Currently living in the Algarve after moving to Lisbon with my partner for her studies years ago.
I know a few non-crypto entrepreneurs who came here for the NHR (non habitual resident scheme - the scheme mentioned in the article which allowed for the 20% tax cap on foreign income).
I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered, not just when dealing with the government, but generally in everyday life. Most people have war stories related to accountants, lawyers, banks, telecom companies or landlords. The real kicker was when they realised that the 20% didn’t include social security payments, bringing most of them (those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens, and pay themselves exclusively in dividends) to an effective rate that wasn’t that far off what they’d be paying elsewhere. Needless to say the expat churn has been quite high.
Regarding Airbnbs and rising housing prices - I’m no economist but intuitively, I’ve always thought it made more sense to blame the explosive growth in tourism Portugal has had in the last decade or so (6M tourists visiting Lisbon, a city of 500k people) rather than the 10-20k digital nomads. Would be curious to know if anyone has better numbers or studies.
Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy.
It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.
> those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens
I suppose it depends on your definition of "hefty" but a couple of thousand USD is usually sufficient, depending on jurisdiction, and obviously is expected to pay for itself many (, many, many) times over.
It's not that hard and it's not just for the 1%. Especially if you're anything approaching a "digital nomad" I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't establish a consulting company somewhere offshore, bill from that, pay yourself a quarterly dividend and then import only the money you actually need.
> I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered
You need someone (in Spain it's called gestor) who does all of that for you. I live in Portugal, by now I speak the language but I don't get the rules etc. I have a guy who does everything, never had any issues. It's very cheap.
Didn't they recently crack down on Airbnb's, adding requirements that should theoretically lower the drive to turn unoccupied housing into Airbnb's (essentially limiting people purchasing flats with this intention)?
The digital nomads are going to soak up a good 3 to 5% of the total housing on a permanent basis, that's a pretty good dent in the reservoir. Tourists predominantly stay in hotels or other short-stay places. Though AirBNB and so on also result in the conversion of some of that available housing into short stay 'hotels' which will put more pressure on that reservoir. Typically in any city the vast bulk of the housing is spoken for, and only a relatively small part is available for newcomers or people that move out of their parents place when they come of age.
So I would not underestimate the impact even if it is only 10 to 20K individuals. Finally: tourists spend a lot, typical budgets are many 100's of euros / day for a family. Digital nomads comparatively little.
Young Portuguese have been emigrating for the last 50 years. The country is full of second residences, bought by people who took advantage of cheap real estate until recently.
Blaming today's inflation and cost of living on a few digital nomads or crypto people doesn't make much sense.
What also chocked me when visiting Lisbon or Porto is the number of old abandoned buildings in what I would consider nice areas. I have always wondered what was the reason for that...
Re abandoned buildings: it’s likely due to the inheritance laws for Portugal, which are unique in the way things are automatically split upon deaths and require official signoff from all parties that are inheritors for sale. If another death occurs, then their own more inheritors for that individual.
No idea about Lisbon but it was common in Brussels to let an old building "rot" to the point where the owner could destroy it and rebuild a new one. This way, they could build a bigger/better building and sell apartment at higher price than just fix the original building.
Demolition permit are hard to obtain but if your building is too decrepit, the city will force you to destroy it.
I remember walking around nicer areas of Porto and Lisbon and seeing a perfectly regular house right next to a row of dilapidated, caved in buildings. Peering inside the cracked windows, I saw trees growing right in the middle of the home’s living area. It would commonly be one regular home for every 3-4 of those abandoned shacks.
In central Europe this is often done to bypass a Historic Bureau. Target of those guys is to preserve current "genus loci" of the city forcing owners to use traditional materials and processes to fix the building so outside it is still looking the same.
The loophole is that if building is too damaged, that there is no viable way to repair it, then it can be destroyed and new one can be built. So you can just let it be as is and wait you can help the decay by removing roof and let rain and cold do the work. Or in most extreme cases, just set it on fire "by accident".
