Construction has kept rent in Chongqing, China to $75 a month
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This kind of stuff https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1761639...
You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.
And, presumably, they'd be as cheap as possible, leading to higher probability of hazards like at Grenfell Tower?
What's needed in London is a change in the development law that mandates 3 good sized bedrooms, two baths and one large living / cooking area. This would provide liveable accommodation for families and would chop out the drivers for a house at any cost.
Actually buying to rent, while bad, isn't the biggest issue. Buying to speculate and drive up prices to flip for a cheap buck while driving others with less capital into penury is. The only good thing that Osbourne got through was the new taxes on property transactions, I think we need more - especially a tax on transactions done in quick succession. If there was a premium on a property being sold (say 5% of the transaction price) less than 24mths after it had previously been sold I think that would kill speculation stone dead.
Note that sprawling suburbs with identical single family houses and lawns controlled to the inch by HOAs are also the end result of government policy.
They sometimes act like government, but are still very limited in scope and power. And a good HOA or condo association (there are some) is even better than a government.
And that's why I wrote that they act like a government. But unlike a government, you can move away from the HOA's project and not be under its thumb. To escape government, you have to buy a ship and anchor it in the middle of the ocean.
Not entirely related but illustrating the point: an HOA is surprisingly similar to a local government: they approve or deny building requests, compel property owners to pay a share of common expenses (in other contexts called taxes), issue fines for violating "laws", hold elections, etc.
Everything is the result of government policy. Even if the government did absolutely nothing, it would be the result of a government policy not to intervene.
It’s amusing to suggest there is “historic stuff” in SF, as there is in China. I saw a “historic” building with a plaque in Palo Alto. It was constructed in the 1900s! Like, after my grandfather was born.
Historical preservation is stealing from the future. If I had my druthers, the opportunity cost of designating buildings or areas as historic would come directly out of the pockets of the preservationists.
It’s amusing to suggest there’s historic stuff in China, as there is in Europe. I saw a “historic” building in China. It was constructed in 1600s! Like, 400 years after the bar I used to work in started.
It’s amusing to suggest there’s historic stuff in Europe, as there is in Egypt. I saw a “historic” building in the UK. It was constructed in the 900s! Like, 4,000 years after the pyramids were built!
etc etc etc
That there’s older shit elsewhere doesn’t remove the historicity of anywhere else
To most, that was making the impression that "time is not actually going," and that people lived exactly like it was today for millennia. There was little regard for "historical things" outside of microscopically small class of educated elites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Japanese_...
The preservation impulse perks up with change.
As an Northeasterner, I am amused at the poor condition of single-story commercial buildings in California, particularly Los Angeles.
You don't see many buildings of that type built before 1970, particularly in New England, because they are poorly built and the roof starts to leak at some point. In the Northeast that is reason to rebuild, in LA you can probably manage a leaky roof with a bucket for much longer.
I've always said that LA is beautiful at night, and pretty ugly during the day. That can be more or less true depending where in LA you're looking, but some of my favorite places in LA are absolutely hideous by the light of the day. But after dusk, same places can be magical.
Some of those old houses are built really beautifully, but there were a lot of shanty buildings that have been patched and patched. But some of the trees between those shanties are old and gorgeous. Somehow it works, but it's not a model for anything else.
When I lived there, it was best to live/work/play in adjacent neighborhoods, and then explore as you found yourself available the rest of the time.
I do love the global diversity aspect of it.
But I sympathize with those who didn't like it.. it's a really easy town to "miss" on.
I called LA home for two decades and the transportation hell largely kept me in my general community. Going to Pasadena from the Westside is a full day commitment, unless you leave at sunrise on a Sunday.
Some of my favorites:
1. Old Town Pasadena 2. Baldwin hill Overlook 3. Little Tokyo and Sawtelle 4. San Gabriel / Alhambra (Chinese food) 5. Signal Hill / Downtown Long Beach 6. Melrose and the area near Laurel Canyon
I could go on, but really there's gems everywhere. I've found that LA is more so a place you live than a place you visit, despite it's reputation otherwise. It's packed to to the brim with artists, developers, and good food, and there's space to stretch.
Not really hacking news, but file this under lifestyle.
I have friends scattered throughout the city and we never see each other. Even the ones who live just a few miles away don’t want to leave their neighborhoods ever because.... traffic.
