Cities Used To Be So Beautiful... WHAT HAPPENED?

Indexé : 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Housing crisis is happening everywhere.

[00:00:02]Priced out of Lisbon.

[00:00:08]Lisbon, beaches, sunshine, safety, good quality of life. For many, Portugal's Atlantic capital is a dream city.

[00:00:17]But for the people who live and work here, it's exactly that. Oh my god, the music It's like a [ __ ] onion video, man. The music changed. Don't know, don't know, don't know, don't know. Many can no longer find a place to live.

[00:00:30]I was pushed out of the neighborhood I lived in, and now I feel pushed out of Lisbon itself.

[00:00:37]Some can no longer afford even a single room and end up here. All right, that really sucks. Kind of a crazy jump, though, but okay. In this illegal settlement, despite having a job.

[00:00:49]I want a home that I can pay for with my salary.

[00:00:52]That's all.

[00:00:54]The rest I can take care of myself.

[00:00:57]At the same time, the luxury end of the property market [music] is booming.

[00:01:00]Lisbon is not alone. Many major cities around the world are facing the same crisis. Experts say this is more than just a housing issue.

[00:01:09]The lack of a political response to the housing crisis is undermining trust.

[00:01:14]When that system fails to respond, democracy itself begins to erode.

[00:01:20]But there is resistance. We want to know So global capital is the problem. I'm not going to say the economic system that's causing a global housing shortage because we view it as a speculative asset and not as a necessity to live.

[00:01:37]It was a capitalist economy.

[00:01:39]How serious is the situation? And who does this city still belong to?

[00:01:53]Isn't Portugal literally in the Balkans?

[00:01:55]Who is surprised? You laugh, you lose, challenge impossible.

[00:01:59]You laugh, you go to America hell. You laugh, you go to America.

[00:02:02]You laugh, you go to Cleveland, Ohio, and are forced to eat American cuisine for 31 days before flying back to wherever you're from.

[00:02:23]George is looking for an apartment.

[00:02:25]After his rent went up by almost [music] 20%, he had to leave his previous home.

[00:02:30]For the last 6 months, he's been searching listings every day, >> [music] >> but finding anything affordable is difficult.

[00:02:39]I was forced I was practically pushed out of the neighborhood where I used to live, and now I feel pushed out of Lisbon itself, as if the city were rejecting me, telling me to go away.

[00:02:50]And I only ended up in this house by chance.

[00:02:53]Another big consequence of financialization is that now that money isn't circulating through real jobs in the real economy, more and more work can only be found in major cities. Like if we still paid people to be shopkeeps, cobblers, tailors, stoneworkers, masons, construction workers, landscapers, all the physical jobs that you do to physically build the world, then you would have tons of that work to do all over. In fact, if anything, there'd be more work in smaller towns. It's the same reason why a lot of people traveled westward during the um the the gold rush. It wasn't just to mine gold, it was because these small towns were flourishing with lots of people moving through small settlements.

[00:03:30]There were a lot of people or there there were a lot of people there, so you needed jobs to sustain the population. But nowadays, now that the only jobs are OnlyFans star, live streamer, and like crypto venture capitalist, you kind of need to be in big cities, and big cities are tough to grow, you know? It would be a lot easier to manage the population crisis if jobs were evenly spread out, because there are like lots of cheap like in America, there are places you can go with really cheap housing. Go out to like rural Midwest. You can find McMansions for a quarter mill or less. It's just there are no jobs there. So unless you're retiring, you already have all the money you're ever going to need.

[00:04:09]You can't live there. Maybe you can get lucky with like remote work, but apart from that, you can't live there.

[00:04:16]Yeah, current gas prices definitely don't help. It's why the just move argument from conservatives has always been, you know, [ __ ] right? You have to go where the jobs are. And like that historically that's always driven migration, right? After the Industrial Revolution, people moved into the cities. People move, you know, wherever there's work, you know? And and and the yeah, big box stores have sucked wealth out of small communities. There just aren't enough jobs there, so.

[00:04:42]Because the friends living here happen to have a spare room.

[00:04:51]It is only a temporary solution, but the 43-year-old really wants is a place of his own.

[00:04:57]George came to Portugal from Brazil in 2017. He works full-time in marketing and earns 2,000 euros net a month, about a third more than the average worker in Portugal.

[00:05:13]Here, a single room costs between 700 and 800 euros.

[00:05:19]When I arrived in Portugal, that was the price of an entire apartment.

[00:05:24]Now it's the price of just one room.

[00:05:27]That's [ __ ] crazy.

[00:05:28]>> many people in Lisbon are in the same situation [music] as George. Since 2020, rents have risen by 42%.

[00:05:36]One reason this picturesque city has become a tourist [music] hotspot. In 2025 alone, around 7 million people visited. And they >> Again, it's a problem with consolidation. Like I don't have a problem Sit like my thought has always been, right? No matter how big you make New York City, it is ultimately finite.

