Munich-born dude here. I'm glad when it's finally. fucking. over. even though it wasn't as bad as it used to be this year in public transport, no idea why - usually all kinds of trains are packed with people drunk out of their mind.
The problem is that a lot of prime real estate is taken over by an army of hotels that are only at ~50-60% load on average [1] but packed during Oktoberfest and the Bauma trade fair with prices skyrocketing to hundreds, even thousands of euros per night [2]. On top of that come all the more or less legal AirBnBs which are just as much of a goldmine, with Oktoberfest yielding enough to pay for a whole year worth of rent.
Fuck that completely unsustainable shit. I'm sick of the exploding rents, cost of living in this shithole of a city, and by the looks of it I'll be out in a year.
> a lot of prime real estate is taken over by an army of hotels that are only at ~50-60% load on average
Isn’t this a textbook case for Airbnb (or something akin to it)? Residents live year round, except during the festival, when they rent out their homes?
Put another way, would the hotels be open to long-term leases which black out the festival?
> Isn’t this a textbook case for Airbnb (or something akin to it)? Residents live year round, except during the festival, when they rent out their homes?
I lived above an AirBnB until the actual landlord shut that shit down. AirBnB is a fucking pest even without Oktoberfest, but during it it's even worse. NO ONE wants hordes of drunkards stomping through the stairwell at 03:00 in the morning. There's a reason accomodation providers are a regulated business.
> Put another way, would the hotels be open to long-term leases which black out the festival?
Who can afford that? Even at 50€ a night it's 1500€ a month with barely more than a bed and a shower.
I used to live right next to the Wiesn (on the place with the St. Paul’s church) and we‘d have strict orders to keep the gate to the buildings yard closed at all times during Octoberfest or the potted plants would die due to urea oversupply.
I believe I spent one year in Munich during the Wiesn, and then fled town every year.
I lived for a year on Bavariaring. After I woke up from the smell of someone having taken a shit in the garden right below my window despite a locked fence/gate, I fled the area. Cheap rent had its reason...
I loved the area, except for the Octoberfest. People leaning on the church walls, puking. No way to use any public transport station nearby. Hordes of drunks moving from/to Hackerbrücke. Unbearable. Unbelievable if you haven‘t seen it.
> NO ONE wants hordes of drunkards stomping through the stairwell at 03:00 in the morning
Isn’t this directly what the rent premium pays for? Segregated revellers. Either that or you nuke the festival, with the economic repercussions that brings.
One can’t legitimately complain about the hotels while rejecting co-residence without banning the Weisn. (Granted, illegitimate complaining and slaughtering golden geese are a hallmarks of modern German politics.)
I've lived in Munich and it's one of my favorite cities in the world. I'm from Nashville and I mostly hate it, though people seem to love it. I think you are experiencing a severe bias if you think Munich resembles anything close to a "shithole." It has amazing parks, great transportation options, a good vibe, hikes within a short train ride, etc. It has tourists and big events? Oh, no...so like every big city on Earth? Avoiding Wiesn is actually extremely easy, unlike other massive events in other cities.
One of the problems in Munich is that all rapid public transport goes through the city centre, there is no loop around it like in Berlin. If you commute to the west you have to go through Hackerbrücke station - that's the one close to Theresienwiese, where Oktoberfest is. Same goes for the subway, Munich has very centralised hubs where the lines cross, hard to avoid.
Just to be the counterpoint: I'm also born in Munich and I like this city quite a lot. Certainly not a shithole, IMO - and that's the main reason why rents are as insane as they are. If not even Freiham, a big new city quarter which is currently being build, is able to put a dent into the rising rents, then I doubt replacing the extra hotel capacity would be a game changer either, IMO. Munich just grew way too quickly without scaling it's infrastructure accordingly.
I don't disagree with most of what you said but (and I might be misremembering) but the "grew way to quickly" doesn't hold up.
When I was in school I learned the number "1.3m people" and that was the early/mid 90s, now it's 1.5m. So unless you start counting a more widespread urbanization of the adjacent towns.. the math doesn't seem to work out.
I do agree that it feels a lot worse than 20 years ago.
I've lived in Munich for like what, 29, years of my life. It's seriously gone down the drain. Born there, went to school there, went to uni there, went away, and came back 8 years ago.
Housing is unaffordable if your parents haven't died and passed you a sizable estate, if you need childcare you have to register a year before planned conception (obviously exagerrated, but you get the point), good luck finding a doctor if you're not having private insurance, public transport is utterly nuts, cops will relentlessly hunt you down for smoking a blunt or beat you up for daring to host an outdoor rave, and there's fucking traffic everywhere.
