 Hello, hello, hello and welcome. I'm Meryl Kevili, we are DM25 and Radical Political Movement for Europe. And this is another live discussion with our coordinating team, featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking about a basic human need, housing. Across Europe, house prices have jumped almost 40% in the last decade, making home ownership a distant dream for many. While rents have also been steadily increasing in almost all European countries, neighborhoods gentrified out of existence, public spaces privatized and more and more people left facing precarious living conditions or homeless. So what are the root causes of this growing yet relatively underreported crisis? And who is really to blame? What are the challenges that people are facing across different European cities and countries? What have activists been up to on the housing front? And what can we all do to help make sure that everyone has the basics, an affordable, decent place to live? Our panel, including our own Yanis Varoufakis and our crew of activists, doers and thinkers from all over Europe will be unpacking this issue today and you, you out there watching us on YouTube. This is live. If you've got thoughts, comments, questions, rants and personal experiences, we particularly would like to hear those on this topic. Then please chime in on the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. The last comment to all of you who are subscribed to our YouTube channel, if you would like to get notified whenever we put a new thing out, a new content out, please hit the bell icon and you'll know as soon as it's out. Okay, let's move to Yanis, the floor is yours. Thank you, madam. I'm going to horrify you by starting at the very beginning. At the very beginning it was feudalism. The whole idea that some very lucky bastards were born into the landed gentry and therefore owned the land. The rest never owned land and were bonded to the land owned by the landed gentry. And the landed gentry courtesy of owning the land effectively collected rent from the peasants who didn't own the land. And that was the basis of feudalism, a rent. Springing out of land ownership by the very, very few. Now, capital was meant to be the major socioeconomic revolution that shifted power away from land towards machines, capital, entrepreneurship. So instead of land, capital was the well of all power and profit was its reward. If you have a left-wing Marxist inclination, you think of profit as the surplus value retained by the owners of the machines from the surplus labor of workers. But the shifts away from land. Both Adam Smith, the great, the patron saint of capitalism and people like Karl Marx who ushered in the idea of a socialist alternative to capitalism celebrated the end of rent and of land as being the motive powers of society. Now, of course, land and rent retained their importance and significance within capitalism. However, shifting to the post-war era after 1945, the system that was introduced, the Bretton Wood system which paved capitalism and created 20 years of the steadiest growth with the lowest unemployment, the lowest level of inequality in the history of humanity, in a sense, or at least post-feudal humanity. That period was a period when rents truly declined and it was profits and wages that made, well, effectively, the name of the game. In 1971, that system was blown up and we have a very strange new world, the world that many people are associated with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is neither here nor there. It's just the ideological term or the ideology of what happened after 1971. So essentially, what happens after 1971 is the common currency that the Bretton Wood system had created because it was a kind of common currency. The Germans had the Deutsche Mark, the French had the French Frank, the Japanese had the Yen, and the Greeks had the Drakma and so on. But all those currencies were linked with a fixed exchange rate. So it goes as if we had more or less the same system, the same monetary system, the same currency unit. That was between 1944 and... And now where have I frozen? That is the big question. I have frozen. You're back. Hello. Am I back? Yeah. Apologies to everyone. I live very close to the American Embassy and I have no internet to speak of. That is a common feature of our live Zoom streams and every interview I give. Just close the bracket. Let's hope that the Americans let me speak. So the post-1971 world is one where you've got a very balanced world whereby the American trade deficit gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It provides demand for German, Japanese, and later Chinese factories. Those produce all the exports of going to the United States into all the deficit, very powerful countries. And the profits of the German, the Chinese, and the Japanese capitalists accumulate in Germany, Japan, and China, and then are transferred to London, to New York, to California, in the form of rents that get invested in real estate. So you have the boom in the house prices in London, in New York, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, as a result of this very imbalanced global capitalist world. This American economy going more and more into deficit and sucking it into its territory, the net exports of the net exporters like Germany, Japan, and China, while at the same time the capitalist profits from Germany, Japan, and China going into the city of London and Wall Street is the process which is at the heart of what we're discussing today, the explosion of the cost of housing. Because essentially you have Chinese, Japanese, and German savings flowing through Wall Street and the city of London into real estate. Not just real estate, but real estate is a very important place where this tsunami of money, of rents, accumulates. This tsunami of money creates what we also know as financialization, the flood of money into finance, insurance, real estate. And the first time house prices went through the roof in London in the major angliosphere, centers was then after the late 1970s, all the way to 2008. It was the same time that financial derivatives, financial markets were going through the roof as a result of the same process. 