My dream job is in LA. I love the idea of LA, just don’t like living here. That’s just me tho, lots of people do really love it :)
And the rest of them are still sitting in their packed U-Hauls in traffic on the Sepulveda pass.
- Majority of city (outside old towns) built after WWII with an emphasis on brutalist 60s suburbia.
- Prop 13 and the NIMBY revolution that cemented it in for the long haul.
It's only in the last five years or so that extreme economic pressure has enabled new buildings over two stories (gasp) to be built outside downtown, while NIMBYs scream bloody murder.
There definitely needs to be more barriers when it comes to designating places and areas as historical, but this is a pretty harsh take.
Especially in a world with a growing population and increasing centralization, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for individuals from new generations to do new things.
The argument is being able to look at some court house built in 1925 is not more important than people in 2018 (and forever into the future) having more affordable places to live.
I tend to agree that the "no historical preservation" viewpoint is way overblown. E.g., there are lots of monuments and buildings in Boston and Philly that should always be preserved because they are integral to telling the nation's founding story. But there are lot of "historical landmarks/buildings" in the USA that are really only significant to the handful of people who pushed to make them "historical" (and are probably now dead anyways).
A compromise can be converting the court house into apartments or offices, so that it can have contemporary use but at the same time some aspects of its historic appearance are preserved (such as its façade). Of course, other parts of its historical value are going to be lost – it is likely impossible to maintain the historical integrity of the actual court rooms in the process of converting the building into offices or apartments – but it is still better than knocking down the building entirely.
I used to live around the corner from an old water pump house converted to offices. When they switched from coal-fired pumps to electrical ones, suddenly the amount of space consumed by the pumps shrunk dramatically. So they removed all the boilers and turned it into office space instead. Part of me wishes the boilers had stayed, but it is better than knocking down the building entirely.
By contrast the city I grew up in, York, had stone walls that are ~2000 years old. The next city I lived, Edinburgh, has some proper-old buildings too. e.g. The Royal mile contains buildings from the 12th century, and I regularly used to drink in pubs that were 600-800 years old.
In short "old" is relative.
Historical preservation is sacrificing for the future. It's literally the exact opposite of stealing from the future
It's also cumulative. There is a finite amount of land. If you designate another 1% of it as historic each year, a hundred years later you're locked in stasis.
There is a reason for the rule against perpetuities.
It wouldn't be the best option but the sites that have survived a hundred of years didn't survive because some legal mandate dictated it. It's because they were buildings built to last.
==It wouldn't be the best option but the sites that have survived a hundred of years didn't survive because some legal mandate dictated it. It's because they were buildings built to last.==
Or they have historical value specifically because they were built to last. Obviously, we wouldn’t know that unless we allow them to last.
If I had to choose my position it would be less broad protection of historic buildings. However if I have to choose one extreme or the other I see homelessness exploding where I live and a bunch of money spent on bullshit. We're not talking about preserving the Sistine Chapel here.
No, they're the remains of historic/old sites that were left after people of yore tore down everything else to build anew.
You don't have to preserve 100% of the "old city" to get a glimpse into an era, just like you don't have to preserve 100% of the city wall just to show that once upon a time, city walls were a thing.
> If we tear down everything old to put up cheaper, more efficient buildings are we necessarily better off?
You don't have to tear down everything in San Francisco, but most of it has little to no "historic value".
Places like Cinque Terra, Istanbul and Cartagena are popular specifically because they have been preserved and are not just remains.
Perhaps, but if we're talking about bulldozing and rebuilding the place to get rent down, San Francisco is at the top of the list.
Once something is destroyed, though, that is impossible to undo, no matter what the future generations would want.
In exactly the same sense you're not binding current generations either.
The issue is that it's a lot easier to get something designated as historical than to get it undesignated as such or to change the process in order to make it easier.
Moreover, changing it is hard because it's a complicated issue that the large majority of people don't really care about and a concentrated special interest group (landlords who want to retain high rents) does care about and doesn't want changed.
Unless you expect that dynamic to change significantly over time, you're binding the future as much as the present.
> Once something is destroyed, though, that is impossible to undo, no matter what the future generations would want.
That is true of all action and inaction. You can't change the past once it has already happened.
You have to choose for them whether the future gets the old buildings or the new buildings. If it turns out the old buildings are worse, e.g. because continued high rents cause lasting economic damage to the region, you can't undo that either.