Ok, a lot of people feel this about their cities they view through the lens of the past. I think the same of Nashville, but I at least acknowledge I am extremely biased and basically just a grumpy 30+ year old. Munich is easily one of the best -big- cities in the world. Literally everything you just said could be applied to virtually every large city on Earth. Munich has roughly the same population as Manhattan, it is a huge city and yet is clean, safe, accessible, has great transit, close to tons of lakes and the Alps. I know Germans are fairly pessimistic, so not really surprising to hear this, but also, I will vouche that it's not really in touch with reality when you compare it to cities of similar sizes in Europe and the US.
> Munich is easily one of the best -big- cities in the world.
That's the usual problem with relative comparisons. When the competition is cities with people defecating on the sidewalks (SF), half the city being bought up as a wealth store for Russians and Chinese (London) or places with incompetent politicians (Berlin), even a run-down place like Munich stands out. And the conservative clowns holding the Bavarian government hostage for decades does all it can to fuck up the city even more (see e.g. the years of the Bezirksregierung Oberbayern throwing wrenches into the C-series subway or tram trains, or how the state and federal government completely blew the 2. Stammstrecke train tunnel project), just to help out the local Conservatives which really aren't liked in Munich by acting like the SPD/Greens government is at fault for the issues.
Seriously, I demand better from politics than to be happy with being the best among mediocrity. Germany is the fourth-richest nation in the world by GDP, the most powerful economy in the EU. We can do better than that.
The complete inability of reforming the Senate vs Bezirke competences chaos is the biggest practical issue for me. The biggest meme issue was to time the last election right alongside the Berlin Marathon which completely predictable led to utter chaos.
I guess they had no choice about the election date, but yeah they should have realized this when they approved the marathon date. And even disregarding that they really should have planned much better, as you said it was predicable there would be immense chaos that day.
The most perplexing thing in recent memory for me was that they had digitized things like apartment registrations during covid yet undid it at some point. What sense does that make?
As another Nashvillian(sp?), I definitely understand the difference between how a city is viewed by tourists and by locals. I don’t mostly hate Nashville, but I basically hate Broadway, 12 south, basically everything everyone thinks of as Nashville
Just to present a balanced view for our international audience: a significant number of locals sincerely enjoy Oktoberfest. Within my circles in the Munich tech/startup scene, a visit to Oktoberfest with the team is often considered one of the year’s highlights in terms of team building and socializing. People attend with friends, family, etc. The infamous images of inebriated tourists merely represent the most attention-grabbing outliers, overshadowing the majority who simply have a splendid time there.
Munich does have its share of issues, rent being a notable example. However, most of these problems are likely a result of the general lack of serious troubles, relatively speaking, which in turn boosts the city's attractiveness.
The hotel plague definitely contributes to the problem. Take alone the Motel One Orleans x Rosenheimer Straße [1]. The 7000 m² would have been a lot of space that could have been used for a rental block, and to make it worse Motel One already has a hotel less than 10 min walking time on Orleansstraße. Or the FIVE HOTELS they built in the former Werksviertel [2]. Or yet another hotel in Hochstraße [3]. And that's just what has been going on over the last few years in my hood - I can reach any of these destinations in less than ten minutes with my bike - , not including what goes on near Central Station which already has the highest density of hotels in the entirety of Europe [4] and yet there are more projects under construction, often at the expense of housing and small businesses.
And all of this is only made possible by Oktoberfest and Bauma, because the extraordinary rates paid for during that time cross-finance the rest of the year.
I'm fucking fed up with hotels, I'm fed up with AirBnB, I'm fed up with tourists. Enough is enough.
That's the size of the entire property, so (depending on what you build / how high) ~28.000 m² of resulting space or about 450-ish 60 m² apartments), so enough living space for 1000-1500 people.
> You'd need 10s of thousands of new units to bring down prices materially.
Agreed, but building hotels that are only fully occupied once every year for Oktoberfest and once every three years for Bauma is a waste of highly valuable real estate.
Munich has about 94k hotel beds in total [1], and less than 10k homeless [2]. Close the hotels, give the place to those who actually need it.
I do like the Wiesn (and just came back from there) and live in Haidhausen which does not get so badly affected by the drunkards, but the whole hotel, airbnb and office space crap is getting too much. That is not sustainable.
Would be interesting to have some hard data with comparison for other cities like Hamburg, Stuttgart, etc. (probably not Berlin, as it's too much of an outlier). How many hotels, how many beds, in comparison to how many people.
If the profits would stay in the local economies, maybe I'd not be so pissed about it. But a huge chunk of the profits ends up at international hotel conglomerates and beer breweries - the only one still independent is Augustiner, everyone else got bought up - and their shareholders.
That certainly is false as a general statement. In America, you will see countless complaints similar to those coming from /u/mschuster91. This makes sense, since many of those inconvenienced don't reap any economic benefits from it.
Usually people/cities appreciate event and tourism business and money (and lament its loss, as during covid) but dislike the crowding and inevitable anti-social behavior that you can run into.