(I've lived in Portugal more than 20 years ago and things (i.e. laws) might have changed significantly.) The problems with abandoned, degraded but historical/beautiful buildings had to do with several factors.
One factor was the social protection that renters (especially elderly) are afforded by law, especially keeping rents very (and I mean very low). This protection is in itself a good thing, but the downside was that landlords had no incentive to do renovations in the order of million euros for a building full of renters paying fifty euros per month each (I can't recall exact quantities). As I said, the protection of elderly is a good thing, but a balance was never achieved.
Another factor (and this ties with the bureaucracy theme) was that for some buildings, the state and municipality couldn't even locate the owner. So you might have this grade I building with a name as the legal owner, but it could be someone that emigrated to Brazil 50 years ago. Couple that with the slowness of judicial process and the building is in a limbo state for a century.
> What also chocked me when visiting Lisbon or Porto is the number of old abandoned buildings in what I would consider nice areas. I have always wondered what was the reason for that...
Likely property that is inherited to families that emigrated.
The article is way overblown and borderline clueless. First off, the Luddites demonstrating before the Web Summit had a political backing, they’re not a grassroots movement. That demonstration happened for the cameras (and to further a small party’s ambitions to the limelight).
Second, there is indeed backlash against the golden visa program, but the most meaningful bits are due to visas being granted to people who do zero actual investment in the country.
As to real estate, this is just the peak of a long crisis brought upon by idiotic zoning laws that favored high-value condos and villas, under pressure from a bunch of lobbyists from the building industry (we have at least two major cement lobbies here, each driven by its own influential family).
That, an emphasis on tourism and landlords’ resistance to maintaining or rebuilding existing buildings (partly due to inheritance laws, yes, but mostly driven by greed) has made it impossible to buy new flats in Lisbon even before “gentrification” from techies began.
(AirBnB is just another factor in this - a lot of those nice villas and flats are priced outside local affordances, and whoever buys them does so to rent out and drive a quick profit, since a lot of AirBnBs aren’t even taxed…)
The only thing the article gets right is that we have a completely bullshit legal and tax system that takes far too long for anyone to sort out - even natives. As an example, it is _much_ less sensible to work as a tech contractor here (unlike, say, the UK) because the fiscal load and legal protection are all stacked against you.
Even with “instant company” fast-tracking (which gives you a working legal entity in a few hours, provided you know where to apply to and how to do the paperwork), setting up a business and having official accounting requires some effort for a random Jane/Joe, especially if foreign.
But those barriers are fixable if you hire a local relocation/setup service, so real startups and savvy techies can breeze through those. The real trouble comes when you need to do contracts, pay taxes, etc. and there is a legal issue — courts here are slow, Byzantine and can take years to close a case, so brokerage (which can be fraught to navigate) is often the only option.
Anyway, the country isn’t broken because a few thousand crypto bros decided to settle in nice villas here. I know of several companies that are thriving here (hi Cloudflare!), even if there are constant paper cuts regarding bureaucracy.
>Portugal sought to lure them with tax breaks [...] Portugal, then with no taxes on crypto-derived capital gains, fit the bill [...] “We have neighborhoods now that are mainly Airbnb,” said Ana, the Portuguese teacher, “We don’t have our homes anymore.” [...] locals protest against rising costs and gentrification
Surprised nobody saw gentrification and rising CoL coming when they invited crypto asset holders and workers who earn several times more than the locals while contributing much less in taxes.
Seems like a move that only benefited the Portuguese landlords and real estate owners at the expense of the rest of the population.
If I was a Portuguese citizen I'd be pissed at such a decision that prioritizes wealthy foreign crypto and tech bros over its own citizens and make sure to vote those politicians out.
Portugal is not Dubai. It can't afford to be a tax heaven with government revenue funded by oil instead of taxes. A country like Portugal should seek to attract businesses and investors who create jobs and pay taxes there, not attract wealth hoarders who dodge taxes and who's only contribution to the local economy is making landlords richer and buying cocktails on the beach.
