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Hey, here’s a thought: outside of banks holding the deed in the context of mortgages, corporations aren’t allowed to own residential properties for perma-renting purposes.

The prices are set by banks. The only limit on what somebody can sell you a house for is what the bank is prepared to lend you.

If the interest rates go down, the price goes up. If the term lengths go up, the price goes up. Prevent lending, and the landlords will buy it up because normal people can no longer afford them.

The system has been fucked for way too long, and in order to fix it, you're going to have to upset a lot of people who have put their money into their home.

We need to stop using the term "middle class."

Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.

Today it's two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.

We're in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.

Basic, modern human needs such as housing, healthcare, education, nutrition, utilities (electricity, internet, water & sewage), and transportation should never be a means of profit. As with everything, there is a cost to maintaining these systems and to profit off of them inherently means diverting resources away from these systems that serve our society into the pocket of an individual.

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

Stop letting corporations gobble up single family homes.

Stop letting multi-home owners buy and buy and buy.

Tax vacant homes.

Supply and demand. Stop letting people (or corporations) buy more than one house and watch prices fall. I own a home, and I’m perfectly willing to see it lose value in order to avoid seeing my country turn into some modern feudalistic hellhole.

At some point we need to have a grown up conversation about the finite nature of land, specifically land that people can live on and find work from.

This "the rich make up the rules and lets pretend land will never run out" nonsense clearly isn't working for anyone but the rich.

Just want to point out, EU inflation rate from 2015 - 2024 is a 12% change, so out of the 3 examples listed only the EU has had stable prices. Technically housing prices went down in some EU countries based on this information, like Portugal. And EU inflation has gone down since the 2022 spike, which means there was a tiny housing bubble in 2022.

This only applies to housing prices of course - rent is a different story so being addressed in different ways across different EU members.

It's affecting the working poor worse. the middle class can still afford rent far easier.

I'm on my thirties, I don't know a single person that can afford to live alone, they are either sharing with a stranger/spouse or still with their parents.

The governments solution will be to start offering 40 year mortgages. Do nothing to make housing affordable, just extend the time to pay it off like they've done with auto loans going from 60 months to 72 months terms.