That being said, I've read some positive comments regarding tourists recently, noting that they are often enthusiastic about parts of your town that you might be jaded about or have written off as useless tourist areas but might actually be something that locals could enjoy as well.
Most of the locals do enjoy the Oktoberfest (speaking as someone from there). It is a fun two weeks of the year and the entire city enters a special kind of mood.
But it is not surprising that the HN crowd would find it distasteful. People here are definitely not the type for these kinds of festivities.
Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with drinking beer, I used to be able to down an entire case of Augustiner in my best days in one night. Personal record at Oktoberfest is something around 6-7 Maß.
The problem I have with Oktoberfest is that it's gotten way out of hand, it's too much impact for the local population for way too little gain for common people - and it's increasingly unaffordable: 15 euros for a liter of beer? That's bloody ridiculous.
Munich locals pay the most expensive rents in Germany, and those who have the cash to buy are facing the second-most expensive real estate market in Europe [1].
I honestly do not see how the two things are related. Spending 15€ once instead of 8€ once is not really a sign of anything. You can do that even as an unemployed person on Bürgergeld.
What is worrying about the German economy is also not the current inflation but the long term outlook: the energy prices that will never be competitive, the 20 years of technological lag within almost all industries due to lack of investment and extremely risk averse financial climate, and the ever aging population, which now Germans are starting to realize, won't be so easily solved by immigration, neither illegal nor legal.
The Tourist Oktoberfest in Munich is good to experience once, but I have no intention to ever go again. Queueing in the hope you can get into a tent, asshole bouncers, and massive crowds took the shine off a bit. You get a table and never leave until you're kicked out. The cost of the beer doesn't include the massive tips you're expected to give the beer women either (which they deserve)
The lack of a hangover after copious amounts of beer was quite a nice surprise though.
> The lack of a hangover after copious amounts of beer was quite a nice surprise though.
That's because it's actual, high quality beer that's been brewed right in Munich - in fact, being brewed inside Munich city borders is a requirement to be allowed on the Oktoberfest, and there are only a handful of qualifying beer breweries in the first place [1].
For those wishing to go: keep in mind that the beer served on Oktoberfest is an even stronger variety than regular beer which is in itself way stronger than what is called beer in other places of this world. And for heavens sake don't forget to eat beforehand and during a tent visit.
A major economy is facing a minor recession in the aftermath of a once-in-a-generation energy shock and a once-in-a-generation inflation spike. If history tells us anything, it's that major economic powers are phenomenally robust.
...and now Britain is a first-world economy with a very high standard of living and home to one of the greatest financial centers in the history of the world.
About half of England (the bit closest to London) is in a good state, Wales not so much, likewise much of The North.
How much of the blame you assign to the Tories, to Brexit, to Covid, and to the global economic repercussions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is up for debate; but the quality of life was very noticeably worse when I last visited friends and family back on the island, compared to my final pre-lockdown trip.
However, none of that is quite as substantial as the colossal loss of relative power that came from the pyrrhic victories of the two World Wars that cost it control of the largest empire the world had ever seen, and left it losing a series of disputes over fishing rights to a country whose primary military forces are its coast guard.
>left it losing a series of disputes over fishing rights to a country whose primary military forces are its coast guard
Why shouldn't Iceland be in control of fishing in own waters and instead expect it to give it up to the UK to come and take as it pleases? Using your navy to take other country's resources is basically a war crime.
This particular series of disputes was regarding the increase of "it's own waters" from 3 miles from the coast to 12/200 miles and if that was even legit.
The last time the West faced a major inflation spike with the mid-to-late 70's (and it was WAY worse than this), about a generation ago. The same can be said of the last major energy crisis.
If you have facts I am unaware of feel free to share them.
That would imply bankruptcies, mass unemployment, etc. But for some reason only the people on anglophile Youtube see this collapse. Germany mostly muddles through.
That is not to say there are no problems. But "collapse" is an absurd hyperbole.
It's not like meat would be better - for capitalist reasons, a lot of traditional breeds of cows, pigs and poultry are nearing extinction because production has optimized to a very few select breeds that produce the "most" meat, at the cost of the animal's welfare (especially with chicken that have issues standing upright) and the taste.
And the nutritional value of animal products may be affected, too:
I live in South America. The lard I buy here from local peasants, who 'breed' an old pig race, has a liquid fraction, even in the fridge. This indicates to a high amount of unsaturated fatty acids. The industrial lard is completely solid at that temperature.
As a local, I'm really looking forward to when this madness is over in a few days, so we can finally use the metro again without that ever-present puke smell.
It’s hard not to be pessimistic in Germany these days.
Population is aging and paying for the retirement money for all existing retirees is already taking up over 25% of government spending. There’s barely money for anything else so taxes and social security payments are poised to go up while already being close to ~50% for most earners.
