I really like the idea of Japan's zoning laws. They have 12 zones nationwide, and they restrict by maximum allowable nuisance. Industry is considered the highest nussicance and low rise residential the lowest. You cannot build a business in a residential area, but you can build apartments in a commercial zone. I feel this opens up many more options for growth while maintaining the spirit of American zoning laws. Here is a good explanation:<p><a href="http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html" rel="nofollow">http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html</a>
Here in Los Angeles we have some of the most overvalued real estate in America. a bungalow in the city can go for millions, and is often torn down and replaced by a gleaming white McMansion because renovation is slower and costlier than filing new papers with the city. We cant just build more housing because traditional neighborhoods will fight to the death in courts to prevent multi family housing from devaluing their property or worse, competing for their rental income. The large apartment complexes that do get built are divided between anyone who can affort 10k a month in rent and fees, and "lower income" applicants who pay a fraction of this but are also held to strict terms and conditions. You wind up with millionaires and single moms living in beachfront Santa Monica communities, while anyone with a regular office job often commutes 40-70 miles in from the valley. Its often said you dont quit your job in LA, you quit your commute.<p>new apartments built are not priced affordably because banks and investors want their interest back quickly and have promised surrounding neighborhoods they will price accordingly to keep out the riff raff. in turn, dilapidated apartment complexes from the 60's go for about the same rates because these property owners know there is no "better offer" in town.<p>this doesnt even cover the 73,000 homeless people in Los Angeles county we cant seem to find a place for because no beach city wants to house their own unsustainable numbers of homeless, and no desert community is within a radius of health and welfare services required by many transients.<p>Then there are the haters. people like the Aids Healthcare Foundation who ran a 6 month campaign to defeat city legislation for new affordable housing. Why? Mike Weinstein doesnt want any development to obstruct the view from his penthouse.<p><a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-aids-foundation-political-spending-20170221-story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-aids-foundation-...</a><p>My husband and I live in LA and love it. but honestly, its bittersweet. We will never truly own anything more than a latte here.
Please call your state legislators - Senator and Assemblymember - about SB 827, which will do more to accomplish this outcome than any land use bill in the last twenty years. A lot of homeowners are opposing the bill and we could use your voice.<p><a href="http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/</a>
No one gets the message in London. There should be high rise condo/apartment buildings like Manhattan, Hong Kong, Singapore, even Toronto, all over the place given the population but height restrictions persist so people live in cramped, miserable conditions. There are vested interest that make allowing this politically challenging, existing owners would see property prices plummet if this was allowed, and then there's some powerful people just block it for aesthetic reasons. Either way it can't continue without having an economic and innovation hit long term.
I think culture helps to keep the house price low as well.<p>1. They don't like secondhand homes, they rather rebuild it[1]. So houses are not a good investment vehicles.<p>2. They values good business practices in housing. (I don't have any data to support). Few months ago I was finding a room in Tokyo, the agent told me people usually live in the same place for years without rent increased. It's not usual to raise the price because it's considered rude and it's something the yakuzas do. It's an entirely different story in Hong Kong where I came from. HK people almost always increase the price so much that people are forced to move every 2 years. AFAIK there is no rent control in both HK and Tokyo.<p>[1]: "the ratio of used homes circulating in the entire housing market remains below 15 percent, substantially smaller than in the United States and European countries." <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/26/national/japans-glut-abandoned-homes-hard-sell-bargains-opportunity-knocks/" rel="nofollow">https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/26/national/japans...</a>
It's too late for California. Either housing prices do come down considerably, and a lot of people have their futures ruined, or they don't come down considerably, and a lot of people have their futures ruined.<p>Theoretically massive inflation would be able to fix this, except that would screw over everyone who's using the US dollar outside of California.
<i>One other reason that density might have been more politically acceptable in Japan is that houses are not used as a vehicle for middle-class wealth accumulation.</i><p>On the spot.