2008, that those pyramids, these houses of cards collapse. Then what happens is, the central banks of the G7 print around $35 trillion, $35,000 billion, $35,000 billion was printed between 2009 and 2002 to reflow the bank. This money, a lot amount of that, went into the real estate of not just the act and other interests. The pandemic gave another opportunity to the central banks to print more money in exactly the same way, money that flooded furthermore into the same fire sector, finance, insurance, real estate. Given also that in for 13 years between 2008 and 2022, the end of the pandemic, you had austerity being practiced and imposed upon the many, while at the same time you had this huge quantity of money going around the circuits of fire, of finance, insurance, real estate. This whole process that began in 2008 was simply going berserk by 2022. At that point, because of the pandemic, you have the disruption of supply chains. Ships stopped moving, trains stopped moving, trucks stopped moving. So supply was constrained at the time where there was a lot of money around and that of course gave rise to inflation. Inflation made rents go up even further. So we reached the present state, whereby the many are in peculiarities. Rents have increased, secularly, from 1997 was out of this balance, dynamic imbalance of global capitalism. Now you have a new bout of inflation that is pushing them up further to cut a very long story. This is very complicated, but at once extremely simple. International rentiers operating with land as the major weapon in real estate. Rentiers operating with the power to set prices. If you are an oil producer, you know, shale gas exporter, class power, any capacity to set wages. The best I can do, with interest from my Wi-Fi, to make the... If you don't really do it without gaining this global perspective, which starts a long time ago, but primarily gets turbocharged in the 1970s by this imbalanced growth of deficits and precipices, which hide a very bitter and very nasty class war behind it. Thanks very much. Thank you, Yanis. Johannes, Johannes Fair, Berlin. Thank you. We looked up in the preparation of the stream a little bit the numbers for Germany to prepare a little bit the ground. So what Yanis just described, you can perfectly also actually see in land prices in Germany being at around 8 euros per square meter in the beginning of the 1960s, going up on average until 2020 to 200 euros per square meter. And this is the average of the country. The cities, Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg are over 1,000 euros per square meter. Munich is over 2,500 euros per square meter. So normal people can definitely not afford to buy anything anymore in these cities because of this equality and because of the prices going up, like the statistics clearly show. I want to make one example for the city of Leipzig, another big German city where there's the case of a big piece of land being close to the train station, very in the center of town, best land to build houses, which is big cities in Germany actually need because there's many people in the need of housing and affordable housing, of course. This land was actually 2005 owned by the German railway and was then sold to a stock market company for 2 million euros. Nothing happened for 10 years, but in 2015, so 10 years later, this company could sell it for actually 33 million euros. So from 2 to 33 million euros in 10 years without doing anything. Four years later, this company sold it again for 200 million euros, a big piece of land in the center of the city. And then this was sold again to another company for a little bit more. This just shows one example of this land, the value goes up, but actually the real value doesn't change at all. It's just a piece of land and nothing happens, which is even, of course, for society very bad because it would be very important to build houses there for the people in the city. The company that actually bought it in 2015 and sold it in 2019, bought it for 30 million and sold it for 200 million is the CG Group. CG stands for Christian Grüner, which is one of the German oligarchs that we all don't hear so much about. That's actually one of the richest person of the country and that just made 160 million euros by buying something and selling it for years later without doing anything with it. So the few are profiting and the many are suffering the consequences of not finding the affordable housing, which is kind of a trend to back to what Janusz has been starting with feudalism, some kind of new feudalism where the many cannot afford to pay the rents and pay bigger shares and shares of their income for rent and a few people are profiting from that because they own this land and land especially of course in bigger cities is scarce. And I think the only really way to change this is ownership, ownership of land, ownership of houses. Here in the city in Berlin and we have been mentioning it a couple of times there was actually a successful public campaign of the many who tried to put some of the houses back into our ownership. They won the public vote with 60% at the last election in 2021 and their model I actually explained a little bit at our last three privatization kills how they want to actually do it because it's not private ownership and then back to the state it's actually ownership by the people. And I think this is the only way or a concrete policy that goes beyond what centrist governments in Germany have been doing for the last years they've tried to made legislation like a rent break to stop the rent from raising too fast still. So I'm actually going to the core of the problem the ownership and having a radical proposal for changing that. Unfortunately the last election in Berlin set up the conservatives winning and then starting a government with the social democrats and probably this initiative for now will not be implemented but of course will be one of the many people trying to still make it a reality because that's the only way you can actually do something about this problem. Thank you Johannes a couple of comments from you guys out there on the chat. Yoga says in Belgium not only is housing overpriced versus wages authorities are now imposing restrictions on owners prohibiting the rental of housing that isn't strictly eco-friendly like insulation and so on this results in a double hit situation versus the tenants