[00:05:55]You can up-zone New York City as much as you want. There is an upper cap on how large you can make that municipal area.

[00:06:01]It's just It's literally like there's a physical limit, right? So, more places should be like New York City. More places should be like Lisbon. The reason everyone wants to go to New York City is because it's [ __ ] goated. So, make more places goated. Have you seen photos of what old St. Louis looked like? Like, America used to be full of places that were interesting and goated. People, and I'm not joking, people used to talk about Kansas City like it was a an up-to-do place. People would be like, "Come Come out west. Come out and see Kansas City, the new New York City out there in the center of America in the great heartlands. You've got Kansas City." You know? Like, you had you had people hyping it up. But, we ended up burning through all these places, you know? You go anywhere, West Virginia, Kansas, [ __ ] Omaha. These These These places used to be a lot more goated than they are now. New Orleans, yeah. Um But, uh Like, look at this.

[00:06:57]Here's a photo from the mean streets a very low-res photo of St. Louis. Look at that.

[00:07:04]This could If I showed you this photo and said this is New York circa 1922, you'd believe me. You wouldn't argue with me. Um It's uh it it it looks like I said It does look like I said It does look like San Francisco. You're not wrong. Uh with the with the tram there. But, you you understand my point, right? You understand my point. Like, one of the big problems we have with housing distribution is just that there are too few places that are cool. There like, you can go to the middle of America and legitimately be like 800 mi away from anything worth [ __ ] Like, no hate to people in the flyover states or whatever, but I hate you. Um it's awful out there. Like, the natural environment's cool, I guess. At least whatever the glaciers didn't roll over.

[00:07:42]But um yeah.

[00:07:46]Like why this is St. Louis in 1900. Why could this have not been another mega city?

[00:07:54]Like why not?

[00:07:56]All these buildings have been torn down.

[00:08:02]Well, whatever.

[00:08:04]We're not going to We're not going to get out of this mess unless we find a way to make more parts of the world appealing to be to go to, right? It is not sustainable that all across the West there are like [ __ ] 10 cities worth going to, right? There are two categories of city, right? There's like ancient western metropo- metropolitan area and then there's like Mediterranean tourist hotspot.

[00:08:28]So if you're in um [ __ ] uh uh uh Athens, Thessaloniki, Rome, Lisbon, Lyon, whatever else, anything near the Mediterranean, that's where Israelis and Germans go to spend their tourist dollars and like ruin the vibes. And then if you're in Paris, London, Constantinople, New York City, Chicago, like these are the the mega cities, the metrop- the metropolises. But those are like the only cities anyone wants to go to. Every like you should in in in France, there should be like 500 cool cities.

[00:09:02]It's called Istanbul. Sorry, I heard I got the news late.

[00:09:06]It There should be like cool cities everywhere.

[00:09:14]Yeah, you get me.

[00:09:17]So it's like Alfama, once [music] home to working-class families, many apartments are now being offered as short-term holiday rentals, forcing residents out.

[00:09:26]The influx of digital nomads has made the situation even worse.

[00:09:30]>> How do you incentivize this? You have to You have to de-financialize. Literally like financialization destroyed this.

[00:09:36]Across America there were tons and tons of cities that were beginning to look like this, and then we were like, "Hmm, what if instead of making money by building things and selling products and services, what if we made money by borrowing money and then leveraging that debt to borrow more money and then investing the money that we borrowed in order to earn more money off the stock market returns that we lost via the interest on the debt, then pay off the debt?"

[00:09:57]What if every store was a big box store, and whenever you bought stuff there, all the money went to a [ __ ] dragon's hoard in the Cayman Islands rather than uh circulating in your local economy?

[00:10:07]You have to de-financialize.

[00:10:10]A local economy is the only way to get stuff like this.

[00:10:14]How can you square this idea, but also want LA and New York to be mega cities?

[00:10:17]I don't understand the the contradiction. I want LA and New York should be mega mega mega cities, but like there should be cool cities everywhere. You know what I mean? Like San Francisco and New York should have like 50 million people in them, in my opinion. But, there should be more cities in America that have like 2 million people and are major metropolitan areas that are really cool to live in. Like really really cool.

[00:10:42]But, yes, New York City and um San Francisco should be like Mega City One and Mega City Two.

[00:10:48]Not really LA. LA has a water problem.

[00:10:50]San Francisco's better off for that.

[00:10:56]We don't even need to say this could happen. It did happen. It was how we used to live, literally. You know where else this is the case? China. We we in the West don't even hear about it, but China has like dozens of bustling new cities. They might not last forever because China's going to go down the same road as us, unless something changes.

[00:11:14]Um I don't want to live in Mega City One.