I think it's important to have a bit of perspective on this graph. While it includes the tail end of "the bubble", the vast majority of this graph documents a time that is pretty difficult to compare with any major city. After the bubble, real estate prices lost up to 80% of their value. It slowly crept back up and in the early 2000s there were signs of vigorous recovery, but in 2006 when the government saw prices going up again, they <i>restricted loans</i>. This stabilised prices. In the last decade, while the prices have gone up and down, the price index now is practically the same as it was in 2010.<p>There are a couple of other important factors. Between 1988 and 2013 (the part documented by the graph), the population of the country grew by only 5 million people. Tokyo's population grew from about 11 million to about 13 million in that time -- so it absorbed almost half of the total population increase of the entire country. Although I haven't looked, I'm willing to bet that Osaka absorbed the other half. So it's quite a bit easier to focus the government when all of your growth is in the same place.<p>Furthermore, if we look at the population increase and compare that to the household increases in the graph, something is pretty apparent. Population increased by 2 million and households increased by 2 million. What that means is that Tokyo was <i>overcrowded</i> in 1988, with large numbers of people living in the same household. As new residences became available, they spread out. It's especially important to understand that in the early nineties, prices were getting <i>cheaper</i>, so that made it easier for people to move.<p>So while building new residences is important, there are a whole host of other factors that led to Tokyo's success in this regard. Personally, I think the resolve to avoid real estate bubbles, even at the cost of economic growth is huge. One last thing I really need to point out because it's confusing for people who don't live in Japan: "Tokyo" usually refers to the <i>prefecture</i> of Tokyo, not just the city. There are parts of Tokyo prefecture that are decidedly rural, so it is doubly difficult to compare it with cities in other countries.
Meanwhile, rural places in Japan are being rapidly de-peopled by both urban migration and an aging population.<p>I read last year that some towns will actually GIVE foreigners a house if they promise to live there a certain numbers of years.
California is bleeding something like 60,000 residents to Texas each year. That sounds like a big number.<p><a href="https://qz.com/1189388/conservative-californians-are-moving-to-texas-for-the-home-prices-and-politics/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/1189388/conservative-californians-are-moving-...</a>
IDK about some of this. When thinking about what policies we should have, we tend to overemphasize policies' effects on whatever we're we're looking to fix. A common trope is policing methods and crime rates.<p>For example, I've heard a lot of talk this past year about german housing policy with Berlin cited as the best example. It rarely mentions that Berlin's population peaked before the war, reunification and other things that aren't housing policy. I'm not saying that Tokyo's housing policies are not good, just that there's likely a lot of context to their successes.<p>Housing can be pretty complicated and nuanced. Policies don't translate well from one place to another. Where I live (dublin), house prices are effectively a derivative of bank policies. Whatever banks will loan the median person becomes the median house price. Now that we've had boom, bust & boom again... it's very easy to see how these two things track.<p>In a less supply constrained scenario I think bigger houses, not cheaper ones. Another big part of the story here is a near unanimous objection to development in general, more out of conservatism than NIMBYism. So, stasis biased.<p>Anyway, my point is that it's complicated. The dynamic in Dublin is different from Austin or Berlin, and policies exist within these contexts. It sounds like NIMBYism is a big factor in california. I imagine that the economic & population growth in these cities is another big factor.
Not only is there enough housing, but the market calibrates it to be affordable. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv6SbFlZMbU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv6SbFlZMbU</a><p>And there's enough space in the housing market to allow for ultra-precision housing alternatives like capsule hotels.<p>If you need to commute in, there's an astonishingly good public transit system.<p>The same youtube channel has an excellent multipart series on homelessness in Japan that's absolutely worth watching. Here's the episode on housing the homeless: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBPyN3LE65g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBPyN3LE65g</a>
I enjoyed this read a while back.<p>How I Used Eve Online to Predict the Great Recession (2013) (gamasutra.com)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469619" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469619</a>
Seems that 'not in my back yard' is a big problem. So what about a rule that says, "If you build a high-density apartment you must financially compensate nearby residents"?
"Sadly, the bill is already encountering opposition from homeowners’ groups, which are no doubt eager to push up their property values."<p>My impression is that neighborhood groups aren't generally interested in raising property values, but rather in preserving the less-developed neighborhood in which they have invested and chosen to live.
Supply that meets demand means prices come down... however, it.needs to be the right supply for the right demand. A bunch of high end housing doesn't make middle or low end housing cheaper.