Where is my filet knife?

https://lemmy.world/post/45273334

Am I too European to understand this?
is there no housing crisis in Europe anymore? have i missed the memo and forgot to afford a house?
Okay, I’m curious, how exactly do you think landlords affect your ability to buy a house?
I would look at things like “supply and demand” to answer that question.

I don’t get it. Landlords don’t buy houses. They mostly buy apartment blocks. At least in central europe, where I’m located. It’s usually not lucrative enough to invest money into a house to rent it back out for like 1500€ - 2000€ a month when you can invest the same amount into an apartment block, have 10 apartments and make like 800€/apartment.

Also, in germany specifically, the problem isn’t landlords. It’s extremely restrictive and confusing building regulations that are extremely hard to fulfill. Well, and the prices for raw materials are currently through the roof aswell. No idea how it’s in other european countries tho.

In the rest of the western world, landlords buy houses. They’re especially prolific for this in places with a high demand for housing, as this will maximise their profit extraction for the least amount of work. It’s a real problem, especially when the people denying mortgages to people are the same ones buying up the housing stock.

The same claim is made in the UK about the “real” problem being building regulations, as if forcing developers to build infrastructure like schools and roads (along with the houses they want to build) is a bad thing. Luckily though, the idea that the private sector could save us from themselves, at the expense of their own profit, is so silly that most people are informed enough to dismiss it instantly as nothing more than the corporate propaganda it is.

At some point, we have to start accepting the finite nature of land.