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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

> What Japan’s inexpensive homes and its alternative policy approach prove is that the housing shortage in British cities is not inevitable. Housing does not have to be expensive in prosperous cities. The housing shortage is something we have chosen to experience and can choose to change if we want to.

Written for Britain, but this could be applied universally.

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It is also meaningless. Yes, if you get to choose what to do, you can do whatever you want. But you don't, so affordable housing remains an unsolved issue in most places. Things haven't changed and aren't changing just because people become convinced otherwise.

There's a lot of people (in the US at least) that see appreciating property values as inevitable. Combined with views associating dense housing with urban ghettos from the 80s, it's one of the reasons people think building more houses won't make them more affordable.

That's weird. Don't we get enough stories about Rust Belt economic hardship and Detroit real estate horror stories to know that property values don't always go up? Have we already forgotten 2008?

But it don't have to take a depression to create sinking house prices. In Sweden we had shrinking house prices between 1931 to 1981, with only three years (right after the war) when prices increased. The same period is the most economically successful period we ever had.

Why? Because politicians built a shitton of houses (and tore down a lot of crappy housing too). Nowadays people here too think prices always go up, not realizing it is a political choice. It may very well be the right choice, but so many doesn't even understand it is a choice in the first place.

Right, but similar interventions are also completely unthinkable today. Which is why Stockholm have some of the most expensive property in Europe.

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