The fact that Porto city is like 80% a UNESCO heritage sight and the local residents need a ton of paperwork and money to get basic repairs done (on top of the crazy property bubble) is just nuts. Porto was the purest form of neoliberalism on steroids I've ever seen.

The Prime Minister of Portugal is known for owning 55 realestate properties.

Some years ago already, a third of the city council members in Lisbon declared "realestate investor" as their second job.

Realestate investment is quite common amongst members of Parliament here, especially the ones not from Lisbon as they get a pretty much unlimited subsidy to pay rent for a place to live in Lisbon, so they move to Lisbon and rent their old home in the region (outside Lisbon) they came from and represent which starts them down that path if they were not already.

Obviously none of these people will do anything in any way form or shape to stop house prices (and hence rents) from going up. In fact quite the contrary: the current government recently passed a law reducing renter rights and last year their measure for, they claimed, "help young people buy their first house" - state guaranteed loans to buy a first house - resulted in a 17% house price spike just that year, exactly the same kind of outcome as the last time a similar measure was enacted (so either they're complete total incompetent morons or a spike in house prices was the intention behind that measure).

I'm in Portugal and it's hilarious (well, more like infuriating, really) that even the supposedly thinking Left (I'm a member of a small such party here and am thoroughly dissapointed with its leadership) haven't connected the dots yet on a problem which has been painfully obvious for more than a decade:

• The big problem of "low birth rates" and hence aging population of the country which in turn ends up cascading into all sorts of other problems (for example, an overloaded National Health Service because an aged population need a lot more healthcare services) and even justifies immigration (as a way to bring in working age adults to produce wealth here) can be pretty directly traced back to high house prices making people leave their parent's house much later (here in Portugal the average age for that is 34 years old!), thus having children much later which usually means fewer and because upsizing their home to have more children is also harder that too means fewer children, with the result that the average number of children per-family here is 1.8 when the replacement rate is 2.4 children.

I mean, even the far-right anti-immigration muppets would logically want lower housing costs so that the locals have more kids and no foreigners need come so that there's still people working to pay their pensions.

And don't get me started on how at this point half the young adults who get University degrees leave the country as soon as they get their degree, another thing which itself also feeds into things like a National Health Service under pressure (as many of those who leave are trained Doctors and Nurses).

Meanwhile, an ever greater fraction of ruling politicians have as a second job "realestate investor" - for example the Prime Minister here in Portugal is well know for owning 55 properties - so they have very clear personal incentives to make policies which result in realestate prices increases since that makes them wealthier (and screw everybody else), which in turn makes the situation of the country worse at many levels.

They'd let the situation aggravate and then blame it on immigrants and focus only on the violence of the few bad actors taking advantage of the situation. You can count on governments doing the wrong thing.