>The center-right Moedas, for his part, said that while clarity on crypto and taxes is welcome, “when you start taxing innovation too soon, you can kill innovation. And so I'm not aligned with the government on this.”
Oh please, taxing crypto assets is not taxing innovation. WTF are you talking about? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read stuff like this.
This would be no-problem if cities built more houses (especially large apartment blocks) ... well, and outlaw airbnb.
I live in a former socialist country that somehow managed to build A LOT of housing in the 70s and 80s, with shitty equipment, but somehow cannot build anything in the last few decades. And not just the government building stuff... normal people could buy a plot of land, get their friends to help, dig a hole and start building... a small loan for bricks and cement, and the basement + a concrete slab was built... then a month or two went buy, and what was left from the paychecks went for a pallet of bricks plus a few bags of cement, and half a floor was made. Repeat for a few years and a house was there... no insulation or a facade, but people could live inside and deal with that later. Papers and permits? As long as you built within some basic rules (far away from the property line and not a too unusual shape), you could basically ignore them, and deal with the "legalization" later. Now you're not allowed to build basically anywhere, papers cost more than the whole material+work did back then, and you're not allowed to do anything by yourself and your friends are not allowed to help anymore. So yeah... good luck.
As a portuguese it blows my mind that "digital nomads" are choosing the country to live in. Surely the country has great weather, food and you get an hefty tax discount that the natives can only dream about (20% of income tax is wayyy lower than a living wage in this country pays). But if you investigated a bit more you would see that the emigration rates of the country are going through the roof.
I also saw some comments blaming the tourism for this "bubble" bursting. The portuguese can't complain about tourism since it's a huge part of our PIB.
> Surely the country has great weather, food and you get an hefty tax discount
Sounds like you have it figured out why people are moving there :)
I think it's always hard for natives to figure out why people want to move to their country, where they see mostly problems and not how much better it is than where the people come from.
I'm an immigrant as well, and wouldn't understand why people would move to the country I was born in, but people who are from the place I currently live in feels the same way but vice-versa.
Good weather and good food is surprisingly convincing, at least for me, in deciding where to live.
It’s ridiculous to blame digital nomads. If there is a primary source to blame, it would be Airbnb.
This gentrification and tourist problem began well before Lisbon became a DN favorite.
Also it’s a global problem as wealth accumulation means individuals and companies can’t find enough places to “safely” put cash. Real estate, especially when it can generate good income, is an obvious choice.
Plus, Portugal attracts wealthy Brazilians who want a comfortable, safe, and European home.
If Airbnb is the problem then just sounds like supply is out of whack with demand. Sounds like they ought to be building more homes and transport infrastructure to cope with the demand. Though based on other comments also sounds like it’s not the most competent local government.
Lots of Goan friends have finally opted for that "ancestral" Portuguese passport and none of them have any intention of either working or staying in Portugal ever.
> Critics “have to understand there is not a dichotomy” between drawing in outsiders and caring for locals.
Can confirm, I’ve stayed longer than short term in many cities and am a transplant in all cities. Some places handle it better than others, every place points fingers at a the nearest most visible externality. What they all hardly consider:
- their neighbor could have set the rent super high at any point in history, and didnt gamble on doing that then and didnt have to gamble on doing that now. the rent doesnt have to be that high and you can likely peer pressure them into not raising it to its highest acceptable threshold
- I dont care what the rent is anywhere, more on this later
- anyone that can afford the current rent, set unilaterally by a gambling landlord, is usually paying more than everyone else
- and circling back, any unit in any city would satisfy me, so even if I would pay $6,000 in Miami and thats super high, the $1500 place in Austin would remove me from the market, even though thats high to people in Austin (example, I dont actually know, or care)
- all together this puts it more so on the gambling landlords in all places, yes there are some tenants that ask for higher rent just to skip the application queue but I would need that quantified
Two+ years in Algarve, with registered activity and paying all the taxes here. Having foreign income all my taxes fall within sweet NHR regime. Can't say anything bad about bureaucracy, with proper lawyer help it is slow-ish but very decent process.
