Affordable Housing Crisis Spreads Throughout World | Hacker News Reader

Affordable Housing Crisis Spreads Throughout World

wsj.com

27 pointswjossey14 comments

“Tokyo is one of the few cities in which supply has kept up with demand, keeping a crisis from developing. But that is due largely to deregulated housing policies that other countries would have a hard time reproducing.”

This “crisis” is completely artificial and the solution is obvious: take off the zoning straight jacket and make it legal to build higher density housing.

Property owners should have zero authority over anything outside of their property lines. Giving Joe Blow the ability to shout down and bikeshed new developments is idiotic.

You are not wrong. The future is extreme high density living. We are trying to put 7 billion people in cities. People have to give up their suburbia dreams.

I wonder if there is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. How many apartment buildings are built for middle class families with 2.5 kids.

I'll give up suburbia when the apt I can get doesn't deafen me with city noise.

Too stressful living in constant noise.

I think the primary problem here is the rural-urban migration; people the world over are moving from villages and small towns to large cities for work and other opportunities. This is a truly global phenomenon with the share of people living in cities rising from 55% in 2018 to a projected 68% in 2050. [0]

Housing and transportation policies are secondary in that they have failed to adequately address this first problem.

The solution is entirely new cities built to meet the demands of the twenty-first century.

[0] https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Key...

What’s the point of an entirely new city?

Completely new infrastructure. No entrenched stakeholders with an incentive to block growth.

New cities would also require the friction of moving cities to be as low as possible.

That friction presents an interesting set of problems.

One aspect of the current housing crisis, at least as it exists here in California, is that young people increasingly rent instead of owning.

A generation ago home ownership would be a form of lock-in for “legacy” cities. High rents and low home ownership suggest that this lock-in is less of a factor.

we have an abundance of production efficiency that’s kept prices from rising. But what to do with that extra money? It’s like a gas, and it has gone to housing. If food, education, healthcare, etc we’re free we would be laying 90% of our income on housing. This will continue until we have an Elon Musk who can solve housing.

Paywalled. Anyone got the text?

Does the article mention Henry George or land tax?

I hate that paywalled content is being posted here, as everyone has a WSJ subscription.

Easiest thing to do is click on the web link and then click through to the article. Typically clicks from Google don't get the paywall.

Tried that - doesn't work for wsj.com

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