would scarcity of housing and high prices versus the landlords depriving them from tangible income so the landlord side represented there. Lewis from Spain he comments that the typical salary here is 1000 euros the minimum apartment rent is 800 euros and Skyler Jones calls on us all and says you say this is a class war so how do you fight back by bashing the billionaires over the head with a history book? Good point let's try and focus if we can on some of the solutions and this is why what happened in Berlin recently I think there is some things we can learn from that campaign although as Johannes said in the latest twist of it it's not looking good. You did, you did Maya from Berlin Thor is yours tell us about it. Well allow me to disagree I would say that it wasn't looking good even when the old government of SPD Greens and Linke were still in power they were like yeah there was this thing but we're not sure can it be implemented let's have a commission and another commission so they had two years time and they didn't implement anything and they didn't sound very active or enthusiastic they didn't even pretend to want to implement the result of this referendum which was one with 60% of the vote so that is probably also why people then switched back to voting for the parties and I think it's kind of like the Greek or here referendum as well in that it shows the limits of people power of referendum when it comes to disowning the oligarchy for as long as the government is beholden to the oligarchy or in the series of series that can be bought out then these referendum well I wouldn't say that they're useless they focus the mind they radicalise people who realise their bad choice in politicians they bring people to the street I think it's very important for people to be on the street and to experience this community and it can be really beautiful and powerful like in France unfortunately not every country has this tradition I'm hoping that we will see this kind of situation everywhere but ultimately it is still in the hands of people on the inside of the institutions in order to turn this people power, street power into the political decisions to clash with the oligarchy and that's why we're building Mera25 Thank you you did I was hoping for a shining light there as an example but okay Juliana Juliana Thank you my friend. I think you did this right you can only change something by changing the government and then implementing laws and policies to you know we actually I can start with a Mera25 program in Germany our program on housing is pretty long and we also have everything in there like to restrict capital movement so that you know real estate cannot be bought with money from I think outside of the EU is in our program and that people should live in the city where they own the real estate and so on so there are many things you can do but you have to have the political will power so to say if you have a government that is not interested you lose for sure and for me personally housing has been you know the biggest nerve wrecking issue of the past year because we have been searching for a new home for a year now and it's really difficult and funny we moved from the city from Frankfurt to the countryside because we said okay we don't want to work just for the rent but we need space with the children so rents were a little bit better on the countryside but now since I think since corona actually more and more families I think reflected on their housing situation being kind of squeezed in in apartments in Frankfurt paying high rents and now more and more people decide to move out of the city so now you have the competition here on the countryside as well and landlords saw that and went like crazy like oh if they come here I might double the rent now and if you look at the market right now it's closing up to the same pricing as in the city and it's really difficult but for us for example we wouldn't have left Frankfurt I've lived there all my life I would have liked to stay in Frankfurt but I also saw this process everything that Janis described at the beginning and that was already said is a perfectly fine description of what happened in front of our eyes but also what I realized over time is that real estate really is also a huge black hole for corruption in local politics because if you see for what prices they sell the real estate in the city it's ridiculous and there are many scandals where politicians get some hand money and they would make a deal like yeah yeah sure you can have this whole area and what they built is actually like more skyscrapers so that the city looks good on a postcard you know it's all for prestige but it has no city planning whatsoever then you have in Frankfurt of course I think that applies to many cities around Europe and it's surprising that they built one room, two room or three room apartments for expats from people who don't live in the city they work there, they go home to London, Brussels, Paris over the weekend their apartments are mostly empty but citizens of Frankfurt cannot find a place to live and families in general cannot because nobody builds anymore anything with space for a family so there is also a huge what kind of people live in the city so it's really I mean the suburbs of Frankfurt if you see the extension it also gets more more expensive so if there is a revolution over something it can only be housing because this cannot go on forever like this students cannot afford anymore a place to live where they want to study they are already squeezed in five people in a small apartment how long can society stand this I think it's a topic where you can really show people the mechanics of capitalism and what it does to us but also where you can make an example of how mindless and how careless politics are functioning and how less they are interested in providing basics I mean housing is like food basic like food it's very important where you live when it comes to your job when it comes to your quality of life and so on so I think you said at the beginning that it's a basic need and I think that's why people have to fight back and they have to elect parties like for example Mera25 which have a program and have the willpower to change something and to fight back against big business and so on thank you Juliana but