An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month
curbed.com
curbed.com
1. yes you might get a house at this price but it's either 1-2 hours out of the city center (which is fine, just saying Tokyo is large.) Or alternatively it's in bad neighborhoods. (bad is relative if you are from the US)
2. your house will most likely look like this: https://www.ii-ie2.net/dat/5ba1164d.jpg
Sayonara sunlight, hello neighbor.
here are listings: https://www.homes.co.jp/smp/kodate/shinchiku/tokyo/list/
there are nice ones in the list. I am just saying that this is the eastern country side of Tokyo (check the map) when the title probably makes everyone think something different.
This is the sort of thing that markets solve really well. If you want a dwelling unit with those properties, pay for it. If they're less important to you than cost, don't. If one is $300,000 and the other $600,000, it's very reasonable to choose affordability and go to a park.
The difficulty that I see is that housing prices in America are so high that it's unrealistic for moth people to create enough value to purchase a residence at even that basic level of quality.
I'm not convinced that these are values worth respecting.
A house or a place to live? There's not enough physical land adjacent to places of business for each person who wants one to own a single-family home. They're an awfully inefficient use of space -- see the entire western half of San Francisco.
> This cannot happen while also respecting the idea of properties as investments...
Property can't be affordable and a good investment. Those two are mutually exclusive. An investment goes up relative to inflation. Affordability by definition goes down relative to inflation. You can't have something that goes up as it goes down.
> ...the wealthy wanting to be able to purchase disproportionately large places in multiple desirable locations...
You can, if you do something along the lines of what Singapore does with the HDB. Some 90% of Singaporeans live in government homes built by the HDB, and the remaining 10% is available to the wealthy to play.
> ...and the idea that so many people may desire to live in a city that the city cannot possibly take them all.
They city can absolutely take them all if you allow building up. There's no excuse for down-town San Francisco north of market limiting buildings to 6 stories when downtown Hong Kong has 118 story buildings.
I'm not sure this is that important a criterion for most people. Pre-lockdown, I'd leave the house before the sun came up, and got home barely in time to catch the sunset. If I wanted sunlight, I could walk a block in either direction.
I actually have a preference for living in shadier (as in shade, not crime) parts of town, especially neighborhoods with tree-lined streets/boulevards.
Out of curiosity, what is your reasoning behind this belief?
[1] At least until we arrive at some sort of Star Trek level of technology, no society is going to do this perfectly, so when I say "functioning society" I mean one that more or less provides for the vast majority of its citizens and provides some sort of safety net/second chance for people who do fall through the cracks.
[2] This is much more "wishy washy" and hard to quantify, but I'd say that in a functioning society everyone would be able to, in a general sense, live the sort of life that they want while providing for themselves and their family. I mean this in broad strokes such as wanting to live in a cosmopolitan city/near the beach/near mountains or wanting to be able to seriously practice art/music/sports (although not necessarily as one's day job).
Invest in public transportation (and potentially restrict private transportation in city centers) so that we can expand how far out someone can live and still have a reasonable commute.
Where appropriate, allow people to work from home so that commute is less of an issue.
Build more and in some cases higher density affordable housing so that more people are able to live in desirable areas.
Invest in infrastructure (both practical infrastructure such as high speed internet and "aesthetic" infrastructure such as parks and public works of art) in order to make more places desirable.
Overall, the market for apartments seems to be supply constrained. The main factors:
1. Government approval is required to build large apartment buildings. In general, this seems to lag behind demand.
2. Large buildings take a long time to build
3. There have been a number of years of high immigration, especially in and around the CBD.
All of these factors combine to cause high prices. In a high price environment, many residents are stretched for cash. They essentially have to pick the lowest price apartment available. It's not uncommon to have multiple people sharing a room in order to decrease costs. This creates a high price floor. Mid range apartments don't tend to be much more expensive, simply because many residents are already super stretched financially and unable to afford the extra marginal cost.
As a property developer in a high floor, low marginal payoff environment your financial incentive is now to build as many low cost apartments as possible.
>> The majority of Victoria’s newest apartments are so small they would be considered unliveable in Sydney…More than three-quarters of new one-bedroom apartments built across the state are 50 square metres or less, which means they probably would have been illegal in Sydney, London and Adelaide. [1]
Making these apartments meet a reasonable minimum standard could only be less than 5% of the total cost [1]. To achieve this governments have tried to intervene by increasing minimum standards [2].
What concerns me the most is the longer term impacts. When demand drops off (as covid is pointing to), you have a massive supply of low quality apartments. Is the end result of this many vacancies and people living in shoe boxes when they could've been somewhere nicer?
There are a few long bows there, but as someone who lives in a relatively sunny but not quite sunny enough apartment that is my take.
