Very bad. Houses have doubled in price in just a few years. Many first-time home buyers cannot afford a house at all, and some say they never will as things look right now.
The government introduced various policies to remedy this, but all has failed. A few years ago they made it easier to fund young people, e.g. by allowing parents to gift 100k EUR to their children in a tax-free manner as long as it's used for buying a house. This resulted in higher housing prices because more people can afford higher prices, and it also disproportionally benefits people who have rich parents.
Now they've backpedalled on that, and the focus is now on disincentivizing investors. They raised ownership transfer taxes for people who buy a house for the purpose of renting it out. They also raised rent taxes. This works a bit better, but not enough. The core problem is just not enough housing. Also, renting out has become less profitable, so some landlords are selling those houses. This has raised concerns that we'll have too few rental housing.
It's not even just a matter of not building quickly enough. The electricity grid is full (not enough capacity), so there are more and more places where new houses can't even be attached to the grid.
My impression is that the government tried to 'solve' the problem with one main constraint in mind: to never allow the prices go down in any meaningful way. Hence the ham-fisted attempts to instead tweak taxes and ease credit conditions.
I guess that's the implicit constraint that none likes to talk about or admit. It doesn't help that no matter what you do, some population will be screwed over. I have seen that people who used to worry about not being able to afford a house, and who have now somehow managed to buy one, now start worrying about their house value going down.
This cannot be solved with just one trick or just in a few years. You need strong, resolute, long-term actions. But that doesn't fit in an election cycle.
Definitely. People don't hate the game, they hate losing at the game.
Problems can be either solved in a constructive way (we see that's not going to happen) or in a nonconstructive way (societal explosion or breakdown of some sort). Or sometimes problems get superseded by bigger problems. Like when recently the home prices went down just a little bit, it was because of ECB's hand forced into fighting inflation with higher interest rates, which made mortgages less accessible.
The government introduced various policies to remedy this, but all has failed. A few years ago they made it easier to fund young people, e.g. by allowing parents to gift 100k EUR to their children in a tax-free manner as long as it's used for buying a house. This resulted in higher housing prices because more people can afford higher prices, and it also disproportionally benefits people who have rich parents.
Now they've backpedalled on that, and the focus is now on disincentivizing investors. They raised ownership transfer taxes for people who buy a house for the purpose of renting it out. They also raised rent taxes. This works a bit better, but not enough. The core problem is just not enough housing. Also, renting out has become less profitable, so some landlords are selling those houses. This has raised concerns that we'll have too few rental housing.
It's not even just a matter of not building quickly enough. The electricity grid is full (not enough capacity), so there are more and more places where new houses can't even be attached to the grid.