then it kind of begs the question what is the answer what is a strategy politically that works I mean are we talking about rent controls which as I understand it have been implemented in several European cities Amsterdam Paris cities in Spain Berlin had it until they reversed it are we talking about building more public housing for the rest of you that are about to speak here please keep in mind like what is a particular strategy that you think could be most effective politically and also of course from the grassroots side of things Maya what has worked in Belgrade yeah do you hear me now because I have new headphones thanks okay thank you Juliana for this that you were saying because you just mentioned the very important thing and that is that the housing questions we cannot talk about it without not changing the government but I also think that this thing should also be in a way said that we cannot change this without changing the system because I think that the housing project is actually not a particular question but it's more like a question that deals with the radical movements like this one and you were just saying do we have any kind of propositions and I have a little well utopistic vision I would go a little bit into history just for a second and say that actually Yugoslavia the ex-Yugoslavia socialist country that we had here that was disilluted actually had these three very important pillars that it based its whole system upon and it was free housing free health and free education the free housing was actually free in a real kind of way so the workers really got departments for free which they could use for the rest of their lives also got of course the other two pillars together with them and they did not have to worry about all of those things I think that today we think about all of these things as complete utopistic visions and they actually existed in a country in Europe less than six years ago so I think that we should maybe when the housing thing when we talk about the housing things we can learn a lot about it from the Yugoslav project of housing of course that we are not talking about the same kind of situation now as we're dealing with a completely different perspective in a historical sense but we can see what happened with the dissolution of Yugoslavia what happened with the housing system particularly in ex-Yugoslav countries like Montenegro and Serbia from this position I can talk about so the privatization of Serbia started actually with the privatization of the public housing system and now the whole black market and money laundering which Julian also mentioned is happening with the housing system so now we have generations that is my generation because my parents lived in Yugoslavia I do not now I inherited my apartment from my parents and my grandparents so the only way that you can afford to live in a city like Belgrade today is by your grandmother or parent dying and inheriting an apartment because renting a place in Belgrade at this moment as somebody mentioned from Spain I think in the comments we have an average paycheck here that is less than 600 euros and at this point in Belgrade you cannot rent a small apartment in Belgrade for less than 600 euros so this social mobility that was possible in Yugoslavia is completely not possible at this moment in Serbia because of course of the wild privatization that happened with the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the socialist project and so now we have the situation a new situation after the war because as most people know most of the Russians and Ukrainians came to Serbia because and Montenegro because we are countries that they don't need visas so they can very easily live here and they raised the prices of rent without the government's interfering so now you have the situation where the rent is above 1000 euros in a country where the average paycheck is less than 600 euros so it's a disaster also for students it's a disaster for people that cannot afford rent we have a very of course bad situation at this moment and also we have a situation with criminals and oligarchs buying apartments now with money that is not controlled so it's some kind of money laundering that's happening also in Montenegro and in Serbia where they come with a suitcase buy apartments and then use them for money laundering so now I think that this housing system that is not regulated by the state in a very important project as we had here 60 years ago now we have a completely different situation where the whole housing project which is supposed to be a basic human right is becoming a place for money laundering for oligarchs so it's a time of capitalism Thank you for that Maya, a couple of comments from the chat Dave says I keep thinking there should be some way for non-profits to do hostile takeovers of real estate corporations and someone else adds squatting is the ultimate hostile takeover and reattached has there some comments from the US the experience from America in the US it's Airbnb and equity firms workers of expanding tech firms and the traditional power of the real estate industry in our dollar riddled system our money riddled system that makes affordable housing so hard to find Eric Edmund based in Athens a city that is becoming unrecognizable in parts perhaps due to some of the dynamics that we're discussing here Flora is yours Cheers Mehran First of all allow me a brief comment on feudalism because in a previous life I was a budding medievalist before politics took over and every time I hear everybody here talk about feudalism my eyes start to twitch and in the middle ages society was very clearly delineated into social groups right so if you're born peasant you're always told that that's what you're always going to be and that's all you can ever aspire to the real evil that we're living through right now in our society is this idea that the world is at the palm of our hands and the only thing stopping us from getting anything that we could dream of is us not working hard enough us not being able to earn it and we're working through a system that is designed against us we live through a rat race that tells us that we could buy a house we could get the new car we could get whatever we want as long as we earn it and it's simply not true however the whole system is