There’s a strong and growing far-right movement full of populist and even neo-nazi ideologies.
Infrastructure is still top notch internationally but funding has been cut over the last decades and it’s starting to show.
I could go on but I think you get the picture. Many people in my social circle want to leave the country so I would really think twice about moving here.
Well when a refugee with 2 kids gets 1890€ in cash, Kindergeld on top, free health insurance and free housing… I am also becoming very quickly populist and even neo-nazi follower. That’s income level of white collar worker after university studies and few years work experience. This nonsense with uncontrolled immigration must be over asap. Get the people some warm shelter and warm food, don’t throw money at them!
What is ridiculous is that a "refugee" who burns his papers gets all that help. Then at the same time I had students who had to leave Germany because they did not find a job in time after their masters. These students have worked throughout their stay here and even payed into the system but were deemed either too foreign or too rich to get any financial assistance while searching for a job.
Germany is a weird place where if you play by the rules you get a very harsh treatment but if you cheat the rules you can get a lot of free shit.
A more apt description would be, taking money from Insrus pocket and giving it to someone else. Someone who deliberately broke the rules and exploited a system designed to help people in need.
While playing around with the N-word is certainly distasteful, the underlying question is pretty crucial.
Once upon a time, when Western economies were relatively stronger (compared to the rest of the world) and Western nations much younger, idealistic people constructed asylum systems that were rather generous to asylants and awarded them the same welfare payments as to the locals.
Year by year, the "global parameters" have shifted bit by bit, and these idealistic systems are now unsustainable. Germany cannot afford to be Sozialamt for millions of young men that manage to get there. It has too many unmet obligations towards its citizens, and most people tend to agree that citizens should come first.
Refusal to even look at this situation and reflexive blaming of all problems on "far right disinformation etc" will only make the necessary correction in the future much more painful and complicated.
Some countries, like Denmark, already understood the situation and adjusted their systems so that they don't attract people looking for better living standards under the guise of asylum.
It’s a very poor tasteful way of saying anti-immigrant sentiment doesn’t appear in a vacuum. That some auto label such people with this sentiment as neo Nazis is another issue.
This is what happens when the established parties refuse to do anything about it and don't even address the issue seriously, instead immediately labeling people who see the problem as "Nazis." The obvious conclusion from this is that these people are inevitably supporting parties that see this is an issue.
So you don't have any source, just some anecdotal claim, which contradicts public data. And since when is the Finanzamt responsible for refugees? That's the job of the Sozialamt. Are you maybe talking about a guestworker, not a refugee? Because refugees are unable to receive Kindergeld, unlike workers of jobs with social insurance.
Ukrainians are a special case. They are not handled as refugees, but EU-citizen, meaning they enter the normal social system. And this is beneficial for Germany, as Ukrainians are also able to enter the job market because of this. But even then your claims are sketchy. Even with Bürgergeld 1 adult + 2 kids needs to be an extreme case for such an amount.
I don’t know about if this is beneficial. I was born in Soviet Union as most of the Ukrainians and I have rudimentary russian language skills. I just don’t hear from refugees about great joy being in Germany and working here. Rather about stupid Germans giving money for free. When I brought trailer full of kitchen parts and Kleinkram to the shelter the so called refugees were standing and looking while German female helpers were offloading the stuff. I was invited into bbq with friendly Ukrainians who work very hard on poverty limit and live in Germany since 2014 and they invited their extended family who were “refugees”. It was 3 hours full of complaints about Germany, bad hotel, not cool place (somewhere Bad Tölz where people pay sick money to make hiking vacation).
Elephant is in the room, Germany has uncontrolled immigration problem. There is no need to see me as a nazi reinstalling gas chambers. But these all people are refugees, let’s give them warm shelter, warm food and 10€ a day for personal expenses. Ok, maybe 15€ per day. But don’t treat them better than other people living and working in Germany for many years.
> And this is beneficial for Germany, as Ukrainians are also able to enter the job market because of this.
If this were beneficial for Germany and the EU, Ukrainians would have had the right to enter the EU and get a job before the war.
In reality, it’s just an attempt to mitigate another immigration disaster.
It will fail, because there is no immigration solution for plummeting birth rates. The people coming to the EU (not specifically Ukrainians, which are perhaps better than average) are already adults, often with incompatible or lacking education, often with a different, incompatible upbringing, consuming significant state resources without having contributed a cent. This can’t work in combination with a social state, it’s just maths.
I think that’s a fair question. The grass is always greener but most are thinking about Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands.
For me, climate change should also factor into this. While Germany will probably be fine temperature wise, I’m not sure if I’d considered moving to Southern Europe anymore.
I live in Switzerland since a few years back. I love Switzerland, it is the best country in the world I've ever been, by far. Unless you want to live in a mega city or on the coast. The only drawback is you must speak either French, Italian or learn Swiss-Deutch, a very difficult German dialect to learn.