That's true in the sense the statement is true of every human action.
> Once something is designated a historic, it's hard to undo
Only because there is widespread support for the general idea of historical preservation; it's usually not more difficult than reverding or passing a normal law to either eliminate a particular designation or an entire system of historic preservation.
People who find it difficult do so not because their hands are tied by the past, but because their hands are tied by their present opposition.
If everybody just left a historic building alone it would just decay into disrepair. If somebody is not using the location it has no value. The people going around designating every building that stays standing beyond a certain number of years historic causing said land to go underutilized need to pay some of the cost. The status quo is overbroad.
The easiest way to do this would be to require consent of the current owner to designate a building as historic.
Then if you want to designate a building as historic but you don't actually want to own it, no problem, you buy the building, designate it as historic and then sell it again. The difference in value before and after comes out of your pocket.
Require a bond be put up to cover the cost of moving the historic building out of the city, so the land can be used for modern construction.
But overwhelmingly it is a pretext for NIMBYism as part of the overall strategy for always having an excuse to not build anything anywhere.
The only way to tax "historic value" would be to put a sliding scale tax on things in proportion to their subjective quality and incentivize garbage that nobody thinks anyone will want 20 years from now.
No, it is not. SF problem can be fixed with a few blocks. A 35 stories building with 1 bed-room condos can host up to 700-1000 persons. I'd bet lots of SF tech developers will opt for a very small high tech condo with amenities (pool, gym, library...) than the crap that is right now.
Say you build a hundred of these. That's 100K person and more than 10% of the population of San Fransisco. You plot the land 10 miles south of the downtown. You make a fast, efficient and new subway that connect from the plot to the downtown.
It is easy considering that the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are doing it everyday. SF has the money, land and tech to do it.
It will be interesting to see which cities do the best in future: the ones that try to house large numbers of people at low cost? The ones that are quickest to adopt new ideas? The ones where billionaires prefer to live? Who knows.
A 35 story building's residents will make much greater use of existing mass transit when located within 3 blocks of said transit than existing low rise development will.
Sure, but you'll induce demand. As SF prices drop, think of all the people who will move in from (mostly) the East Bay. Prices will drop, but not nearly as much as you think without 100,000 units.
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/11/economy/subways-US-ex...
[2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
Already exists, see e.g. Croydon. Yes, not in Zone 1, but 14 minutes to London Bridge by Thameslink, about the same time it took me to go from South Kensington to Westminster/St James in the early 2000s and probably without having to wait out a couple trains at rush hour due to lack of space within.
I've witnessed a lot of it, myself, but this video was posted on HN a couple of days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E
As bad as that is, it only scratches the surface because they didn't actually go inside any of the buildings. It would be unimaginable for a building outside of the Chinese bubble to literally start collapsing upon itself after standing on its own for only three years.
It was international news when there was a serious fire in a tower recently in London, it's not news at all in some places.
Well, that "government policy" is the will of the taxpayers and voters who want to decide what happens to the city they live in and not just accept that living conditions imposed upon them by some bureaucrat. People in Guangzhou may be accustomed to living in Sim City, but that's not how it works in a democracy.
Personally, I've been to all three cities, and I wouldn't want to live in Guangzhou, compared to London or San Francisco.
People aren't robots to be warehoused.
So go ahead. No one is stopping you.
SF housing is broken
I don't disagree, and that's also the case in most large cities these days.
I would not put it on a pedestal of being some grand embodyment of democracy.
I don't think it's grand, but I think there's more value to it than current generations understand.
Chicago, as always, begs to differ. But no one notices it, it always flies under the radar which probably contributes to it's success in this regard.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-ed...
There's some sort of open border policy between the US and China?
Seems like a lot of effort simply to live somewhere with reasonable housing policies.
I was about to disagree but I just looked it up and it seems to be doing a lot better than I remembered.
Heh, that's how I would describe much of the SF market in comparison to the (better designed subset of) suburbs. An apartment in SF that is anything more than a place to park one's sleeping corpse is quite expensive.
But Guangzhou has a much higher property price to income ratio than either London or SF. So, the policy you suggest doesn't fix the problem you raise.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/in/Guangzhou
I lived in city of Mumbai, India where median income is about $3K per annum and median apartment price is would be about $200K.
In fact, one of the defining traits of San Francisco is that it disallows chain restaurants, walmarts, etc. It also has many parks. When I see a stone church that has stood for 200 years in a city, I think it's priceless.