designed around this idea that we could so in many ways I think people in the middle ages were far happier than we are today because of this back in the for the second memorandum that was imposed on Greece by the Troika of Lenders one of the terms and conditions attached to getting that money was that we had to scrap the entirety of Greek social housing as a policy it should not exist anymore it was considered a frivolity a luxury that we cannot afford to have because we're bankrupt so in Greece it's not that we have an underfunded social housing policy it's that we don't have one at all it doesn't exist and it hasn't existed for close to 10 years now social housing doesn't only serve the purpose of a social role in society giving people one of their basic needs which is a place to live in the current context that we're living through of environmental crisis it also has a very very important role to play in sustainability new housing that is better insulated that is fed through a green grid of energy with solar panels the rest of it has a very very direct role to play in the green transition so the fact that we're not investing in social housing everywhere in Europe not just in Greece but Greece is at the bottom of the barrel so let's take the worst case scenario also proves how we're not taking the environmental crisis seriously enough either apart from making our current abodes sustainable there is also the very obvious answer of creating new socially and environmentally sustainable housing so that's to the one side we need social housing in Europe both for the social but also for the environmental role that it plays the other thing that we haven't touched upon Athens especially my home city is a land victim of is a short term leasing or essentially Airbnb what Airbnb is doing to cities apart from the gentrification entire neighborhoods being bought up by developers and being turned into unofficial accommodation for tourists and therefore then being populated by you know bars and restaurants and basically things that you don't use in your day-to-day life when you live in a city not supermarkets or dry cleaners or whatever have you entire sort of funground neighborhoods essentially pushing people away both in terms of the services that are offered in those neighborhoods but also because the rents become unachievably high what that does is that it's basically pushing the Athenians out of their neighborhoods even if they inherit an apartment from their parents they might still find themselves living in neighborhoods that are no longer neighborhoods but are fungrounds for tourists and this is also something that I experienced when I came over three weeks ago looking for a place to stay because I didn't know how long I'd be here for a short-term rental and I was also looking for something that was furnished so basically anybody who has something like that to offer nine out of ten times will offer it through Airbnb they're not going to go through the normal housing market now two things here firstly out of the ten people that I spoke to at least half were non-Greeks I was not talking to Greeks I was talking to people from Austria I was talking to a couple from France who had this profile picture of the two of them at some beach sipping a frappé or whatever these were half the people that I was talking to to try and find a place to stay in my hometown and if I sound bitter it's because I am bitter because what's happened is actually in Greece is through these last ten years of total collapse of zero political overview of the situation of a fire sale of the entire country what's happened is that vultures whether individuals or companies came and picked off everything services whether it's energy or water or the airport or the trains as we've been talking about recently or indeed housing and that's something that is ongoing because non-serviceable loans in Greece that a lot of people still have since the crisis are still driving people out of their homes with funds from from Delaware and New Jersey and the rest but having bought these non-serviceable loans they're all now evicting people from their homes and reselling them in this kind of property market so it's an ongoing situation apart from the damage that has already been done it's an ongoing problem for the country so apart from the fact that when it's sociable housing socialized housing there's another two things that we need first secondly it is to protect people from this kind of aggressive capitalism that's driving people out of their homes a protection of people's primary residence and finding ways and META has in Greece has developed a very I'm not going to go into detail I've already been speaking for way too long but a very comprehensive way of protecting people from non-serviceable loans from staying in their homes and thirdly limiting the amount of time that people are allowed to put up their properties and how many properties as well they can put up on platforms such as Airbnb in order to limit how much money somebody can make out of a platform like that and thus driving people back to the normal housing market and this way countering this this way that has been going in this sort of quick and easy money-making direction that has catastrophic results for entire neighborhoods and whole cities and you know not just happens think of places like islands in various places in Greece which are in their entirety very small and therefore even more susceptible to these kind of price hikes Thank you for sharing your experience on that Eric just a statistic here Kukaki my old neighborhood in Athens rents rose there by 60% in just two years from 2016 to 2018 as a result of the Airbnb boom and probably they've gone up much more since then I would be interested to know though and perhaps for the rest of you who are speaking here has any city successfully pushed back against the Airbnb because I haven't heard of it maybe we're just not talking about these stories but it would be good to know if that model actually does work okay Amir our policy coordinator Leheig tell us your story Thanks Mehran firstly on your question you just asked the one successful model be aware of is in the city of Graz where the municipality has the right of first refusal on sales of homes and there they've actually managed to step in