I'd scratch France, Belgium, Sweden and the UK off that list. I've worked 6+ months in all those countries and well, they're not great. What's worse is they're going in the wrong direction.
I'm from Sweden and it is rapidly deteriorating. It saddens me greatly to say this, but I don't think my home country has a very bright future. When you hear the politicians talk it seems they finally realize that they have fucked up the country. But not to what extent, and their solutions are a joke.
It will only get worse, and it will never be the same.
Before you consider Belgium, I suggest you spend some time in Brussels. You will know what I mean.
Maybe Flanders... I really like Antwerp, actually it's one of my favorite cities. If you like beer, you will love Antwerp.
I was working in Antwerp for a long time. But why bother with Belgium when Netherlands is right there?
The UK is dirty and the cities are full of homeless and it has a byzantine bureaucracy on top of everything. I'm currently working in Liverpool(not by choice, posted by my company) but I have been pretty much all over the U.K. Some places are better than others, the country side is all right, but still.
Don't go there. The U.K. truly is a dying empire.
>I'm from Sweden and it is rapidly deteriorating. It saddens me greatly to say this, but I don't think my home country has a very bright future. When you hear the politicians talk it seems they finally realize that they have fucked up the country. But not to what extent, and their solutions are a joke. It will only get worse, and it will never be the same.
HN paints an overly gloomy picture of Germany. All points mentioned contain a kernel of truth but also a pessimistic linear regression concerning the outlook of the future. We've got a very minor recession going on, that's all. The economy will turn around next year.
The energy crisis is of the higher price than usual variety (and is already way past its peak; look at the 5y chart: https://ycharts.com/indicators/germany_natural_gas_border_pr...). The greenefication of our electrical grid is ongoing and will cost us a ton of money over the next 5-10 years, but will pay off after that (yes, it would have been better to keep the atomic power plants running until then; that's one of the few irrational decision done by the previous conservative government and confirmed by the current government).
We had a large immigration spike in 2015 and another one in 2022 (Syria and Ukraine), overfilling the immigration centers.
Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed.
It's certainly not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's also certainly not a crumbling country without a future.
> Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed.
That calculation would work if Germany would be getting only kids and babies which would be adopted by local families.
It’s getting some of those kids, with a lot of parents, grandparents and teens in addition.
Many of those adults are economic migrants, without the education and the resources to succeed in any European country, never mind the highly demanding German labour market.
They will be stuck in dead-end jobs delivering packages at best. If Germany has a serious need of unskilled labour, why don’t those 40% have any job after so many years? I see three possibilities:
* living on state support is better than any of the jobs they could get
* they don’t want to work
* they can’t work
They will all nevertheless use all the benefits provided by the state, putting pressure on the housing market, state budgets, availability of medical treatment, etc.
Relying on immigration to fix plummeting birth rates is broken by design, with significant downsides. Nobody succeeded at doing this.
„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do, and it‘s a huge problem. But on the other hand, Germany also has a huge infrastructure deficit in more rural areas - I live in Berlin and would happily vacate my flat to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier small town, but that means giving up on solid public transport, connectivity, supermarket next door, walkability and fast internet in many many places. Work wouldn’t be an issue, our company is remote anyways, but all of these things are a huge problem. Fixing those issues would mean less people want to move to the city, less pressure on the housing market etc.
>„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do
Yes, and everyone coming to Germany will also want to live only in the big cities, not in some desolate village full of empty homes and super conservative boomers. How is this sustainable?
Yep, true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have plenty of beautiful, livable, attractive mid-size towns because they have in fact managed to avoid these issues. Have good internet, have solid connectivity to places people want to go.
The „village“ I grew up in has about 8000 inhabitants, it‘s 5 kilometers from a train station with trains every 15 minutes. About 70 000 people live in a circle of about 10-15 kilometers around that town. The next major town is about 20 kilometers away, or 15 minutes by train from that station. Yet, there‘s not a single bus to the train station. There’s no proper bike parking at that station. There‘s a bus every 30 minutes that takes an hour to reach the city center. Internet is capped at about 16MBit/sec. This is a densely populated area by most standards. Still, every bit of infrastructure sucks - except for cars. There‘s two different highways right around the village.
Germany will very likely never catch up technologically to the US. We aren't going to have the Germany equivalent of Open AI anytime soon, or the equivalent of Tesla or Space X. So if you care at all about being on the winning team, it's probably not going to be Germany or even anywhere in Europe. You'd have to choose between the US or China and South Korea.
I do work in tech, doesn't mean the country isn't a failing mess that is becoming worse to live in by the year.
If you have a high demand job, that gives you leverage to move to a country that isn't shooting itself in the foot consistently and in a downward spiral toward authoritarianism.
