Society The housing crisis fuelled by immigration and gentrification

[Stuvanè]

Its because we in the west have it easy for generations. Imho that basically sums up modern liberalism. In my country housing is huge issue and many of the left are getting punished aswell, I can't believe our government is so incompetent to allow so much immigration when we never had the housing and jobs for this turbo migration.

The phenomenon is epochal and probably no longer governable, not even by those who have the actual will to combat it.
Add to this a large dose of political incompetence - this transversal to almost all sides - and an equal dose of subservience to a certain third world mainstream, as well as to some interests kept more or less under the table, interwoven between local and foreign politicians.
Submissiveness could be defined as a kind of Stockholm syndrome, which pushes you to collaborate with your invader (naively hoping to ingratiate him), or not to come into conflict with him, under penalty of ostracization by politics and the right-thinking electorate of leftists who will label you a racist hack.
The interests are almost always determined by huge funding coming from foreign countries, which effectively distort local politics.
In Milan, where I live (governed by a left-wing council), a powerful process of gentrification has been underway for about 10-15 years, in which the forced and impetuous redevelopment of once poor areas is expelling the old local population, incapable of supporting purchases, rents and current expenses in their old area thus transformed. Try to guess from which non-European countries these loans and real estate investments come, which are basically buying up entire neighborhoods of the city. Try to see if something similar is happening there too. Do you want a local administration to come into conflict with its major subsidizer, creating barriers and obstacles regarding immigrants who come from those same countries?
Business is business, even and above all on the left

 

[Stuvanè]

In some parts of Southern Europe the local population is being excluded by the post-pandemic invasion of tourists from Northern Europe eager for the beautiful beaches and warm climate of the south of the continent and not by cunning capitalists from Eastern Europe or the third world. It's an economic issue, without a doubt. What is best for the city or the region? Moneyed and poorly educated British tourists, with no knowledge of history, who spray graffiti, for example, on the Colosseum (in Rome) or the friendly but impoverished old natives who want to sell their houses for 1 Euro for wealthy foreigners to renovate and live there. Who is to blame, if anyone is to blame? In capitalism, making money and making profits is not a crime and restricting the free exercise of any type of economic activity violates freedom (Elon Musk and his X say so).

Ibiza locals living in cars as party island sees rents soar

Duarte,

in these situations there is always a contributory fault, even among the locals.

When profit and certain capitalist and speculative manias in general become aggressive, boorish and ignorant (or the institutions themselves impose foolish policies or exasperating taxation and tax regimes), the middle or lower-middle classes, which form the core of a country's productive system, are put in trouble. They behave like the idiot sawing off the branch on which he is perched. I see what is happening in Ibiza, in Milan perhaps we are already at the next stage.

Having destroyed the indigenous base that was able both to produce and spend, you already lose sovereignty there and have to beg for funding from external actors, who - at certain levels - will make precise political demands (not to say blackmail), heavily conditioning governments and local administrations. Sometimes this happens almost in the open, and in this case I would include the reconstruction of certain zones of Milan.

Other times these operations take place in the dark. Does anyone better informed than me have any updates on Qatargate, which involved some MEPs (including Italians) about a year and a half ago? Have there been any developments? Or must everything go by the wayside so as not to tarnish the immaculate image of certain left-wing parties?

 

[bigsnake49]

I think that gentrification, air B&B's and investment companies that are buying the houses to rent them out are the main drivers in the US. Where I live there is a limit to how far people can commute to downtown Tampa. There is no commuter trains although there is an elementary bus network. So people don't want to spend an hour each way commuting. Developers are risk averse because they got burned in the 2008 fiasco. To tell you the truth, this area is running out of land to put new developments. Very soon they will have to start buying older homes and building bigger 2 story houses rather than the smaller, flat ranch houses that were built 40-50 years ago.

 

[Vitruvius]

Left and right are two sides of the same coin and their motivating factors (financial greed) are one and the same. They both are cannibalizing their own native populations as has already been wisely noted. I am more interested in solutions that concern the defense and protection of the unrepresented and exploited native Europeans of these countries - especially prioritizing the middle and working classes whose labor the prosperity of society at large is wholly dependent on. Part of the reason this is so important is because the middle class represents the possibility of social mobility and by extension proof of an equitable and balanced societal contact in a push-pull lens of civilizational development. If an ethnically native born citizen cannot work their way to economic prosperity through their own diligence and sweat, then interest for participation in the system itself will dramatically decrease. Talented, but impoverished individuals will move elsewhere where their efforts will be better compensated (emmigration/brain drain) and those that remain will be unmotivated to struggle or participate diligently in a system of governence whose structural/legal elements are written against their interests. The kind of governance we live under currently is an extraordinarily dysgenic system when you really look at it.

