Nah, Poland has plenty of empty (dodgy quality) housing left abandoned since 1989.

This is just the thing Polish bourgeois like to do. The "everyone is trying to screw me over, so why shouldn't I do the same?" is very popular among the population.

It's not just a westerner thing, look at China before Mao's reforms. Look at parts of South Africa now. Feudal economic conditions lead to this kind of rent seeking behaviour being taken to the extreme. It's why Adam Smith hated landlords so much, the whole point of capitalism, to those that actually belive in it, is that's it's a progression from feudalism. So this kind of extreme rent seeking behaviour should not be a part of capitalism, according to what I refer to as utopian and idealistic capitalists. However, in actually existing capitalism, neo feudal economic conditions are recreated over time as the rate of profit falls. Which leads to this kind of behaviour and landlord worship.

Yes. I have a cousin who bought a place and is renting it out rather than living there because she can't actually afford the mortgage on her own salary. She's living with my aunt for free.

It's bad, folks.

Some see it as a survival strategy for when they reach retirement age

Is this the dream of every Westerner to own property that they can rent out?

That was 90% of the pull of Metaverse(tm) and NFT grifts, yeah.

The average person’s dream is to be able to exploit their neighbors. They won’t say it of course. But they’ll talk about wanting to own property to rent. When my family came here and was poor as hell, my dad considered buying two houses to rent the other.

Luckily my mom talked him out of it, but that’s because he was planning on doing all the maintenance work and answering calls lol. Wonder how it would’ve played out if they learned that you can be a lazy bum and outsource everything at your leisure and most people won’t be able to complain because housing would be scarce 10 years later.

Yep, I know a 22 year old who's current financial goals in life is looking for rental properties to buy within the next year in his cheap hometown so his parents can manage it

give me like 20% more space and access to nice communal food and recreation areas and I'm game for sleeping in a little box tbh. But this isn't that.

Of course not. Rimworld apartments have a communal common area that is as luxurious as the situation permits, and sometimes have enough room for a double bed.

At least the floor isn't just dirt and pools of insect blood like in my early bases... right?

Yeah I think nearly 100 people in Johannesburg died from a fire in an illegally divided apartment building. So many people so close together is unsafe.