Lease prices are driven by taxes and tourism, short term (AL) accommodation is taxed at 6%, long term lease contracts go from 30% (for 1+ year contracts) down to 10% (for 10+ years contracts). Obviously landlords are pushed into short term accommodation which creates lack of long term offers. Matter of getting taxes more fair over long/short term categories would fix the market immediately.
Quality of life and nice people are above anything else so I wouldn't change a thing from this current setup.
I was just in Lisbon yesterday. I recommend the Lisbon Winery for a lesson in port wine and great food. It’s a nice city, the level of English is high, but it’s not as modern as other European cities. Plus, who wants a horde of cryptobros anyway? What “innovative” about tulipomaniacs?
As for Airbnb, that’s the same is most touristy cities and it’s not just because of nomads.
Yeah, affordable living only for the Portuguese that have to find housing on the outskirts and drive one hour to work, because naturally our public transport network isn't that great anyway.
Thankfully I got my housing situation clarifyied several years ago.
Yeah one thing I have learnt in my adventures is that you should never try to do business in a non advanced economy. I keep all my business in the Netherlands no matter where I live.
Is this purely a Lisbon thing, or has it exploded over the last 6 months? I visited Porto last spring and there weren't any crowds nor many foreigners, it was pretty quiet.
It's being blown out of proportion for click-bait reasons. The journalist and the people he interviewed are delusional too (ability of Portugal to tax). There is churn even with the tax rebates because of how bad portgual is. This thing would not work with taxes or expensive prices/real-estate.
Nomadism is ephemeral. The bubble will pop as soon as the new hottest place comes into the picture.
You should read the article to the end. We get multiple small (i.e., hardly felt) quakes throughout the year that point to a steady release in pressure in the fault.
> Not advocating for the influx of "crypto bros" and "digital nomads" but to blame the current wave of inflation on them is a bit ridiculous
Good, because this article is about neither but easy to deflect if all you look at is the title; its mostly about the affluent and those who could work remotely (not entirely nomadic as they were already EU citizens) who took advantage of this scheme, here are the most important takeaways that support that it's scope goes beyond either for the issues seen now on PT:
> Belgian entrepreneur Jan Deruyck, who moved to Portugal in 2021 with his wife Morgane to build feminine health startup Guud in “full isolation” during the pandemic, is one of them. But a year and a half later, he’s out: “[They have] huge ambitions, but there’s little execution.”
> Thank the Web Summit for the visas' shift toward tech workers: It’s “one of the reasons why Lisbon got on the map of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs,” said Armand Arton, founder of the Global Citizen Forum, a members’ club for well-heeled cosmopolites. “Then COVID happened and we started getting calls from wealthy American families saying they wanted a residence permit to enter Europe at any time [regardless of travel restriction]. They got golden visas by investing in technology companies.”
> Not to be left out, EU citizens also flocked into Portugal to work remotely during the pandemic, taking advantage of a “non-habitual resident” tax regime that exempts foreign income from taxation and charges a flat 20 percent rate on Portugal-generated revenue from high-value professional activities. Managing a company or working in the technology field can qualify for such activities, making the scheme attractive to digital nomads.
I'm a DN and came over during COVID, in the onset PT was on my list, but after the headache I had to deal with the HR government and the sheer incompetence and abject failure to do even basic functions, I realized PT was the same but with the added headache of competing with a much broader scope of people and the longer backorders and growing wait list, the processing time went from 6 months to a year plus for approval because of the influx.
Furthermore, the main cities soon started to look like a common tourist traps and all that follows because of the crowds who came over which was one of the reasons I wanted to get out of the US in the first place and ultimately made the decision for me.
