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Miguel Nunes Silva has an MA from the College of Europe and is currently the director of the Trezeno Institute, in Portugal. He has worked for a number of UN and EU agencies and regularly writes for publications such as The Washington Examiner and The Salisbury Review.
Portugal has been one of the countries worst affected by a generalised housing crisis in the West. Along with Spain, the Iberian nation faces an offensive on two fronts: from the south, it must cope with immense pressure from developing-world immigration flows as well as from former colonies in the Americas and Africa. From the north, it faces waves of first-world digital nomads and retirees, escaping overtaxed metropoles, suffering from terrorism and rising crime. This is aggravated by Lisbon’s rising pull as a tourism destination, currently placed in Europe’s top 10 and welcoming 30 million visitors annually. In addition, neither Madrid nor Lisbon is known for particularly streamlined bureaucracies, and the construction of new developments is often delayed by government regulation [ [link removed] ]. The crisis is eased only by inverted age pyramids which facilitate children inheriting property from their parents as well as by emigration flows of domestically qualified youths to northern Europe, thus relieving some of the pressure on the housing market in the peninsula.
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The Left fumes at the contrast between empty homes and the difficulty of finding housing, in particular for youths and the elderly. This rage was one of the primary motivations for the Indignados movement that emerged during the Great Recession. It is a misleading point to invoke, however, because in two of Europe’s main tourist destinations, it is normal for the real estate market to feature empty houses which serve primarily as holiday homes. The golden visa schemes, which were adopted after the subprime crisis, only made this contrast more acute.
In Spain, the Sánchez government came under heavy right-wing criticism for having started the legalisation process for up to a million illegal migrants [ [link removed] ] but this figure is also cited in the case of Portugal with more dire implications. During the tenure of António Costa, now President of the European Council, in a context of parliamentary entente with the communist far left, his socialist government dismantled the border control agency and remade it into a ‘human rights’-themed government department for asylum seekers. In the process, this facilitated the entry of a million immigrants, mostly from the developing world, which meant Portugal was forced to tackle a 10 per cent increase in national population in less than a decade. These colossal numbers meant, as I explained recently [ [link removed] ], that:
“(…) the current social-democratic (PSD/EPP) government’s health minister admitted [ [link removed] ] that the persistent scarcity of family doctors was due to demographic pressure emanating from immigration, and Portugal’s official statistics department (INE) now finds itself in hot water [ [link removed] ] after it was forced to revise its demographic figures, showing that Portugal’s population amounts, in fact, to 11.4 million. This revision therefore puts Portugal in the EU’s Top 10 most populous states, in 9th place (…)”. Portugal now has the worst house price-to-income ratio in Europe, an outcome to which the Costa governments’ policies contributed significantly.
None of this would be news to those critical of the immigration and asylum policies of Labour and Tory governments, in particular the record levels of net migration in recent years, which equally left the UK housing market in a dire state for those most vulnerable in it: the very young and the very old. Nevertheless, the UK Government is perfectly capable of innovating in perversity too. In a move typical of a Left that ignores incentives, the Government is considering a new cohabitation law [ [link removed] ] which would equate couples living together for more than three years to a marriage. This, in turn, would endow them with mutual financial rights to the common patrimony, except that, since men are the ones far more likely to bear the financial burden of formal divorce, such a law would invariably result in pushing men away from cohabitation altogether, leading to… more numerous one-person households and even steeper housing prices, given heightened demand and diminished supply.
Across the pond, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose support is concentrated among young, urban progressives, has been doing his utmost to make New York’s housing market into an even more dysfunctional morass [ [link removed] ] than how he found it. He has prioritised increasing publicly controlled rent properties, converting city-owned office buildings into residential units, implementing a new pied-à-terre fee to ‘tax the rich’ along with a public name-and-shame list of respective owners in NYC. His administration is studying how best to enforce rent freezes in the five boroughs. Publicly owned ‘affordable housing’ tends to end in poorly maintained properties with corrupt acceptance practices; office buildings are not designed to be living spaces and converting them (thickening walls, mitigating fire hazards from cooking) is often either too expensive or too time-consuming; antagonising the segment of the citizenry that contributes the most towards the city budget is ill-advised; and rent freezes disincentivise private construction as well as real estate investment.
Whether in Lisbon, London or New York, the pattern is the same: the housing shortage is not an accident of circumstance but a product of policy. It is a crisis motivated by left-wing demagoguery, a populism which tends to become more acute in governments fighting for survival and seeking to shore up support amongst the groups they rely on most: the young, single women and the elderly. Tragically, it is also the most vulnerable that suffer the worst effects of anti-market laws. Socialism is positively corrosive to the most basic of human needs: shelter.
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