We seem to be regressing into a fief-like society in which the wealthy become needlessly wealthier while the poor become painstakingly poorer at the expense of participation in the middle class - all the while any labor shortages caused by fertility drops are compensated by mass immigration from exotic lands. It's hard for me to imagine a more short sighted and foolish period of governance. I see no politicians which are willing to mobilize their military to stem the tide of immigrants, nor take any serious, hard line steps in this regard. Even the most vocal anti-immigrant politicians seem to do nothing once elected. I also see no politicians interested in seriously reducing public debt and government spending in an attempt to ultimately reduce the tax burden. Productive populations who work and are necessarily forced to pay these taxes are limited in the amount of children they can have financially, which adds more needless pressure on the fertility rate crisis. I think we are effectively at a point to where we have ask how much more pressure/mismanagement European and more broadly western/colonial states can handle before they simply regress into 2nd or 3rd world countries thanks to the policies of international finance.

 

[Vitruvius]

I understand that the middle class and even those who could be defined as poor (I do not include the miserable in this list, unfortunately sometimes lacking the minimum necessary for survival) tend to think that outsiders and immigrants are stealing their jobs, housing and contributing to increasing the housing crisis and increasing crime rates. The lack of qualifications and underemployment can in fact contribute to the proliferation of sub housing and also to the increase in crime rates related to drug trafficking (mainly murders, robberies, executions) and the marginalized populations are the most susceptible to cooptation into crime, organized or not. Brains leave in search of better opportunities, whether outside their hometowns or even their countries of origin. They usually qualify themselves as desired immigrants in most places where they go and they don't get there by jumping over fences, walls, in the hold of ships, dodging immigration in ports and airports or on floating stilts. Brain drain is a problem that must be resolved by offering better opportunities for Engineers, masters and doctors to remain where they are, in their cities or countries of origin. By the other hand, Immigrants unwanted by the poor and middle class and hated by the extra-right tend to be (under)employed by economically advantaged people to work as domestic servants, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, cleaners, bricklayers, gardeners, etc., subjecting themselves to working hours , excessive and without any social labor protection. I don't know to what extent they are taking the place of native workers who are often no longer willing to work in roles that they would consider degrading and with vile salaries. Modern human traffickers take advantage of this, co-opting vulnerable people in poor countries or at war to take them to rich countries. Of course, everything is a crime, from human trafficking, to illegal immigration, to exploitation in the form of slave labor or sexual exploitation. Bandits, drug traffickers and terrorists who would be unwanted anywhere in the world also use illegal immigration to continue in the crime way. But, in my humble opinion, to believe that all of Europe's current problems, including the exponential increase in crime, are linked to illegal immigration, often related to the chaos created with the unequivocal help of the West itself in the immigrants' countries of origin, is a very myopic vision. It’s to cover the sun with a sieve.

I think you are mischaracterizing a lot of my points a lot here. I never said immigration encompassed all of Europe's problems, but it is by far the most major problem to date. I also never advocated that most first generation immigrants are taking primarily middle class jobs, however you would do well to not underestimate how many immigrants do in fact broadly drive down wages in the labor market and those from educated backgrounds or second generation immigrants do indeed place significant pressure on the middle class job market even if they don't represent the bulk of this demographic. To pretend this does not happen is simply false. The reason many of these low paying jobs have such poor and "vile" wages as you've described is specifically because foreigners are willing to work for those precise wages - lest employers (legal or not) would have to pay more for the position to begin with had they not had access to a large pool of exotic individuals from poorer countries. What is myopic to me is the idea that introducing a large sum of high fertility exotic immigrants to Europe in a period of low fertility for the native population is going to do anything but create more long term problems. It is like trying to put a small dirty bandage on a gaping wound. The result causes infection and more problems than what was started with. If you have an issue with fertility and labor participation you need to institute a system of governance that incentivizes childbirth at the benefit of the local population instead of trying to replace them with foreigners. You're never going to get me to agree to the idea that mass migration is a good thing, here. This is fundamentally an anti-European perspective that would rather see the continent full of Africans, Middle Easterners and Asians solely to prop up a cheap labor market. So yes, immigrants in this case, particularly the exotic ones that have little to no connection to Europe or its history are the main problem, along with their respective traffickers. There are many other issues as well that do not relate to the migrants that Europe will also have to confront, but they are lesser in terms of scope and difficulty of correcting long term.

 

[bigsnake49]

Today I heard an interview with Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and part of the interview dealt with immigration. Canada has done a wonderful job dealing with immigration recognizing that seasonal labor (farm and construction) is needed and organized an orderly process to satisfy that demand. He also covered the resettlement of about 30,000 Syrian refugees. Offered incentives to the refugees to settle in smaller provincial towns rather than the big cities. What refreshingly thoughtful approach to this problem. There was a lot more organized, studied approaches to problems in that interview. That's what we need in the US instead of demonizing the other side.