One person I know went to the United States. Ten to Switzerland. Zero anywhere else on the planet. Not sure the US guy counts though, quite possible that it's only a temporary assignment from his home employer.
If you wonder what the Swiss do, when all those Germans take their jobs: my observation, utterly anecdotal of course, is that they commute to Liechtenstein.
Seeing that we are at the level of anecdotes, as a Swiss I went to Germany and don’t plan to ever go back. Other friends went to the UK, Japan, the US, Canada. So there is that. And not because foreigners take our jobs, that’s an utterly absurd concept, Switzerland wouldn’t be the country it is without cross border workers and people immigrating. Our dumb isolationist and social conservative politics are costing the country and community a lot.
I'd wait a bit, at least until end of Q1 2024 to see which place makes the most sense socioeconomically.
That said, I strongly recommend the Balkans (e.g: Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) if you have a remote source of income: very safe, great people, fantastic culture, in the big cities English is widely spoken, low cost-of-living, active tech communities, and you're usually surrounded by tons of beautiful nature and again, some of the best people ever.
Not to mention, setting up your own company usually allows you to operate in a low tax/tax-optimized fashion.
For what it's worth, I've lived all over Europe (including Germany) and the Balkans really must be the best place in Europe - as long as you're earning remotely, local wages are unfortunately ridiculously low.
This is a real issue throughout europe, particularity in east europe, where germany has been dumping highly polluting cars for decades sometimes even by threatening countries that tried blocking it, as is always the case with german eu politics, using the might of eu fines and sanctions.
That map specifically talks of urban air quality. Foreign visitors hanging out among “beautiful nature” are, well, out in nature, not dense urban environments. Especially in the summer when the lowlands are baking, it is popular for foreign remote workers to head up to mountain resort towns that don’t have a lot of air pollution because they don’t have a lot of cars in the area.
Especially compared to some more remote areas in Western Europe like the Alps or the Massif Central in France. Which would suggest that emissions from cars are not the main reasons why the Balkans (and Eastern Europe is general) are doing so bad.
Air pollution in rural areas in the Western Balkans is, besides vehicles, largely a function of burning wood for heating. For example, look at Korçë in Albania, which is a black spot on your linked map (very high pollution): this surely reflects in part the burning of wood in November–April by nearly the entire town, because it is cold at 800 m, but they do not have access to gas heating, and electric heating is expensive. Again, because the trend is mainly to go up to the mountains in the summer months, when the locals are not running their wood stoves, foreign remote workers avoid the worst of that.
PM10 is basically woodburning stoves. PM2.5 is much more hazardous to your health, and produced by industrial processes to a greater degree. Using PM10 is just artificially tipping the scale to make less-industrialized locations look worse.
Low cost of living in some regards … housing for example compared to most western countries.
But higher cost of living in others … price of gas for example… it’s close to 1.75$ per litere.
Food in the big cities is slightly cheaper, but not that much cheaper than the west. Around 40-50$ per person at the restaurant.
Food is much cheaper in the smaller towns, but most people from the west are unlikely to want to live there. Gas the same, housing is basically free, but there’s a reason for it.
I am baffled by your claim that restaurant prices are $40-50 per person. Except in Romania where dining out has surged in price, or in coastal ripoff Montenegro or Croatia, I would be hard pressed to spend more than about $20-25 per person in Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, or Albania for dinner. (I have no recent Bulgarian experience.) Do you eat at those few places for the local upper class, or order expensive wine or spirits with meals?
Westerners are unlikely to want to live there because they've never even visited it so that's not an argument against. The Balkans is sunny, taxes are low. I'd take that any day over subzero Northern Germany.
40-50$ per person in a restaurant is a flat out lie so I'm not gonna even bother with that.
According to you it's much better to live in a 2m^2 apartment in Paris than in Balkans. I'd take the Balkans any day.
> 40-50$ per person in a restaurant is a flat out lie so I'm not gonna even bother with that.
Unfortunately things here in Bucharest are pretty much getting there, maybe not in the range of 40-50$ per person but most definitely in the 35-40$ range, and I'm talking a regular restaurant. Before the pandemic I'd say that that price was in the 20-25$ range.
Though I can see how prices in cities like Belgrade, Sofia or Skopje might still be lower, as even Athens is now cheaper than Bucharest when it comes to eating out (I've experienced that myself recently), in which case enjoy it while it still lasts.
A mom-and-pop German restaurant near me [1] where for Bavarian Weisswurst, a cabbage salad, some "peasant potatoes" (I don't know the official name) and a non-filtered beer I paid about 30 euros when I went there about a month ago. Had I also ordered a soup, or a second bear, I could have easily gone into the 35-40 euros range.
I had them in mind when I made the comment because I had just learned earlier that day that Japan had bears, that was a surprise to me. Plus, bears are cool, beer, too (if drunk responsibly).