and reduce speculation in that way and make way for more public and social housing so that there is a model out there and there's a lot of beautiful interesting articles about it as on people can of course look it up just turning back a little bit more to the question at hand and the focus of housing at the European level well in also in preparation for tonight's call looking at through the European Union structures at least it's an area of very little focus and the focus that there is there is essentially on how to make sure that workers have housing of course as engines of productivity for the EU and businesses if you like but otherwise it sort of put down as an area of national in some cases local competence even though we see the role of trust national capital in making housing unaffordable and driving up homelessness as well across the continent and on this issue of homelessness Netherlands is leading in terms of unfortunately of course in terms of increase it's quadrupled under the government of Mark Ratter but that's not only Netherlands Latvia has seen an increase of around 300% Ireland 200% and so on there's only a single country as far as we're aware which is Finland which has managed to reduce homelessness which is the most of course acute part of this discussion but turning back on the housing in general the European level in the Green Deal for Europe program we have some key points I'm going to quickly just run through some of them which is the using Europe's 38 million vacant homes and mobilizing public investments to retrofit existing homes and use the vacant homes to eliminate homelessness and housing security as well as providing real power to tenants and residents associations on decisions about their homes in terms of evictions and so on and just one more thing would be construction of housing of new units having some accountability to workers and the communities Eric just mentioned the environmental crisis and we also have to bear in mind that as the effects of climate change become worse and more extreme we're going to see an increase in bearing in mind that millions still remain homeless in Pakistan for example because of the floods and this is going to continue as as a global issue just touching on as well what Johannes mentioned regarding land use bearing in mind that half of the habitable land on earth is used for animal based agriculture so as we've talked about before in terms of the plant based treaty and switching to a plant based agriculture it does free up if you like you know land for nature rewinding and of course for construction of homes which is also again acute problem in the Netherlands there's a struggle between farming and house building and lastly just to wrap it up at least this portion is a remaining vigilant of Europe's role in worsening the issue or this issue through its foreign policy whether it's hardening of refugee policies and in terms of externalization of borders and of course not forgetting that we're meeting on the tonight anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the millions that were made homeless or refugees because of that and of course the continued effects of for example depleted uranium which affects lives and livelihoods and lastly the continued inaction of Palestine and again not forgetting that the people of are now approaching 16 years of blockade in their home. Thank you Amir and just staying on that point of Airbnb I didn't know about the GRAS in Austria Austria's second city thank you for that but they've successfully apparently pushed back against Airbnb James Stewart from the chat says that Edinburgh has banned Airbnb only hotel rooms are now on the platform at Edinburgh and Rodrigo notes that Amsterdam is fighting Airbnb heavily it imposes annual time limits for Airbnb rentals Airbnb is trying to fight back but so far without big success Federico Dolce from Italy for us yours what's going on over there with regard to the topics we're discussing it's the other button yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm so sorry yeah well usually you don't go to Italy to look for solution and well this as well housing is a problem that rarely finds a space some space in the media and part because it's kind of a stigma of having housing problem part because we're living in this place where Italy is this happy place where we don't have a problem of house and housing actually we do even though we don't have proper conscience of it but I did a little research of course as myself to prepare for this live and numbers I don't want to flood you with numbers but numbers are bad and housing is exploding as a problem that can create some very big issue and a real crisis of course Milan is the fourth city in Europe in terms of cost of two room apartments we do have Rome, Bologna Firenze and Venice there are staggering examples of spike in renting and house prices that goes up to almost 20% per year as Eric was mentioned before we do have some social housing program back in the days but somewhere around the 80s we collectively stop actually funding it and because we decided that all that is state related was bad and all that was free market was good all held free market and so we tried to leave it to the market we tried something that can actually be pointed out as a failed policy because we left everything to the market we gave a fiscal incentive for landlords for landlords to put houses on rent control and to make them emerge from the black market which is a real big issue here and it failed big time because money flow decreased because the tax cut was so big and not so many houses from the black market emerged and we still face a huge huge crisis we had to stop maintain and actually we stopped maintaining very few social houses that we had and at this point we have more than 50,000 social housing flats that are no longer in alphabetical because there are no longer meeting the minimum requirements for being livable and we have more than almost 300,000 elections that are ready to be executed in the next year which is staggering numbers and that can create a huge problem and in the end the Meloni government decided few months ago to stop altogether to put money in this rent fund that was used to help people in needs to actually pay for rent when they were no longer able to and