capping rents, investing in subsidized housing and limiting the purchase of properties by foreigners have not stemmed the issue’s spread. Between 2015 and 2024, prices rose by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and by nearly 15% in the European Union (including by 26% in Spain), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
…
Salaries have not grown apace with real estate prices. In the EU, the median rent rose by 20% between 2010 and 2022, with rental and purchase prices growing by up to 48%, according to Eurostat. Underregulated markets are wreaking havoc, and in the United States and Spain, 20% of renters spend more than 40% of their income on housing, while in France, Italy, Portugal and Greece, that percentage varies between 10% and 15%, according to the OECD. Many countries have created programs aimed at increasing the future supply of public housing, but their effectiveness has yet to be determined and analysts say that results will be limited if smarter regional planning decisions are not made.
Well, in the Post 2008 Crash World with the most favorable policies for the Asset Owner class since the time of the Monarchy, after the rich finished draining the Poor and Traditional Working class using rent-seeking anchored on their control of assets connected to life essentials (most obviously, Housing) and, especially in the West, their leverage of the Demand Side for Work thanks to having sent most jobs abroad with Globalization (something which was itself pushed by the rich in the 70s and is core in Neoliberalism), they would obviously go after the Middle-Class next.
I mean, did anybody really expect that the Greed of the Owner Class would somehow magically stop when the only large pool of wealth left out of their hands was the one held by the Middle-Class?
What I find funny in all this is the “Modern” “Left” parties were the scions of the Middle-Class obsess over Supposedly-Left-but-really-Liberal ideas (mainly Identity Politics) having forgotten the core concern of the old-fashioned Traditional Left (such as Communism, Socialism, Social-Democracy and independently of one agreeing with their actual solutions of not) which is about Power (in the sense of who, if any, can impose their will on others directly or indirectly) hence totally ignoring the detail that 4 decades of Neoliberalism have de facto turned Money into a Power far above the State, and which most definitelly forces on others choices such as were to live, how to live, and what to do.
The “Modern” “Left” thinking, birthed in the 80s from some ideas from American think tanks and without Equality explicitly as an Ideology (instead they had some pre-made policies for “Equalities” - i.e. Equality on a group by group basis, with how much each person’s deserving of fair and equal treatment and access to things in life depending on their “group” membership defined by their genetics, religion, gender, sexual orientation or place of birth - that avoided like the plague even mentioning Equality For All, the only real Equality) were useful idiots for the Neoliberals and now here were are, when even those priviledged scions of the Middle and Upper Middle-Class are starting to be squeezed by the wealthy, whose power they so pointedly avoided talking about and criticizing, must less trying to control and reduce.
Con-fucking-gratulations!