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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

The answer to this is build more housing. Who or what is preventing that?

The rich will capitalize on that and will create endless waves of constructing and reconstructing 'social housing'. They will become super rich and will form a layer with vested interest in maintaining hundreds of thousands being poor. This is France.

All kinds of things. Large organisations (supermarket chains like Tesco) holding onto vast "land banks," new property being bought up and left vacant by foreign investors as fast as it can been build (a big problem in London and Cambridge), construction companies and their investors who want to restrict the supply to keep prices high, a lack of suitable places to build new housing (lack of infrastructure, protected countryside...). Everywhere I look I keep seeing new flats (apartments) being built where offices used to be but they are empty, so it's a bit of a mystery. Maybe these are of the wrong type or these are examples of the ones the foreign investors are buying?

Foreign "investments" in property are almost universally bad. I give you Vancouver, London, SF, and NYC as just a few examples. The very rich in other economies buy large amounts of "investment" property and do nothing other than drive up prices against - and out of step with - the local economy. This drives out the locals, and causes many actual residents to wonder how someone, even on a good salary, could afford a local property.

A lot of these foreign investments come from China. I don't know a solution - if I had buckets of money I'd love to have property abroad (although more for living, less as investment). I don't know what restricting local investments in property would do economically, but I know the current lack of restrictions cause terrible hurt to locals.

I always wonder at lack of reciprocal thinking in these kinds of views. People don't mind buying cheap stuff from foreign countries but think there's something wrong or bad when the people that received their money use that money to buy something in their country.

This is exactly part of the whole deal. It's inseparable. Why would they sell you something in the first place if they couldn't buy anything back?

The buying up and hoarding of land and property is just one symptom of broader wealth concentration into the hands of global elite. Like you said, its universally bad, but when you have so much wealth (on a macroeconomic scale) and nowhere to in the immediate term invest it to produce reliable returns, you instead towards hoarding scarce resources as a store of value - gold, land, and essential crops and anywhere else you can trade fiat / volatile stock into less risky properties.

China has gotten very rich in the last twenty years, but it has been nothing close to an equal rising tide of prosperity. There are now uber-rich competitive with the greatest dynasties of Euro-American enterprise that want to do something with all that wealth, and particular relative to the West they have a problem with their stock market being heavily state controlled and thus an undesirable place to safety hoard capital.

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