[00:11:16]That's fine, then just live somewhere else. But like, you know, You're demonstrating a serious misunderstanding of how many cool things there are in a place like Cleveland. No, come on, man. Don't Go on Google Street View downtown Cleveland. Okay, even if what you're saying about Cleveland is true and it's not, it wouldn't change my point.

[00:11:39]Cuz like the Midwest, Ohio is full of places that used to be really cool, but fell apart during the the the the the deindustrialization of America, you know?

[00:11:52]Look, I know there's pretty stuff in Cleveland, but a lot of it was built in the '60s or earlier. That's the point, you know? That's the point that I'm making.

[00:12:03]I'm from Cleveland. We're not as bad as people think, but we're not New York.

[00:12:05]Okay, I retract my Cleveland slander, but the point remains.

[00:12:10]The only point that I'm trying to make is that like 100 years ago, cities like London and Paris and New York weren't thought of as like the only places that could be like that. They were special, but you could drive across America and find places that gave you the New York vibe. You could go across Paris and find places that gave or sorry, uh France and find places that give you the Parisian vibe or whatever. Over time, more wealth has been sucked out of areas that aren't mega cities so that only the mega cities are like the the do and done happenin' places.

[00:12:45]Why you sleeping on Plainsville, Indiana, bro? I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

[00:12:49]I'm still confused cuz you said cities have upper limits, but you're also saying that you want mega cities. What I'm saying is that even if you upzone New York City so it could hold 50 million people, right now if you did that, if you snapped your fingers and made it so New York City could hold 50 million people, 100 million people would still want to live there. You understand? 100 million people. There will never be If New York City is the only cool place in America, and it borderline is, there will never be enough residences in it to fill demand.

[00:13:16]You need more New York cities. That's the point. You need more places that are goated.

[00:13:22]Experts recommend spending no more than 30% of your income on rent. In reality, the average figure is now around [music] 40% in Berlin, 75 in London, and in Lisbon, 116%.

[00:13:40]But, there's growing [music] resistance.

[00:13:42]Today, one of the biggest Welch, West Virginia, same location in 1946 and 2015. Yeah, we've done this tour before with West Virginia, but this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Like the world used to be so much more beautiful than it is now. All the wealth and life and joy have been sucked out of much of the world because we the consolidation of capital behind finance made it so that only cities that had stock exchanges were worth um really, really investing in. A bit of an overstatement, but not much of one. Just a small overstatement, really. There's literally nothing on Earth that make Like there's there's nothing. There is no reason at all why cities, even small ones, can't look like this. There's no reason. The upper picture, I mean. None.

[00:14:29]People are like, "Oh, it's cars." Dog, cars are in the top photo. There are more cars in the top photo.

[00:14:35]It's not even cars. It's just that there used to be more jobs here because the jobs weren't all sucked out via financialization. That's it.

[00:14:44]This is not a problem that can be solved with any amount of rezoning or urbanization. You need to de-financialize. More money needs to run through the economy.

[00:14:53]How much of this will require strong mayors in these towns? That won't fix it.

[00:14:57]No, it is de-financialization.

[00:14:59]We will probably not live to see the world return to this standard of beauty.

[00:15:04]It's that simple.

[00:15:07]The picture on the top is a product of wealth. The wealth existed because money ran through the city. Money ran through the city because there were jobs and people and people who needed jobs and there was work that needed doing. On the bottom photo, there is still work that needs doing. There is still money, but the money is not being used for jobs for the work that needs doing because the money is trapped in a vortex of uh corporate reinvestment.

[00:15:30]I don't know the story of Welch, West Virginia, but it's probably the same as the story of every other [ __ ] town in this country.

[00:15:36]demonstrations in years is planned in central Lisbon. Thousands are expected to attend. Housing prices is is very high. We cannot afford to buy or rent an apartment at the moment.

[00:15:48]I receive a pension that by Portuguese standards is not very much, around 1,000 euros, but I have to pay 550 euros in rent.

[00:15:56]It's complicated, for sure. Would that shitty place cost more in maintenance?

[00:15:59]Do you mean this top photo right here?

[00:16:01]Believe it or not, it really doesn't because you know what happens when you pay for maintenance on a building? You give money to a worker. The worker lives locally and then uses that money to buy groceries and pay for rent. And when he buys groceries and pays for rent, he enriches the landlord and the local grocery store, and so on and so on. It's not a byproduct of how much work. There is plenty of work that needs doing out there. In this country right now, there are unemployed people, there is work that needs doing, and there is money to pay them. All three of these things exist, but the incentive structures are not lined up correctly. The best way to make money if you have money is not to pay people to do work. It is, instead, to engage in financial [ __ ] That's the reason why areas in the Rust Belt that still look like the top photo are dead towns. That's the why areas like this are rotting. It's because even if you still have the buildings, you don't have the jobs.

[00:16:53]The money all floats up, baby.