The price of a shitty room in a coloc (not even in paris) gets you an actual 2/3 bedroom apartment.
Taxes are, as you say, very low in comparison. The usual min wage + dividends can get you an effective tax rate of about 9% (depending on the country).
Impossible to tell without further qualification. Hamburg (Germany's second largest city after Berlin) is expensive though still cheaper than Munich, other cities with universities such as Bremen, Kiel, etc. aren't cheap but bearable, countryside places are relatively cheap, seaside places OTOH can be expensive or outright unaffordable (Sylt and other North Sea islands/places), remote places in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern can be really cheap but not around Schwerin and at places near Hamburg. Also, energy costs need to be considered.
And Munich is not a shithole but a fantastic place to stay at in the summer - less so in winter unless you can go skiing in nearby Alps IME and especially not during Oktoberfest.
Thanks. I've been to Europe a bunch of times, including once east of the Iron Curtain when it was still up. If I were to go back now, the Balkans, Poland, and Lithuania would be the destinations (the last two are for ancestry reasons).
I follow the news closely as I'm in the area, nothing's going to happen aside from the usual posturing, Serbia's in no rush to be once again on the sharp end of NATO's pointy stick.
There are problems in balkans. In Romania, hospitals are just sh**, same thing with infrastructure/public transport&hoghways and education system. For the rest, yeah, with western salary it's cheap here and food is ok, you can live with little stress from 2k eur/m
I'm not talking about vaslui and it's not the early 2000s anymore.
My reference point is growing up in western europe, and then spending a decade moving around various western european countries, coming to eastern europe and the balkans some years ago. To be quite frank, I found the balkans a massive upgrade in every way possible including the aspects you mentioned - except local wages.
Western europe used to be better, but the past 5 years or so it's nosedived while the balkans has seen improvements.
I don't talk about vaslui either. Even in big cities hospitals are bad, even private. Same story with education system, also should mention that you'll waste hours of your life in traffic bringing the child to the school, bc pub transport sucks too.
Food imo is subpar compared to Italy/France/Spain, both quality and taste, with few exceptions ofc. Romania's trains are bad too. Want to go from Cluj to say Iasi? best bet is either 6h car drive or 6h flight with layover in bucharest(with imo expensive price) or 9h train drive in subhuman conditions(bc usually max speed is abt 50km/h and most trains are from communist era). And this compared to France/Italy/Spain that have a lot of 200km/h+ trains, so that same distance could be covered in two hour train drive.
Similar experience is going from cluj to the romania's black sea. Also you have very few highways, so can't drive fast big chunks of the road. And I didn't even cover the quality, just recently a chunk of newly build highway broke down bc of corruption, and prior to that a newly bridge collapsed just before a bus full of kids was about to pass.
You get a cheaper life in eastern europe, maybe in some parts like Poland it's better than Romania, but make no mistake, it's a tradeoff, you get a cheaper life but with worse public infra on all levels. For some it's a good tradeoff, for others - not so much
We're currently in a war, a complete energy transition, global supply chain disruptions all hitting an export driven economy at the same time, and yet we're talking about GDP stagnation or decline of a fraction of a percent.
People are truly dramatic these days, if you had asked me five years ago what the toll of something like this would be I'd have guessed it'd be ten times as bad.
Give it a few years and don't base your long term decisions on stuff like this, Germany has always been resilient and able to adapt, if a little slowly at times. The 'sick man of Europe' debate is not new and the cup gets passed around every once in a while.
Honestly, the gloom over Germany’s economy is fairly overblown. Germany is facing challenges, but they're by no means as apocalyptic as people make them out to be.
It’s not really a German recession, but instead a global manufacturing recession. Germany’s economy is highly exposed to manufacturing, and so it shows up more in the country-wide economic stats. If you look at almost any major manufacturing country right now, their manufacturing sector is also in recession.
Many other economic sectors of Germany are doing just fine, especially services. Unemployment is also very very low, so the country is well positioned to re-absorb any jobs that may be lost if some manufacturing companies go under, and those jobs may end up going into more productive companies or sectors anyways.
I moved here from Canada two months ago and I’m really liking it so far.
>I had no idea the economy was like that in Germany.
Addiction to Russian gas, over-bureaucratic system that's super inefficient with tax-money meaning most goes to waste, an ageing population hoarding all the wealth and burdening the welfare system, uncontrolled unskilled immigration further burdening the welfare system and pushing rents up, clueless boomer leaders not investing in innovation and capturing new areas of the economy, refusing to build more real-estate because environment further pushing housing up, politics based on ideology not reality, a clueless and arrogant voter base thinking everything is perfect and none of the issues above need addressing, will do that to you.