If you don't, well there's plenty of cities that don't give a crap about aesthetics at all, and so they're cheap, and so they're full of poor people, and so they're full of crime.
I think we’ve found the world’s most honest NIMBYist!
When a city makes decisions that don't favor its residents, it becomes an unaffordable haven for transplants, speculators and people who value the facade of the 200 year old stone church as opposed to the poor people the church was created to serve/bilk.
One is not like the other.
Seriously. You can't compare any American city with a European counterpart from a "historic" perspective.
There is plenty of history in North America.
For very narrow values of "chain restaurants, walmarts etc." Target is basically the same thing as Wal-mart. Chain restaurants are common. (For example, I used to eat lunch at a nearby Jimmy John's, a sandwich chain from Illinois. Which Jimmy John's I ate at might vary; there was more than one nearby.) There's a Starbucks on every block.
This speaks to a much larger problem. As opportunity concentrates in dense areas, the lucky few elite will try their hardest to keep it all to themselves, one way being by hoarding it in an artificially-low population city like SF. Eventually they’ll start building a wall to keep the undesirables out, or have police harass everyone who isn’t driving a luxury vehicle like in Marin.
I think that actually there are megacorporations in SF (or within commuting distance in the Valley), and they are the reasons people want to live here. I see no less than 6 historic churches out of my window in a historic city in Poland, and yet rent is $300 a month and no one wants to move here. Why? No megacorporations.
SF is overrated. The reason you would pay $3000 for a tiny studio is because commuting into the city to work for one of the megacorporations is untenable. There are much nicer places to live in the Peninsula and South Bay, or even in other states.
Meh. When I see it, I see a monumental squandering of human labor.
You mean like the Projects?
I feel like that's been done before and failed.
You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas
These neighborhoods aren't "nondescript" to people who have been living there for generations. And your apparent obliviousness to this central fact goes to the heart of the matter of why redevelopment politics are so contentious in many cities.
Nonsense.
If zoning was changed so large housing buildings became legal, existing home owners in prime locations could become very rich selling to skyscraper developers. Or even build tall buildings of their own.
All experience indicates that people with a chance to become very rich will take that chance.
You can say it's "nonsense" if you want.
But the simple fact is, this idea you apparently have -- that a developer can deterministically "buy people" out of their property (or rental status), even assuming that that it had adequate capital on hand -- is just not how this stuff works.
In Moscow for example, new apartments tend to be 25-40 stories high. However, they have large offsets from the street, are not built “shoulder to shoulder” with neighbors and generally developments from inner courtyards that are big enough to have parking and a soccer field.
There’s also a phenomenon of what locals call “pinpoint development”, where some unscrupulous developer will try to stick a tower in these courtyards and ruin the setup for everyone.
Contrast that with SF or NYC - you hardly have open plots of lands and everything is one giant wall of buildings.
It did allow for significant growth. It also put a lot of strain on public transportation.
If England is like New Zealand guess it’s close to 100%
1. http://archplanbaltimore.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-one-plus-f...
There are answers like "only good looking houses got preserved" or "it's just perception, in a hundred years people will love the houses being build now as much as the houses which were build in the nineteenth century". I don't really buy such arguments. I had some musings about people no longer caring about living in a beautiful house because with fast transportation there is less incentive to make a good impression on your neighbors. Or maybe it's something about craftsmen making less design decisions because of more planing and prefabrication. But these too are just speculations.
If you're polling the public, taste is a real thing too, modern architects have a different aesthetic. Same shows up in clothing: a simple waterproof polyester jacket from uniqlo vs a hand-sewn trench coat with a million features like epaulets, grenade rings, gunflaps, etc.
TBH the quality was good enough. Sound could be quieter but was fine. The biggest problem was sprinkler system, at least once a year there would be a leak or a trigger that would completely destroy 1-3 apts. I dream of concrete now.
America's housing project is simply because of government and the courts. Politicians through special interest groups which funnel money to their campaign and friends; namely highly paid positions with little more than a part time job, to courts which treat every opposing idea as having merit.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/SF-supervisors-...
[2] https://reason.com/2019/03/19/the-most-contested-apartment-b
You are partially right here, people do not control the means of production, way too many greedy foreign companies do. That Mr. Huang mentioned in the article is another good example, why should he be paid only $1,000 USD when the same Ford car he built is being sold way more expensive in China than in the US?
