Fascinating to see that the exact same thing is happening in different places. The large cities in Norway experience exactly the same problem right now, mostly due to the booming oil industry.
Forecasts from the government statistics agency for the next three years of housing prices practically make it impossible for young professionals to buy a home, even with very high (100,000+ USD) salaries. I'm not the only one curious about how the situation will resolve.
It's not really comparable. Same mechanism, but still.
Commute an hour out of Oslo, Bergen or pretty much any other Norwegian city, and you're in the middle of nowhere, with plenty of options that are vastly cheaper than in most similar positions relative to SF or Silicon Valley.
Couple that with a far flatter salary curve, and it might be worse for those of us on the upper part, but for most people it's vastly easier to find decent sized places.
E.g. my brother lives in a two bedroom flat 30 minutes from the centre of Oslo which costs less than most studios where I live, in a suburb an hour from Central London.Bay Area is closer to London than Oslo in terms of availability of decent priced property.
Outside of the tiny city cores which are typically small enough to walk across, I think price increases for property in Norway are more affected by construction cost driven up by high salaries even on the low end of the salary scale.
Forecasts from the government statistics agency for the next three years of housing prices practically make it impossible for young professionals to buy a home, even with very high (100,000+ USD) salaries. I'm not the only one curious about how the situation will resolve.