Why Don't You Just Buy a House?

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]This is the cost for an average apartment in Berlin, Lisbon, and Dublin.

[00:00:05]Since 2015, housing prices in Europe have skyrocketed, on average, going up by 50% in just 10 years. In some countries, like Hungary, they went up over 200%.

[00:00:18]This isn't just the case for buying a home. Renting has also gone up. Since 2010, rent costs have gone over 220% in Estonia, 180% in Lithuania, and over 110% in Ireland. An overwhelming majority of European genzers, over 70%, live with their parents, and most will never own their own home in their life, unless their grandparents die and inherit a house in a backwater village as sung by this guy.

[00:00:58]But how did Europe end up in such a bad housing crisis? And is there a way out?

[00:01:04]Well, to understand that, we first have to look at a bit of history. Picture this. It's 1945. The bloodiest war in all of human history just ended. Europe is completely devastated. On average, 20% of all homes were destroyed. But in some regions of the Soviet Union and Germany, this number was over 50%. And in most severely impacted regions, this number reached even 90%. Before Germany's Grand European tour, the housing market in Europe wasn't all too great either. But now it's completely in the gutter. Millions are left homeless and they need houses fast. Social housing programs began to pop up left and right. In the beginning, public demand was dictating construction. These programs only continued to grow. In the 60s, a 100,000 new social homes were built in France per year. In the same time period, around 70% of Germany's new homes were social housing. The same time period also saw Sweden's million program that, as the name suggests, built 1 million new homes. The Eastern block was also getting busy as this is also when the humble commie block was invented. We have a whole video about it if you're interested. While these social housing programs never fully alleviated a housing crisis, they certainly helped.

[00:02:21]Real estate prices were kept stable and affordable, being able to move out of your parents' basement seemed like an achievable goal for many. But then almost overnight, everything changed.

[00:02:33]It's the 1980s. Disco's time was over and Michael Jackson was king. And it was the same for housing policy. While social housing was great, people wanted to try something new, something more exciting.

[00:02:46]Enter neoliberalism. It's like liberalism but neo. It argued for more freedom, lower taxes, less government, and more trade. As this ideology became more popular, many start to question Europe's housing policy. A lot of people believed that maybe if housing was viewed as an asset rather than a right, more housing would be built and Europe's economy would boom from prosperity.

[00:03:11]Construction of new housing was no longer the task of the government, but was allocated to private companies. In the UK, the right to buy program was instituted, which sold off social housing on mass to its tenants, led by none other than Margaret Fer.

[00:03:27]>> A similar thing occurred in Eastern Europe a decade later after the fall of communism. In the beginning, things seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. Hell, most people in Europe cited the 80s as the golden age of housing affordability. At first, it looked like the new system was working.

[00:03:42]More houses were being built. More people were buying. But beneath the surface, something else was happening.

[00:03:49]Housing was no longer just a place to live anymore. Now it was an investment.

[00:03:55]Banks wanted in on the action. Interest rates dropped. Loan requirements loosened. They started handing out mortgages like Mormon missionaries handed out the Bible. Prices kept rising. And with the ease of lending, many thought of borrowing money. today to purchase a home, then selling it tomorrow and walking off with a fat stack of cash. A brilliant idea no one ever thought of before. This brought even more people in on the action. But there was a problem. While the housing market was rising, the people's wages weren't. The entire system was starting to look like a bubble. And every bubble eventually pops. But even though the housing market collapsed, your online data doesn't have to, which you can protect with Surf SharkVPN.

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[00:06:10]And in 2008, that's exactly what happened. Banks had spent years handing out risky mortgages to people who realistically could never repay them.

[00:06:20]And like dominoes, they started falling one by one. It started off in America.

[00:06:24]Millions defaulted. With no money coming back to the original lenders, hundreds of financial institutions followed suit.

[00:06:31]Trail lending was frozen. Developers stopped building. Hell, thousands of construction projects were abandoned halfway through. And when America goes broke, Europe has an insatiable compulsion to do the same. In many European countries, housing prices crash overnight. In Ireland, the average home prices fell by over 50%. Spain's giant construction boom completely imploded.

[00:06:55]Entire ghost towns of half-finished apartments appeared almost overnight. It spared no one except Albania because not even Albanians want to live in Albania.

[00:07:05]Even though most investors lost billions in a matter of days, many saw this as a good sign. Housing prices were corrected and many believed housing would become affordable again. But uh things uh only got worse, a lot worse. To try and ease the situation of billions of euros just vanishing from the continent, the EU implemented the worst thing possible, austerity measures, because that's what they always do whenever there's any sort of crisis. Instead of using public funds to restart social housing efforts or putting in legislation to limit speculation, governments across Europe cut public spending. Salaries cut.

[00:07:44]public sector budget slashed and social housing construction blown up to smitherines, aka the complete opposite of what a government should do during a recession. I mean, if only there were a framework on how to handle an economic bubble bursting. But alas, there is none. In an effort to pull the economy out of the [ __ ] central banks set their interest rates to near zero, meaning the public would have to pay [ __ ] all for borrowing new cash. But because the regular folks were broke, the only people that seized this opportunity were the same guys who made this mess in the first place. Banks, affluent landlords, and other financial institutions started buying up apartments across Europe for pennies on the dollar. Housing came into the hands of the few. As the poor got poorer, the rich just got richer. Before 2008, housing, despite increasingly becoming an asset, was still at large an essential good. But after it, it was cemented as such and things just started to spiral out of control from there.