Because otherwise he'd be paid $0 since it'd be cheaper to manufacture the car somewhere other than China. Also, Chinese politicians are perfectly free to require such things so it's odd that you're blaming western companies which only have power in China because politicians let them have power. Of course, massive unemployment rates tend to cause more issues so it's clear why they don't.
I asked the exact same question to my then boss many many years ago on why Chinese software engineers are paid far less than American engineers. His answer was almost identical to yours above and we all know what happened in the last 10 years.
The current ruling class in China is very aware that people need to be happy with basic necessities or else.... That's all.
Housing isn't like manufactured goods where the marginal cost decrease the more you make. Since the more you build in one area the less available space there is. If you want to decrease cost you have to supply more space.
Still that is only the supply side. As long as there are people, or even an increase of people, that are willing to pay it never becomes affordable even if there are comparable.
This was probably true in 1750, but today you can build up. A 2000 SQ foot home can become a 40,000 SQ foot tower.
My unit has a construction cost that's significantly less than half of my unit's total value. The tiny one story ramblers across the street all sold for over a million a pop, but the houses were worth ~negative to the purchaser and got torn down and replaced.
Its purely cultural, but its burning trillions of dollars a year in maintenance, wasted time, and wasted potential.
You can shift supply by e.g. changing zoning. Now you have more resources. But it doesn't change the equation, so eventually you might end up in an even worse situation were it is even harder do the same thing again. The even bigger problem however is that you don't necessarily get choose what should happen. Or maybe something is already shifting demand, like demographics.
You build for density until you hit the actual physical limits on density, and then you have a claim to the infeasibility of housing everyone where they want to be. We are so radically far away from such a threshold it is laughable, in much the same way some purport our understanding of the universe is nearly complete, or that we have near total mastery of our planet - neither are remotely close to happening and are just hubris on the part of those who can't comprehend how much more there is left to do.
We could have cities hundreds of stories high, entire populations housed in glass pyramids taller than Everest, population densities in excess of a hundred thousand per mile. And that doesn't need to imply poverty, squalor, or suffering - we are fully capable of building dense well. It is an independent knob of consideration that only shows correlation today because of cultural motivations and social pressure to make dense housing suck to punish the poor because only the poor live in dense housing because dense housing sucks.
There must be a name for this pattern, which occurs in areas of life as varied as technical debates, climate science, and health. The common thread is that there's some strong effect that smart people would prefer not to be true and that these smart people spend an inordinate amount of time and social capital finding seemingly-rational justifications for denying this strong effect. The result of this high-IQ motivated reasoning is an impenetrable mess of dueling blog posts, cherry-picked studies, and sophisticated personal sniping that leads regular people to throw their hands up in confusion and do nothing.
An example of this effect: the "zombie claim" (an idea that keeps circulating after being debunked, mostly because it's rhetorically useful) that building housing doesn't decrease prices because developers build only high-end housing. Granted, this effect might be true for very limited times under very limited circumstances in some special region of the supply curve, but it's clearly not a general principle. But there are just enough studies purporting to show this effect that people who want to block housing in general can point to some official-looking LaTeX-typeset thing and say "Look! Economics proves that construction doesn't lower prices!". By the time someone gets around to reading that article and commenting, "if you read beyond the abstract, the article it doesn't say that...", someone's already made some other blog post with the same discredited idea. It goes on and on and on and on and on.
I've become increasingly convinced that the whole scientific and rational enterprise only works in collaborative mode, when there's some shared desire to find the truth. You can never convince someone of something by using reason and evidence, and your counterparty will suspect (rightfully so!) that your "evidence" is just the sort of rhetoric-disguised-as-dialectic that I'm talking about.
It's a dismal conclusion.
I personally agreed with your general idea, but the place where we are today was developed intentionally via propaganda systems designed to question the validity of expertise. If a person believes that government bureaucrats are all ineffective, that vaccines are dangerous, that all scientists believed a new ice age was going to start back in the 80's, then it is very easy to deny anything that experts say, and that your gut is right most of the time. This, of course, couldn't be further from the truth.
There are huge swaths of humanity that are willing to change their opinions based on the presentation of evidence. What is clear is that they are not good at generating enough political power to start the grand collective ideas that are necessary to fight homelessness locally (I know that I'm having trouble pushing housing first ideas - I think that Americans are punitive, culturally), or to fight climate change globally.