[1] - https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/05/18/apartment... (great blog for planning issues)
[2] - https://architectureau.com/articles/victorias-draft-apartmen...
I have less experience in the high end of the market, as it's firmly out of my price range. Perhaps that alone is the answer? If while earning ~2x median pay, I don't consider staying somewhere more livable it would suggest prohibitively high prices. I'm unsure if the price is dictated more by the aforementioned undersupply or the higher quality. It probably reveals something about inequality in society.
I can't be certain the motivations of the developers choosing to build smaller apartments, the reasons I alluded to in the parent comment were an attempt at an educated guess. There is however an obvious ground truth that apartment sizes are shrinking (47m2 2014/44m2 2015 for 1 bedroom -10% in one year!) [1]
- [1] https://www.afr.com/property/melbourne-new-apartment-sizes-s...
$300k for new construction is ludicrously cheap for most coastal California cities. I was told to budget $150-250k for permits when I considered buying land and building my own house in Santa Barbara.
Both my current and my previous house would be illegal to build today because they are too large (even though both houses comfortably fit the frontage requirements, there is an additional X square feet of livable space per Y square feet of lot; in all R-1 zones, the calculation is such that a single-story house can usually hit the dwelling-space limit, so most 2 story houses in town would be illegal to build today).
Santa Barbara is significantly cheaper than bay area in terms of renting or buying real estate.
The 2br apartment I'm currently renting in SB is $2.6k/mo. A very similar apartment in Redwood City is over $4k/mo.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/116-Route-9h-Hudson-NY-12...
For anyone living in one of the equivalent world cities (say, NyC, London, Shanghai, Paris, San Fran- you may quibble with me in the exact list but you know what I mean) these prices aren’t even remotely plausible.
(The one possible exception might be Berlin but that info could be dated)
Not sure what's wrong with that? That looks pretty amazing actually. I live in a unit that looks similar to that near downtown Chicago. My unit is north facing, and even so, there's more than enough sunlight.
I live in a pretty well to do family oriented neighborhood in central Tokyo, and this is a very common design. Although I’m not sure about mortgages, but rents definitely ain’t just $850. But as the parent post said, it’s all about location. Prices nosedive once you leave the center of Tokyo or are off the main train lines.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with an apartment or microhouse, but it makes the quoted rent less impressive.
Also, keep in mind the height of the house. People tend to build up here rather than wide -- at least in family areas in central Tokyo. My current house, while slender is almost obscenely tall. It's four floors including the rooftop deck. In comparison, my childhood house back in midwestern America, seems much less spacious.
I've never been to Japan, but I imagine that a bad Japanese neighborhood is incredibly safe compared to a bad U.S. neighborhood. In a bad U.S. neighborhood one has to regularly take precautions in order to not be physically assaulted or even killed by other people.
>your house will most likely look like this: https://www.ii-ie2.net/dat/5ba1164d.jpg
Looks pretty amazing for less than $1000/month.
That said, of course I'm not thinking that Japan is some paradise. What I hear/read about their justice system and their stifling conformist culture doesn't sound very good to me.
Living in a city which city center was (re-) build between the 16th and 17th century, the 30 years till worthless puzzles me.
Even the house I live in is over 100 years old and in excellent condition.
Why do houses loose their value so rapidly in Tokyo?
It's something I wondered about too until I looked at descriptions and photos of >30-year-old houses on real estate sites.
One thing to consider is that Tokyo is a prefecture, not a city. There are rural areas of Tokyo (like really rural), though most of it is very suburban. Anybody who has lived in the suburbs in western countries would probably be fairly comfortable in most parts of Tokyo prefecture.
It is true that in quite a few areas of Tokyo it takes a long time to get to central Tokyo. 2 hours is at the extreme, though. I live in very rural Shizuoka prefecture and I can get to Tokyo station in 2 hours if I time the bus and shinkansen perfectly. If you are on the train line, most places are no more than an hour away. It's pretty comparable to living in satellite cities in London, but the train is much better :-)
If you are not on the train line, though, it can take quite a long time. Roads in Japan are very slow, especially in rural areas. It's not unusual for it to take me over an hour to drive 30 km or so if I need to go through several towns. So you definitely can find houses in Tokyo that will be 2 hours away from the city center, but I don't think anyone working in central Tokyo would buy those houses.
I honestly don't think the example picture is representative of houses you'll find in Tokyo prefecture. They definitely exist in areas that are desirable, though. I think saying that you're probably looking at either a 1 hour commute by train or your are going to get a house jammed in wherever it will fit is correct. But it's not both at the same time.