[00:08:46]With the low prices of houses and even lower prices of lending, investors from all over the globe flocked to Europe to buy up defaulted apartments. Private equity giants like everyone's favorite company, Blackstone, got in on the action and bought up tens of thousands of homes in Europe's most prominent cities like Berlin, Lisbon, and Dublin.

[00:09:05]It also didn't help that Europe kept becoming an ever more popular destination for immigration. Students from within and outside of the EU flocked to major cities to pursue their studies. Migrant and refugee waves from the Middle East and South Asia also started coming in in greater and greater numbers. When the economic crisis was subdued, tourism exploded as well.

[00:09:26]Mediterranean countries in particular started seeing record-breaking numbers of tourists annually. In 2025, 102 million people visited France alone.

[00:09:36]That's like 10 Hungaries visiting the country every year. Short-term accommodation platforms like Airbnb became extremely profitable as a result with their higher short-term profit margins. Long-term rentals went down in number, lowering the already miserable supply of regular apartments and raising the prices further in big tourist cities like Budapest, Prague, and Barcelona.

[00:09:58]And with most houses on the continent being in the hands of the few, prices only continue to skyrocket. Between 2010 and today, housing in many European countries went from expensive to completely detached from reality. In Germany, a modest apartment for one person, let alone one fit for a family can now cost over €350,000.

[00:10:20]Meanwhile, the average salary is only 40,000 a year. 30 years ago, that kind of income would have put your family in the upper class. Today, it barely gets you through the front door. By now, you might be thinking, "Okay, Yosh, this is bad." But we can solve it by just building more houses. And to that, I say it's not that simple. Arguably, Europe has always had a problem with housing.

[00:10:44]>> Give him a big hand, guys. Homeless dude.

[00:10:48]>> The USSR and its allied states put in tremendous efforts in solving this problem. During the 20th century, Soviet Russia focused its industrial efforts in the mass construction of public house and giving birth to the housing unit.

[00:10:59]Every teenager that red marks points at claiming communism works, aka the commie block. These homes were made for cheap, utilizing concrete panels and were constructed in a similar fashion to Legos. Credit where credit is due. Out of all European countries post World War II, the socialist block made the most progress in home construction. But the lack of housing was an issue they battled for decades. Many families had to share one apartment. A newlywed couple would have to wait several years up to a decade and a half or more to receive a place of their own. Being forced to live with their parents and even grandparents for years. Even with the efficiency of an authoritarian centrally planned government, housing was still a thorn in Eastern Europe's side. But now with democracy and neoliberalism, things have gotten even more complicated. First and foremost, although all industries from technology to agriculture have continually developed as technology has progressed, construction on the other hand not so much. Despite having computers that can calculate things in nanoseconds, we still use the same building techniques from 50 to 100 years ago. Unlike most industrial goods, housing is still built in a large part manually. Every home must be produced at a different place.

[00:12:12]Each apartment block has a different design and most of the labor from wiring, plumbing to even brick laying is done by hand which again is something even the Soviets struggled with solving despite having access to cranes and automation. Secondly, Europe is a bureaucratic nightmare. The amount of paperwork needed to construct a single home tremendously slows down the rate of new housing entering the market. For a single project to be realized, a project must go through an environmental review, heritage approval, be grin by the local council, fight off legal appeals, alongside getting all the necessary construction permits. It also doesn't help that the price of construction has become expensive as hell thanks to modern regulations, energy standards, parking minimums, accessibility requirements, safety standards, and high labor costs all drive the price up and elongate its finalization. Since housing is now an asset, existing homeowners object to the construction of new homes.

[00:13:07]If demand is high and supply is low, their home will only go up in value. So, one day when they do choose to sell and retire in some bum [ __ ] village in the countryside, they'll be set for life.

[00:13:19]Even though they'll only live, I don't know, maybe like 10 years max. But, you know, money is money. The housing crisis is something Europe has battled against since its conception. Numerous factors contribute to the ever rising price of it, but the main issue it's played with is that today it has become an asset rather than an essential commodity.

[00:13:38]Ultimately, those who own a home gain from gatekeeping others from owning one as they indirectly benefit from the crisis. While yes, we can solve it by building more homes, we must first change the legislation surrounding housing. Europe must loosen its bureaucratic grip. Regulations and permits are suffocating the prospects of affordable housing by raising its price.

[00:13:58]Young people like you watching this also need to get more politically involved, not just on a national level, but a local one. Genzers and millennials vote far less than older generations. As a result, those generations are able to dictate how Gen Z lives and whether or not they'll have a home in the future. I mean, just look at Hungary. Record turnout among young people managed to dethrone Orban. This should be proof that anything is possible. So, if you want cheaper housing, go out and vote.

[00:14:28]As always, if you enjoy this video, click the like button. And if you're new to the channel, click the subscribe one as well. Your support helps in creating more videos like this one. And of course, let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below. My name is Yanosh, and you've watched Living Ironically in Europe.

[00:14:42]>> Hey, hey, why are you living in the USA?

[00:14:47]It is not the place to stay. Hey. Hey. I sh my glasses for me.

[00:14:55]Don't tell me that you are gay.