This is a bad “map”. The pie charts add clutter to the image, and it’s not immediatly obvious how two cities compare. The country borders offer no additional information other than vague context for those who know what countries are located where. Since there is only one datapoint per country, it might as well have been a line of columns showing percentage of salary used by colouring part of the column red. The map medium does not help in anyway to provide the information.
This isn’t factoring in other factors, like how the tax rate in Bern is very high, or how the cost of living is very high
tax rate in Been is very high What? Swiss taxes are a joke.
Or the % of home ownership.
Terrible charts aside, Bern and Vienna were surprising to me. Good wages? Or rent control laws?
adequate housing supply for the housing demand.
a concept a lot of cities actively refuse to believe is possible by their obsession with limiting development.
for rents to be stable you need 6-7% of available units vacant. much more if you want to drive prices down.
the vacancy rate in many places is like 1%. hence the rents going up super fast YoY. in my city people bid up rent because there are so few apartments available. so it lists for 2800/mo and the person that gets it is paying 3200/mo.
my city builds like 5000 new apartments per year. the population is growing by like 25,000 people per year. so the rent is skyrocketing. we keep adding lots and lots of jobs. every new development is like 5000 jobs, and 100 apartments. where are the other 4900 people going to live?
unfortunately there is no amount of wage that prevent high rent… on the contrary. All the city with low relative rend have rent control laws.
And they must be updated often since landlords try to sneak their way.
For exemple, in Paris, there is a fashion trend of building offering " coworking rent", where they rent you a 10m2 for exuberant price, and they justify it by having a "PC room " in the building or something. So the city is in the process of banning thoses “coworking” place, which are just a way to bypass rent control law
one reason why vienna is better than other cities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau
they saw a problem and started building
lol one complex is even called karl marx hof
edit: chart is awful indeed it features capital cities only. Berlin is still cheaper than München. not for a lack of trying tho
Weird choice to not include cities as big as the capitals. Milan, Zurich and Barcelona would definitely have been interesting.
It’s only capitals, not that weird a choice
This is, quite possibly, the most useless map I’ve seen.
Not only is it using average salaries, it’s also only looking at country capitals, where executive salaries are notoriously obnoxious.
For this to have any real-life use, it should be using the median salary, at the very least, and use the average apartment price based on data from, I don’t know, top-10 cities.
That would be better, although I’d guess it would look similar in the end.
It would look VERY different. The median salary in Poland in 2024 was around €1550. The average monthly rent for an apartment in Warsaw in 2025 is €1440. The average price of groceries for a month in Warsaw is around €220.
Assuming you work from home and your water/heating/electricity/Internet costs are somehow zero (they aren’t), you’re still -€110 per month, instead of having half your salary left.
Large cities are notoriously expensive in Poland.
Poland did come across as a hard-to-exist-in eastern country on this map as well. The numbers would of course be different, but I’m not sure the pattern would be.
What do you mean? According to this map, you need to spend around half of your salary for accommodation, which puts it near the middle of the stack. And, considering the average salaries, would allow you live very comfortably.
I guess you’re right. It’s not Vienna, but it’s not Kyiv either.
Do you think housing would come out worse in Poland than places like Russia or Turkey if it was measured correctly?
Housing is pretty bad in Poland overall. Cheapest apartments are also 2+ hours away from any work opportunities. I don’t know enough about the Turkish or russian markets to have an opinion, though.
Came here to see if it was median or not.
Bern filled with rich people making housing cheap I guess. /j
lisbon 🥀🥀
No but seriously, Lisbon how?
demand
lots of people want to live there. rents go up.
And there are always openings because they all starve to death?
no, the demand is very recent. 10 years ago nobody know wtf lisbon was. now is i very ‘hot’ place to travel/live, hence the rents skyrocketed.
It’s like 3,000 years old…
Nothing like an infographic to immediately enrage nerds
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Where is the supplemental data table and sources?!
The one for Zagreb doesn’t look realistic. I wanted to find the source, but I guess my search skills aren’t that great today.
How you doin Lisbon?
Local politicians seem to be more interested in “unicorn factories” and WebSummit show off events than solving the issues of the people that elected them. Twice. So the voters may not be too bright either.
They can’t answer. The internet money was used to tip the landlord.
Once again, Portugal is so far west it underflows into eastern Europe.
What part of tiny pie charts was necessary? Just make a heatmap but in dots.
Right? Is this a revival of dataisugly?
All I see is the two colors. If I wanted to have to look closely I would have just opted for a list.
Dot heatmaps font represent accurate numbers the same as this. Which size is 70%? Which is 50?
Nah that’s a bad choice.
Someone do Japan
Outside of Tokyo and Osaka city center, housing costs aren’t that bad.
Housing in Japan is an depreciating value. Unlike other cultures, Japan homes are not an investment.
This is so stupid. Just fucking use numbers