I'm not surprised locals are pissed, they should be: but they should primarily direct their anger toward their government that because of failed policy, poor economic and investment strategies have made the decades long brain-drain in PT necessary, and in turned hollowed out their entire economy in the process which led to the typical housing and property speculation and consolidation from foreign investment as big as it is, and golden visa schemes the only thing monetarily viable in their country other than tourism.
The truth is that Portugal, despite being geographically the most Western of all nations in the EU, is pretty much on par with it's E. European counterparts (made up of former Soviet satellites or fragmented Republics of Yugoslavia) economically, socially and politically so; Digital nomad visas didn't do that, it just made it more accessible in what is actually just a glimpse of what is to come: as the Global population starts to recede (gradually and then suddenly) from it's 8 billion high as more boomer start to die the unfunded liabilities within the system will have already bled it dry in pensions and medical costs and the only thing left will be to compete for citizens with favorable status--Portugal didn't just offer a DN a tax free temporary residence, but full fledged EU citizenship within 5 years with some caveats. It was essentially a longer path toward the Golden Visa that is only offered to those wealthy enough to buy-in their way into passport hunting.
Just for context, even Germany (the most non-PIIGS nation) is struggling to keep the hospitals running [0] because of the staff shortages after COVID, and even keeping up with supplies is suffering due to the supply shortages and over-dependence on imported made drugs and devices in a mainly manufacturing country is staggering, and it has been made worse since the invasion in Ukraine due to the cost hikes on everything.
alzamos|3 years ago
I know a few non-crypto entrepreneurs who came here for the NHR (non habitual resident scheme - the scheme mentioned in the article which allowed for the 20% tax cap on foreign income).
I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered, not just when dealing with the government, but generally in everyday life. Most people have war stories related to accountants, lawyers, banks, telecom companies or landlords. The real kicker was when they realised that the 20% didn’t include social security payments, bringing most of them (those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens, and pay themselves exclusively in dividends) to an effective rate that wasn’t that far off what they’d be paying elsewhere. Needless to say the expat churn has been quite high.
Regarding Airbnbs and rising housing prices - I’m no economist but intuitively, I’ve always thought it made more sense to blame the explosive growth in tourism Portugal has had in the last decade or so (6M tourists visiting Lisbon, a city of 500k people) rather than the 10-20k digital nomads. Would be curious to know if anyone has better numbers or studies.
user_named|3 years ago
It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.
sho|3 years ago
I suppose it depends on your definition of "hefty" but a couple of thousand USD is usually sufficient, depending on jurisdiction, and obviously is expected to pay for itself many (, many, many) times over.
It's not that hard and it's not just for the 1%. Especially if you're anything approaching a "digital nomad" I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't establish a consulting company somewhere offshore, bill from that, pay yourself a quarterly dividend and then import only the money you actually need.
tluyben2|3 years ago
You need someone (in Spain it's called gestor) who does all of that for you. I live in Portugal, by now I speak the language but I don't get the rules etc. I have a guy who does everything, never had any issues. It's very cheap.
mancerayder|3 years ago
Didn't they recently crack down on Airbnb's, adding requirements that should theoretically lower the drive to turn unoccupied housing into Airbnb's (essentially limiting people purchasing flats with this intention)?
jacquesm|3 years ago
So I would not underestimate the impact even if it is only 10 to 20K individuals. Finally: tourists spend a lot, typical budgets are many 100's of euros / day for a family. Digital nomads comparatively little.
lildata|3 years ago
What also chocked me when visiting Lisbon or Porto is the number of old abandoned buildings in what I would consider nice areas. I have always wondered what was the reason for that...
rancar2|3 years ago
whynotmaybe|3 years ago
Demolition permit are hard to obtain but if your building is too decrepit, the city will force you to destroy it.
floppydiskette|3 years ago
TheLoafOfBread|3 years ago
The loophole is that if building is too damaged, that there is no viable way to repair it, then it can be destroyed and new one can be built. So you can just let it be as is and wait you can help the decay by removing roof and let rain and cold do the work. Or in most extreme cases, just set it on fire "by accident".
rvieira|3 years ago
One factor was the social protection that renters (especially elderly) are afforded by law, especially keeping rents very (and I mean very low). This protection is in itself a good thing, but the downside was that landlords had no incentive to do renovations in the order of million euros for a building full of renters paying fifty euros per month each (I can't recall exact quantities). As I said, the protection of elderly is a good thing, but a balance was never achieved.