[00:16:56]I don't want to live in my parents' house until I'm 50.

[00:17:03]You really think $5,000 maintenance for an NYC condo is okay? What are you talking I don't understand what you're talking. What are you referencing? What am I arguing with? What position am I meant to be defending here?

[00:17:13]Welch went from a population of 6.5k to just 3.4k now. Isn't that crazy? This top photo is from a town of 6 and 1/2 thousand. 6 and 1/2 thousand. A tiny town by anyone's standards, and yet it looked like this. Many such cases all across America.

[00:17:30]Sousa is here, too. For some time now, he's been active with Porta Porta, an organization founded in 2023 to fight for the right to housing.

[00:17:40]That is their goal, to pressure the government, to make them act.

[00:17:44]To make them see housing for what it is, a national emergency.

[00:17:48]We believe that together we can bring about change.

[00:17:52]We can turn what is treated today as a market back into what it should be, a right. The right to have a place to live.

[00:18:06]Why did we stop building cars out of steel and move to an aluminum frame?

[00:18:09]Aluminum framed cars are safer because when you get into a collision at high speeds, which modern cars are much more capable of older cars, aluminum buckles and absorbs the impact of the crash, whereas a steel car will remain relatively intact but turn the passengers on the inside of the car into a fine paste.

[00:18:25]Steel cars were safer for the car, but not for you.

[00:18:32]What is the music, man?

[00:18:33]>> So, welcome to this exquisite loft >> Ah, yes, luxury is booming. Who benefits from the new property market? in the neighborhood of Alcantara in Lisbon.

[00:18:44]This is one of my favorite properties because it's incredibly unique. There isn't really anything like it on the market right now.

[00:18:53]This luxury apartment on sale for 1.4 million euros is one of the listings of the Ann Briden Group.

[00:19:00]>> God, as a Seattle resident, it's not even that much.

[00:19:03]The American entrepreneur has built up a successful real estate company in recent years, now employing more than Incredible thing to have plastered at a gentrifying uh colonizer property buying up Lisbon. Incredible thing to put there.

[00:19:19]Now employing more than two dozen people. A specialty, the very top end of the market.

[00:19:25]I would move in here in a second and I would live here for three or four years and make a nice profit if I wanted to sell it. So >> Oh, I see. It's all speculation. It's not about living here. To her, living here is just like a temporary residence. She has no home. She is part of the shiftless transnational elite, etc. etc. You've heard my spiel. So, I think this is really an exceptional vibe. [music] And Breitman's luxury properties are sold to buyers from all over the world, including Northern Europe, the United States and Brazil. She knows international demand has transformed the market, [music] but in her view, the reasons for the housing crisis lie elsewhere.

[00:20:10]This really isn't a problem of expats coming into the country. This is really a an issue of the government working on affordable housing, making the process much easier and much shorter and cutting some of the bureaucracy and red tape that the a developers run into.

[00:20:31]>> [music] >> In fact, Portugal is amongst the lowest in Europe when it comes [music] to social housing provision, with it making up just around 2% of the housing stock.

[00:20:41]Countries like the Netherlands, Austria [music] and France have significantly more.

[00:20:46]That also has to do with the country's history. After World War II, rents in Lisbon were frozen [music] for decades.

[00:20:52]That meant there was little incentive and little money to maintain buildings properly. Then in 2012, >> [music] >> the government liberalized the housing market. Permanent rental contracts were largely abolished and Portugal actively attracted [music] foreign investors who bought property >> One of the developers? I'm sorry to say, but there really is no solution to this problem outside of um uh uh uh government takeover of housing construction. It has to be decommodified. It just it does. The modern shareholder capitalist system does not allow for you to live comfortably in a place that you can afford.

[00:21:25]If you can comfortably afford your residence, you are an enemy of the state.

[00:21:29]They will kill you.

[00:21:31]city in the country.

[00:21:34]For Lisbon City Councilor Vasco Moreira Rato, the housing crisis is real, and there are no easy solutions. But, he says foreign investment also brought benefits.

[00:21:45]Not so many years ago, downtown Lisbon was full of buildings in very poor condition, often empty or occupied by people who had no means to renovate them.

[00:21:56]Today, downtown Lisbon is a vibrant part of the city, completely transformed and rehabilitated. So, at that time, Lisbon needed that investment.

[00:22:08]Oh, [ __ ] They're popping.

[00:22:14]Christ, that lady is a demon. The one before? She is, but it's also not her fault. Again, it's important to understand that everything comes down to incentive structures. We have built a system where the best way to make money is to do the stuff that she is doing, so of course people are going to do the stuff that she's doing. The government is run by people who know that they are doing this and profit from it. Like, yeah, obviously people who actually bite the lure are going to be more odious in general, but you could, you know, you could jail a million people like this. It wouldn't change anything.