so we will find low incomes family and people that will be found of incomparable delinquency that will be kicked out of their homes and it's going to be a huge social bomb basically and that is the result of a failed policy about leaving everything to the market and to actually put very little money into it and decided that it was not worth it because we didn't actually add this problem while we do I think that in the end housing is a very peculiar issue because it mixes basic needs like having a roof over heads and when these needs are not fulfilled it creates the very last of our society, the homeless in these books and it combines with the very top 1% of society that used landlord, lien and real estate investment to shape money from taxes and diversify investment I don't I had the chance to do actually I actually live in Turing which is one of the major city in Italy but not the one that is probably the one that is less hit by the rent price hikes but nonetheless I had the chance to talk with the real estate a couple of weeks ago and it told me that without any real reason we are facing time right now where demand and offer are so distant and it creates an equality so big that it really is difficult for him to work and for people to actually find anything within the border of the city that not being for having a growing population because Italy is not having this population growth that you might think and actually having a housing market that is increasing the only solution, the only actually cost that you can find lies into the short rental and over tourism the Airbnb facilities that are floating the market for wealthy people is very convenient to pay very low taxes and invest in this market and that creates so much suffering and so much trouble to so many other people that it's unthinkable to just sit down and do nothing and think okay this is not our problem it's never going to be our problem and it's never going to affect us in any way it's hard to actually think of a solution on a local base because rent control is not something that you can apply on a local level, on a city level even though every city has its own housing market control also is not something that can be implemented on a municipal level we need huge national investment in social housing and that cannot be done on a local level because municipality doesn't have that kind of money and of course tourism and short tourism and short-term rent is a regulation that can be somehow done on a local level, it's better to be done on a national level, even better to be done at a European level. Thank you for that Federico. Juliana, let me bring you back in. Yeah, thank you when Eric was saying before this notion of it's your fault you don't work hard enough it reminded me that the topic has also we have this generational conflict which I have run into very often and I think many people of my generation have heard this notion of why don't you just buy a house why don't you just work harder I think this is something that each of us is fighting against to say compared to when you bought your house in the economic situation right now it's not the same and it's really also the reason now why we're searching for a new place to live because our landlords and I think this term landlords still fits because they treat you as if they owe you if you rent their house they came to us and they said you know what you're living here for three years in this house I think you can buy it now and we're like okay what's the price 530,000 euros like half a million euros and they go yes and we're like we cannot buy it for half a million euros why not you just go to the bank and you talk to the bank consultant and then you buy the house and we're like nobody will give us half a million euros alone and he was so convinced you know elder generation they bought like 5 houses here they're renting out apartments and whatever there's just they're so delusional about where we stand as a family and where they stood in the 80s you know and it's like it's driving me crazy and I think this is also it's also the topic of the way people want to live my parents bought a house they both worked three jobs and I barely saw them my father died with 52 so he's not going to enjoy his house until the rest of his life so it's really also a model of life that you want to follow you know it's not just okay it's all about owning the house and I'm going to work to death I'm never going to see my children also you know where this disrespect against you know maybe younger generations come from that we are not tough enough that we just want to you know have a chill life but I think maybe you worked just too hard for too less instead of giving us you know this stamp that we are just too lazy but I think every elder generation calls the next one lazier than they were so I guess that's just how but it's just what I wanted to add which really drives me crazy for years now this notion of yeah we've done something wrong that's the problem thanks for sharing your experience Juliana Lucas Lucas February from Berlin and then we'll bring Yanis back into class Lucas, close your eyes I'm going to start with a joke but there's a point to it two fish are taking a swim in the sea when another one comes in the opposite direction and he starts to chat with them and says hey guys I'm enjoying the water this morning and goes away then one of the original two turns to the other and goes what the hell is water and I think the point here which you know I've heard this years ago but it's stuck to me and the point here is there are so many things that pervade our lives and dictate them in certain ways that we just don't notice and we're immersing them all the time which is the water and the joke and I think in our case in the real world here housing and the idea that housing is a commodity to be traded to be bought and sold was one of those ideas that we don't know anything else most of us don't know anything else so we don't realize how obscene and absurd of an idea because I often think in order to sort of not allow myself to take these things for granted and not challenge them I try to think 50, 100 years in the future what is it from our world today that if we when and we live in a different better world when that time comes that people are going to look back