So there’s a ton of countries that I’ve heard have had truly unaffordable housing for decades, like:
- The UK
- Ireland
- The Netherlands
And I’ve heard of a ton of countries where the cost of houses was until recently quite affordable where it’s also started getting worse:
- Germany
- Poland
- Czechia
- Hungary
- The US
- Australia
- Canada
- And I’m sure plenty others
- It seems to be a pan-Western bloc thing. Is the cause in all these countries the same?
- We’ve heard of success stories in cities like Vienna where much of the housing stock is municipally owned – but those cities have had it that way for decades. Would their system alleviate the current crisis if established in the aforementioned countries?
- What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again? Is there any silver bullet? Has any country demonstrably managed to reverse this crisis yet?
Yes, USSR.
I wonder what the USSR would look like today if it still existed. Probably not good.
It’d look exactly like Russia but bigger. Same corruption, same authoritarianism, same human rights abuse, same power imbalance etc.
Better than Putin Russia, that for sure.
I think it would look like “better EU”, but EU itself would be better than in our timeline.
EDIT: I think alternative timeline EU would be even better than our timeline because it would have example of union, that focuses on quality of life instead of “number must go up”. Also it is worth noting, that I said this assuming USSR would either survive as it was politically in 1991 or reborn as result of parlament winning in October of 1993.
EDIT2: Also I said it with assumption that USSR would learn, that feeding people to military machine is bad for everything.
I think the EU could easily be far more leftist if that’s who won in the national + EP elections. I think its constitutional design is relatively apolitical
Relatively as long as we are talking about variations of parlamentary republic or other system without Great Leader. For example we can compare EU and USA of our timeline: one has functioning healthcare, public transport and labour laws, while other has system, that allows only for two right-wing parties to exist, both of which compete for sucking corporate dicks more. All this while election of Great Leader takes all attention from parlamentary and local elections.
And as you have said “if that’s who won in the national + EP elections”. Having oligarchy neigbour instead of leftist one makes domestic oligarchs more likely to win.