Another factor (and this ties with the bureaucracy theme) was that for some buildings, the state and municipality couldn't even locate the owner. So you might have this grade I building with a name as the legal owner, but it could be someone that emigrated to Brazil 50 years ago. Couple that with the slowness of judicial process and the building is in a limbo state for a century.
whimsicalism|3 years ago
Likely property that is inherited to families that emigrated.
rcarmo|3 years ago
Second, there is indeed backlash against the golden visa program, but the most meaningful bits are due to visas being granted to people who do zero actual investment in the country.
As to real estate, this is just the peak of a long crisis brought upon by idiotic zoning laws that favored high-value condos and villas, under pressure from a bunch of lobbyists from the building industry (we have at least two major cement lobbies here, each driven by its own influential family).
That, an emphasis on tourism and landlords’ resistance to maintaining or rebuilding existing buildings (partly due to inheritance laws, yes, but mostly driven by greed) has made it impossible to buy new flats in Lisbon even before “gentrification” from techies began.
(AirBnB is just another factor in this - a lot of those nice villas and flats are priced outside local affordances, and whoever buys them does so to rent out and drive a quick profit, since a lot of AirBnBs aren’t even taxed…)
The only thing the article gets right is that we have a completely bullshit legal and tax system that takes far too long for anyone to sort out - even natives. As an example, it is _much_ less sensible to work as a tech contractor here (unlike, say, the UK) because the fiscal load and legal protection are all stacked against you.
Even with “instant company” fast-tracking (which gives you a working legal entity in a few hours, provided you know where to apply to and how to do the paperwork), setting up a business and having official accounting requires some effort for a random Jane/Joe, especially if foreign.
But those barriers are fixable if you hire a local relocation/setup service, so real startups and savvy techies can breeze through those. The real trouble comes when you need to do contracts, pay taxes, etc. and there is a legal issue — courts here are slow, Byzantine and can take years to close a case, so brokerage (which can be fraught to navigate) is often the only option.
Anyway, the country isn’t broken because a few thousand crypto bros decided to settle in nice villas here. I know of several companies that are thriving here (hi Cloudflare!), even if there are constant paper cuts regarding bureaucracy.
diceduckmonk|3 years ago
ChuckNorris89|3 years ago
Surprised nobody saw gentrification and rising CoL coming when they invited crypto asset holders and workers who earn several times more than the locals while contributing much less in taxes.
Seems like a move that only benefited the Portuguese landlords and real estate owners at the expense of the rest of the population.
If I was a Portuguese citizen I'd be pissed at such a decision that prioritizes wealthy foreign crypto and tech bros over its own citizens and make sure to vote those politicians out.
Portugal is not Dubai. It can't afford to be a tax heaven with government revenue funded by oil instead of taxes. A country like Portugal should seek to attract businesses and investors who create jobs and pay taxes there, not attract wealth hoarders who dodge taxes and who's only contribution to the local economy is making landlords richer and buying cocktails on the beach.
>The center-right Moedas, for his part, said that while clarity on crypto and taxes is welcome, “when you start taxing innovation too soon, you can kill innovation. And so I'm not aligned with the government on this.”