when history is taught in schools and they're going to be horrified and that these ideas were accepted and I think this is one of them which is an idea that would be completely foreign and shocking to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived and since we're moving towards the end here I wanted to close on a positive note that I think no matter how difficult the task seems right now I think it is completely possible and we see signs of societies moving in this direction in a lot of ways it's getting worse in a lot of ways but the way people understand these issues it's evolving we saw it here in Berlin we talked about it at a length earlier with Johannes and you did it wasn't implemented but it's still incredible that they got the signatures for this to be on the balance in the first place which was no guarantee and then that 60% of people 60% of people in such a large city despite all the scaremongering of course because there's a massive campaign against this they voted for it so it just gives you a sign that people's understanding is changing bit by bit we find that the hardening development of course then the politicians failed to implement the popular world as they are known to do but to me the message then is well it's time to replace them and lucky for the people who are watching us and for us here DM and Meta25 we put our money where our mouth is and Meta25 in Greece in Germany have been founded to do exactly that to replace those politicians and if you look at our program for example for the upcoming elections a very key part of it is the understanding of housing as a public good not as a commodity as an object to be bought and sold and it aims to have 70% of the housing stock in the city in the hands of public institutions so yeah it's going to be a difficult task but I think there's reason to be optimistic about it and if you agree with what's been said here and you agree with this vision you want to see come about then join DM25 and if you're in Germany, if you're in Italy for in Greece join Meta25 as well and support it thank you for that Lucas if you'd like to join dm25.org join is the address and you can be a member in a couple of seconds Janis well I started at a very abstract historical level now I'm going to finish off very concretely okay what doesn't work is giving low interest loans to young people supposedly to help them get a foot in a so called housing ladder because let's face it even though you may like it at a personal level when these loans are given to a sufficiently large number of young people couples, families and so on what happens is demand goes up and prices go up so then you need an even greater loan and this is a spiral that leads to complete catastrophe to over indebtedness so cheap mortgages, no go that's not an answer assistance with rents doesn't work for the same reason you give assistance to people for renting that is government schemes that subsidize rents that increases the demand for rental accommodation that increases rents again a catastrophic upward loop of on the one hand rents and on the other hand government subsidies which of course are paid for by the poor because it is the poor that pay most taxes let's forget let's not forget that they're each don't pay taxes what will help the only thing that helps is social housing in Britain in 1979 when Thatcher came in 40% of families lived in council housing they were not particularly beautiful some of them were but families had a roof of their heads at miniscule rents nominal rents a very small fraction of their wages and they could stay in there until they died they could not leave them to their children which is fantastic it's the way it should be it could not be inherited but 40% of the people of Britain lived in council houses and Thatcher turned this thing on its head by offering to sell them at very low prices half the market value of those houses to the working class people living in them and that was a safe bet for them so essentially she bribed the working class to do away with social housing the workers who actually went to the bank you know let's suppose you lived in a council house whose market value was 20,000 quid and you sold to you for 10,000 quid all bankers were falling over each other to give you a loan because they were getting a collateral worth 20,000 for a rent for a loan of 10,000 even if you didn't pay your mortgage repayments the bank would get something worth 20,000 for 10,000 so the working class people who actually got those houses using being financialized getting a mortgage they benefited individually for a short while but after a while they were in a very unforgiving housing market in which the kids they themselves when they got older they just couldn't afford to give anymore when it comes to so build social houses how do you pay for those well you can you can lever up commercial zones you can have the state companies develop commercial zones for the purposes of renting them to businesses and to rich people and using the proceeds in order to fund social housing in social zones that is a possibility even before we create social issues under more or less existing capitalist conditions and when it comes to Airbnb the Merit 25 policy here in Greece is really very simple a time limit of 60 days per year you can rent your place for 60 days a year in chunks of no long more than 30 days with 30 days in between so you can rent it for the whole of May and the whole of August but you cannot rent it for July and August and whoever likes it, whoever doesn't like it peace off that's my scientific conclusion peace off Thank you for that and it's wonderful to end on solutions and ways forward and for your information there will be a talk which will be up here in the next few weeks between representatives from our three political parties comparing and contrasting our proposals on this specific issue housing Italy, Germany and Greece so please if you haven't yet just click the bell icon to get notified whenever that's up. We've gone quite a way past the hour thank you very much indeed it's been a fantastic discussion we'll continue the discussion in the comments of this YouTube video thank you to all of you out there for your thoughts and sharing your experiences in the YouTube chat and see you again at the same time same place