Still a dismal conclusion.
I have following thing to say about real estate in China as a person who's been going in and out of China for last 12 years: conventional supply and demand economics fail to rationally explain the market, alike many other things in the country.
There are big cities with really constrained supply, not unlike California, and still having low rents, and there is Shanghai, with new suburbs and microdistricts popping up every year, but still having highest rent in China despite high vacancy rate even in the city centre.
Housing in China is also a very emotionally charged topic. A lot of status connotation is attached to it, and there is peer pressure like "no wife for you without a house."
Most Chinese I meet can't conceal their bemusement when they see foreigners being so unconcerned with housing issue. These people don't know that in most of the world, renting an apartment, and moreover luxury one, is more expensive than paying for mortgage, and are utterly shocked when I show them the digits. Chinese don't realise just how blessed they are with low rents.
And yes, there are still Chinese out there who are shocked discovering that "most Americans are still living in wooden houses," and that ones who live there tend to be richer than ones buying highrise apartments.
This is true for SF Bay Area as well.
Anyways, I saved a lot on rent during my 9 years in China.
Speculation. Prices have been going up at crazy rates for years. Something like 10% a year isn't uncommon. Millions of people got rich just buying and selling few years later. That, and the necessity to buy before marriage that forces people to stop renting.
I don't envy them. Some people spend up to 70% of their income into 30 year mortgages, based on pure conviction that housing prices will always go up.
You weren't a tenant. You were a placeholder.
Your function was to pay enough money for the owner to pay the property taxes and maintenance until the value of the home rose to a level where it was worth selling.
I live in such a place. The Chinese woman who owns my house is just waiting for the market to reach the right price point where she can sell.
In the meantime, my function as a renter is to keep the place clean and safe and do basic maintenance. That's not what's spelled out on the lease, but at an abstracted level, I know that's what I am to her.
Chinese real estate is bizarre.
that is pretty much an American thing, e.g. in Sydney, people don't buy wooden match boxes, they prefer double brick federation home or californian bungalow.
The depreciating housing is in places people don't want to live. In general modern societies are centralizing in cities to a degree never before seen, but that migration is stymied by catastrophic amounts of NIMBYism and regulation holding back density.
In Tokyo most properties don't depreciate that much if at all, and modern Japanese building code means new structures are much more permanent and last longer. It takes time for the culture to shift as with all things, but the Tokyo metro won't stay contrarian to every other metro for long - its been trending away from the always-deprecating building for over 30 years now.
Then the economy went into a multidecade slide.
Even in China precincts with more recognized property rights will see this effect where even on massive government works projects contractors just build around holdouts whom can exploit the growing demand for the land they are on.
Preventing people from profiting by supplying the market (aka treating the good in question as an investment) leads to shortages and high prices, as the history of rent control amply demonstrates. Anecdotally, San Francisco has had some of the most stringent rent control laws in the US over the last 50 years and today has the highest rental rates in the world.
Unfortunately, this view is very unpopular in the US, particularly among the most powerful special interests and voting blocs.
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 307.91 $[1]
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 825.35 $[1]
37%
San Francisco:
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 3,386.72 $[2]
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 6,497.75
52%
Oklahoma City:
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 857.50 $[3]
Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax) 2,639.56 $[3]
32%
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Chongqing?displayCu...
Of course it's cheaper to house people when land isn't scarce.
If you take the urban population listed there and divide by the listed urban area you get 4,250. A bit above 960.
That all said, it’s also a joke to think that SF uses its land wisely. What’s at the 24th st mission BART stop? A 1 story McDonald’s, what a great use of prime real estate to protect a treasured cultural relic.
Chengdu is probably in a similar boat to Chongqing. Well, any tier 2 city actually.
Just came back from Hangzhou, the entire city is flooded with people in their early 20s. I think the speculation is mainly on those annual 10 million university graduates joining the workforces. Farmers are not going to buy those apartments in tier-2 cities, their sons/daughters with university degrees sometimes at postgraduate level are the ones buying.
I was there for two days earlier this year and felt like I just scratched the surface.
"Basically there were a lot of approx 35 story similar tower blocks and most people used public transport/taxis rather than having cars."
My understanding is that traffic does increase until a certain threshold of density is achieved and then it craters from there. Cities should probably be designed just above that.