Oh please, taxing crypto assets is not taxing innovation. WTF are you talking about? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read stuff like this.
ajsnigrutin|3 years ago
I live in a former socialist country that somehow managed to build A LOT of housing in the 70s and 80s, with shitty equipment, but somehow cannot build anything in the last few decades. And not just the government building stuff... normal people could buy a plot of land, get their friends to help, dig a hole and start building... a small loan for bricks and cement, and the basement + a concrete slab was built... then a month or two went buy, and what was left from the paychecks went for a pallet of bricks plus a few bags of cement, and half a floor was made. Repeat for a few years and a house was there... no insulation or a facade, but people could live inside and deal with that later. Papers and permits? As long as you built within some basic rules (far away from the property line and not a too unusual shape), you could basically ignore them, and deal with the "legalization" later. Now you're not allowed to build basically anywhere, papers cost more than the whole material+work did back then, and you're not allowed to do anything by yourself and your friends are not allowed to help anymore. So yeah... good luck.
traveler01|3 years ago
It should be a huge red flag that one "nice" country has more than 20% of it's population living abroad: https://poligrafo.sapo.pt/fact-check/cotrim-de-figueiredo-po... (you might want to use Google Translate on this one).
I also saw some comments blaming the tourism for this "bubble" bursting. The portuguese can't complain about tourism since it's a huge part of our PIB.
capableweb|3 years ago
Sounds like you have it figured out why people are moving there :)
I think it's always hard for natives to figure out why people want to move to their country, where they see mostly problems and not how much better it is than where the people come from.
I'm an immigrant as well, and wouldn't understand why people would move to the country I was born in, but people who are from the place I currently live in feels the same way but vice-versa.
Good weather and good food is surprisingly convincing, at least for me, in deciding where to live.
baxtr|3 years ago
michaelteter|3 years ago
This gentrification and tourist problem began well before Lisbon became a DN favorite.
Also it’s a global problem as wealth accumulation means individuals and companies can’t find enough places to “safely” put cash. Real estate, especially when it can generate good income, is an obvious choice.
Plus, Portugal attracts wealthy Brazilians who want a comfortable, safe, and European home.
presentation|3 years ago
crossroadsguy|3 years ago
louloulou|3 years ago
yieldcrv|3 years ago
Can confirm, I’ve stayed longer than short term in many cities and am a transplant in all cities. Some places handle it better than others, every place points fingers at a the nearest most visible externality. What they all hardly consider:
- their neighbor could have set the rent super high at any point in history, and didnt gamble on doing that then and didnt have to gamble on doing that now. the rent doesnt have to be that high and you can likely peer pressure them into not raising it to its highest acceptable threshold
- I dont care what the rent is anywhere, more on this later
- anyone that can afford the current rent, set unilaterally by a gambling landlord, is usually paying more than everyone else
- and circling back, any unit in any city would satisfy me, so even if I would pay $6,000 in Miami and thats super high, the $1500 place in Austin would remove me from the market, even though thats high to people in Austin (example, I dont actually know, or care)
- all together this puts it more so on the gambling landlords in all places, yes there are some tenants that ask for higher rent just to skip the application queue but I would need that quantified
binaryapparatus|3 years ago
Lease prices are driven by taxes and tourism, short term (AL) accommodation is taxed at 6%, long term lease contracts go from 30% (for 1+ year contracts) down to 10% (for 10+ years contracts). Obviously landlords are pushed into short term accommodation which creates lack of long term offers. Matter of getting taxes more fair over long/short term categories would fix the market immediately.
Quality of life and nice people are above anything else so I wouldn't change a thing from this current setup.
tiffanyh|3 years ago
FlyingSnake|3 years ago
garbagecoder|3 years ago
As for Airbnb, that’s the same is most touristy cities and it’s not just because of nomads.
ajsnigrutin|3 years ago
Cities should be for citizens... tourists belong in hotels.
pjmlp|3 years ago
Thankfully I got my housing situation clarifyied several years ago.
nodemaker|3 years ago
forgotmypw17|3 years ago
maeil|3 years ago
csomar|3 years ago
Nomadism is ephemeral. The bubble will pop as soon as the new hottest place comes into the picture.
pjmlp|3 years ago
This year quite a few thousand university students had to give up their place, because they could not find affordable housing.
robbywashere_|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
RagnarD|3 years ago
https://www.air-worldwide.com/publications/air-currents/from...
rcarmo|3 years ago
PaywallBuster|3 years ago
Fire/reduce public servants and spread them away from Lisbon, there, solved!
sources:
"highest increase in jobs can be seen in central administration"
https://www.portugalresident.com/number-of-public-sector-wor...
https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=19963&langId=e...
