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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I may be biased because I moved recently to the Netherlands and looking to buy our first home and stop paying rent.

But, the house prices are crazy out here. I work in tech and my wife is an academic. We earn what is definitely above market average, and it looks like we cannot afford most houses we find in the area where we are renting now(well outside Amsterdam).

At this juncture, at least temporarily, investors who are looking to buy up properties and make money out of it need to be stopped by regulations. This is for the greater good. Investors can always find other avenues to invest. But, people need reasonable housing prices.

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This is becoming a problem in farmlands too. Young farmers are unable to buy farmlands, they are forced to lease from huge landowners. It is zero risk investment for these big landowners. Farmers do all the work, put in all the investment like tools (except the land) - landowners simply collect rent. Some of these people own hundreds of thousands of acres (Bill Gates, for example).

This is an ugly situation. This is not sustainable. At some point, we'd have a few hundred super wealthy people/corporations owning much of the desirable land and property. Everyone else would become just a peasant/tenant living in tiny apartments working all our lives just so we can have a tiny roof over our heads. This isn't hyperbole - one look at BlackRock should give us an idea in the direction this problem is going.

Oh, I know! We can give them the land for free, but instead we get to collect a tax on their produce. Of course they cannot leave this arrangement without immediately paying for all the land.

I think we can call these people serfs.

The same applies to the whole rented sector. We're all serfs.

Luckily Apple only wants 30% for selling an app your customer cannot otherwise load on their phone or table.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28424989

This kind of system was sustained for thousands of years in many different cultures, so I wouldn't exactly call it unsustainable. I would very much call it ugly and undesirable though.

My point here is that there is no guarantee that this will be solved just because it's "unsustainable". I don't understand why people aren't literally protesting on the street; we did so in the 70s and 80s ("geen woning geen kroning") and the situation was a lot less bad back then.

While buying the house in early 2019 I consulted Woz portal and saw that the price (of the house I was planning to buy) had increased 300% over ~8 year period. A constant lunch table discussion used to be how crazy housing prices were even back in 2018-19. So the market was already hot even before the pandemic, but now it's reached mania levels!

I'm in Wales and house prices in Amsterdam look incredibly low for better build quality and higher living standard.

The result of years of low interest rate policies.

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