Why is an aging population an issue? Labour participation and productivity is up over the decades, society can produce more than enough widgets to keep everyone comfortable, despite the aging population causing a regression-to-historic-mean in labour participation.
Because the pension is a ponzi scheme. Young people will be squeezed for every penny as the old population also controls the majority of votes. Politicians have known this for decades and done nothing serious to fix the problem.
>Politicians have known this for decades and done nothing serious to fix the problem.
They have always done something. They kicked the can down the road and blamed the previous people in power for the current siltation. Rinse and repeat.
I've done no research and don't have a stake in the game, so I'm blindly just copy/pasting another comment on here. But if it's accurate I could see it being an issue.
> Population is aging and paying for the retirement money for all existing retirees is already taking up over 25% of government spending. There’s barely money for anything else so taxes and social security payments are poised to go up while already being close to ~50% for most earners.
The tax/social contributions stuff can be cherry picked to become very high and very low to support any point people want to make.
There are employer contributions in Germany that are recently counted in such calculations to prove a point, while leaving costs for "benefits" in US companies off the table when doing the comparison.
Some like to add the VAT to the "what life costs here", which is a 19% (except for necessities, which are at 7%).
If you refuse to accept such calculations that mix up tax brackets (popular error in that space), that immediately filters out 90% of them.
It's an issue when you compare what amount of consumption a given job allows. If your wages support old people, some of that consumption is outsourced (outsinked?)
Labour productivity has gone up (As has labour participation, if you compare it to the 50s and 60s). It should more than counterbalance a demographic-caused dip in labour participation rates. Fewer people, working less, produce more today than they did 40 years ago.
We produce more for less work. Why can't that be turned into a lower labour participation rate, while maintaining the same quality of life, despite demographic shifts?
Yes I read your post it was like half a paragraph…We produce more but there’s more retirees and they live longer.
At the end of the day the contributors have to siphon off part of their earnings to give to the beneficiaries. Believe it or not, there is in fact many scenarios where the entitlements of the beneficiaries exceeds the input from the contributors. Just because we produce more per worker, does not mean we can support any arbitrary ratio of workers to retirees (who become more expensive over time).
Because old people run the country. That is even worse than us having to pay for them. Old men are scared of their own farts and that is not good for the future of a country. We don't want to be stuck living in the late 20th century but that is where all these old people steer the country towards.
Germans are exceptionally good at kicking back, drinking a few beers, and disconnecting from the real world, even if it is just for 6 or 8 hours or so. They can do it with an extraordinary insouciance that I do not believe is easily observable, elsewhere in the Western sphere.
I remember, arriving for my first year of many in a German town, to the raucous cacophony of a Karnival (im Rührgebiet) wherein a mass of teenagers, whom I would ordinarily have deemed far too irresponsible for the drunkenness and tomfoolery on display gleefully smashed their freshly emptied bottles of local beers in the village streets for all and sundry to enjoy. It was extraordinary - definitely not a riot, but rather a very well organized and town-supported explosion of pent-up energy. The glass was all impeccably removed within hours of the jubilations' end. This was a regular thing, a kind of festival, and nobody really minded the puke. The Rührpott weather would sort it out, ho ho.
And its the same throughout the German state, which is accustomed to so much gloom but yet produces so much beauty, life and vitality. I dare you to find the fertility of Münich or Köln or Frankfurt, in summer time, elsewhere .. it is palpable.
>I dare you to find the fertility of Münich or Köln or Frankfurt, in summer time, elsewhere
Your take feels weird, as if only Germany has great nightlife. I don't get what you were trying to prove with this point.
Most big European cities are vibrant in the summer, some even all year round, and some even better than the German cities you mentioned. Even Belgrade is friggin awesome to visit and party in.
German drinking culture is certainly different. Pubs don't exist. Yeah sure you might have a Kneipe or a Biergarten here and there, but mostly, you go to your friends house to drink there or you sit around in a circle on the pavement (but never on the kerb…) outside a closed bar. There's a weird street energy there, but it's not intense, just conversationally pleasant. Maybe you get a Kebap on the way home, but only if you're waiting for your train.
The UK by contrast has a different energy. Pubs almost every corner, fancy ones with fireplaces and sofas, high heels and bare legs no matter the (often chill-inducing) weather, kebab shops surging with a strange camraderie, singing in the streets, and most importantly, people sitting on the kerb.
Compare a kneipe or a biergarden with an english pub. Huge difference in tone. The Irish pubs you might find dotted around are more aimed at tourists/students/rich city workers, instead of the depressing hole where the locals come to forget themselves. I know it sounds like I'm gatekeeping here, but it just feels wildly different. It would be like you going to beergarden in London, to be greeted with patrons wearing lederhosen with the flag of bayern flying everywhere and everyone speaking in funny-sounding fake german accents. It's not accurate, the tone feels forced, and any actual germans passing through would likely feel compelled to stay away.