76% centralized government https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/b9b...
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
exhibitapp|3 years ago
Melting_Harps|3 years ago
Good, because this article is about neither but easy to deflect if all you look at is the title; its mostly about the affluent and those who could work remotely (not entirely nomadic as they were already EU citizens) who took advantage of this scheme, here are the most important takeaways that support that it's scope goes beyond either for the issues seen now on PT:
> Belgian entrepreneur Jan Deruyck, who moved to Portugal in 2021 with his wife Morgane to build feminine health startup Guud in “full isolation” during the pandemic, is one of them. But a year and a half later, he’s out: “[They have] huge ambitions, but there’s little execution.”
> Thank the Web Summit for the visas' shift toward tech workers: It’s “one of the reasons why Lisbon got on the map of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs,” said Armand Arton, founder of the Global Citizen Forum, a members’ club for well-heeled cosmopolites. “Then COVID happened and we started getting calls from wealthy American families saying they wanted a residence permit to enter Europe at any time [regardless of travel restriction]. They got golden visas by investing in technology companies.”
> Not to be left out, EU citizens also flocked into Portugal to work remotely during the pandemic, taking advantage of a “non-habitual resident” tax regime that exempts foreign income from taxation and charges a flat 20 percent rate on Portugal-generated revenue from high-value professional activities. Managing a company or working in the technology field can qualify for such activities, making the scheme attractive to digital nomads.
I'm a DN and came over during COVID, in the onset PT was on my list, but after the headache I had to deal with the HR government and the sheer incompetence and abject failure to do even basic functions, I realized PT was the same but with the added headache of competing with a much broader scope of people and the longer backorders and growing wait list, the processing time went from 6 months to a year plus for approval because of the influx.
Furthermore, the main cities soon started to look like a common tourist traps and all that follows because of the crowds who came over which was one of the reasons I wanted to get out of the US in the first place and ultimately made the decision for me.
I'm not surprised locals are pissed, they should be: but they should primarily direct their anger toward their government that because of failed policy, poor economic and investment strategies have made the decades long brain-drain in PT necessary, and in turned hollowed out their entire economy in the process which led to the typical housing and property speculation and consolidation from foreign investment as big as it is, and golden visa schemes the only thing monetarily viable in their country other than tourism.
The truth is that Portugal, despite being geographically the most Western of all nations in the EU, is pretty much on par with it's E. European counterparts (made up of former Soviet satellites or fragmented Republics of Yugoslavia) economically, socially and politically so; Digital nomad visas didn't do that, it just made it more accessible in what is actually just a glimpse of what is to come: as the Global population starts to recede (gradually and then suddenly) from it's 8 billion high as more boomer start to die the unfunded liabilities within the system will have already bled it dry in pensions and medical costs and the only thing left will be to compete for citizens with favorable status--Portugal didn't just offer a DN a tax free temporary residence, but full fledged EU citizenship within 5 years with some caveats. It was essentially a longer path toward the Golden Visa that is only offered to those wealthy enough to buy-in their way into passport hunting.
Just for context, even Germany (the most non-PIIGS nation) is struggling to keep the hospitals running [0] because of the staff shortages after COVID, and even keeping up with supplies is suffering due to the supply shortages and over-dependence on imported made drugs and devices in a mainly manufacturing country is staggering, and it has been made worse since the invasion in Ukraine due to the cost hikes on everything.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=075AAaehmN8
zeruch|3 years ago
VulgarExigency|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Kukumber|3 years ago
how is that a thing, as a society we keep reaching new lows year after year, this is very concerning
"repeating past mistakes is our motto"