I don't often go to Tokyo, but I occasionally go to surrounding areas. Probably if I was looking at houses for commuting to central Tokyo, I would probably look at places in Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama as well as Tokyo. There is actually quite a lot of choice.
The video linked in the article is well worth watching (as is anything from "Life Where I'm From" if you are interested in Japan) and is extremely balanced IMHO. Compared to other big city centers around the world, Tokyo and the surrounding area is quite affordable. Compared to Silicon Valley it's almost comically so, but Silicon Valley is really right at the other extreme.
On the other hand, rural (so cheap) areas are less packed so sunlight is less of an issue.
Fixing this can be a major obstacle in countries with inadequate pension systems. In countries where dependency on rising property values is the chief or sole form of retirement planing for vast numbers of people, fixing a broken housing market becomes dependent on fixing the retirement system.
And when land values are consistently propped up by government to a greater degree than other investments, it moves people even more into land speculation as their retirement investment because of its artificial safety.
I feel like this is a misleading way to put it. Japanese houses decrease in value, generally quite severely - the conventional wisdom is that after a few decades you might as well just tear it down and build a new one. So there's very real option value you're losing in the Japanese model; if you have to move in a decade or two, you won't be able to get back the equity you put in.
But there are also A LOT of earthquakes, typhoons, and floods in Japan, so it’s not exactly a minor concern either, especially when houses are typically seen as something you buy for life.
My point the housing market like it is makes it much less likely for people to become homeless. Japan's homeless numbers reflect this.
Compare with NHTSA car safety ratings. Many cars get 4 or 5 stars, but you can still build/buy a car that would be less safe.
"JAPAN'S 100-YEAR BANK LOANS (FORTUNE Magazine) By Susan Moffat May 21, 1990
"(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Japanese, famous for saving, are now loading their future generations with debt. Nippon Mortgage and Japan Housing Loan, two big home lenders, are offering 99- and 100-year multigeneration loans with interest rates from 8.9% to 9.9%. Borrowers put up their homes as collateral. Such deals represent sound fiscal planning for some families, especially the very wealthy living in Tokyo who, perversely, can almost not afford to inherit a house: Japan's graduated inheritance tax can take up to 70% of a family's assets, including its home. Under the 100-year loan plan, a second generation can move into a deceased parent's home and pay inheritance taxes on only a fraction of the house's value. Most Japanese, of course, don't have such problems. Their challenge is to find a house they can afford, especially if they want to live in Tokyo. The housing crunch there inspired Robinsons on the Sand, a 1989 hit movie that's now No. 8 on Japan's VCR rental list. It tells the story of a salaryman and his family, who are willing to do anything to escape the misery of their tiny rented apartment. The ''anything'' turns out to be living on constant display as a ''model family'' in a spacious model home while potential buyers tramp through. Jealous neighbors bully the children and make obscene phone calls. Before long, one of the two sons turns delinquent, the daughter is killing kittens, and the father ends up homeless in the street. Mom and the kids finally return to their old apartment, where they watch TV in the closet in blessed privacy. So much for that particular family's Japanese dream."
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
The 100-year Japanese residential mortgage: An examination
"A recent innovation in the Japanese real estate industry to promote home ownership is the creation of a 100-year mortgage term. The home, encumbered by the mortgage, becomes an ancestral property and is passed on from grandparent to grandchild in a multigenerational fashion. We analyze the implications of this innovative practice, contrast it with the conventional 30-year mortgage popular in Western nations and explore its unique benefits and limitations within the Japanese economic and cultural framework. Through the use of simulation, the conclusion is reached that the 100-year mortgage has failed to increase the affordability of homes. Instead, affluent homeowners are more likely to employ long-term mortgages as an estate-planning tool to reduce inheritance taxes."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/106195...
And why shouldn't they? What keeps housing prices high in the U.S. is artificial scarcity. It's the land that's valuable, not the out-of-date structures that exist on it. And the land is so valuable because it's illegal to build enough housing to meet demand in most places.
"The typical Tokyo metro area starter home would be an apartment (around 750 square feet) or detached wooden house (around 970 square feet) located in the outer suburbs. According to Zoe Ward of Japan Property Central, the average Tokyo office worker has about a one-hour commute by train each morning."
So part of the answer is that homes are tiny by American standards, and it's not actually in Tokyo proper.
[1] https://www.curbed.com/2016/6/21/11946606/starter-homes-swed...
[1] たとえば https://www.nitori-net.jp/ec/product/1141031-1140061s/
My parents lived in japan and I have a few friends there. I spoke with a friend who works in graphic design on the outskirts of Tokyo who doesn’t even own a fridge - all his meals are eaten outside of his home.
If these cultural differences are so strong, then surely a market that allows new construction in the U.S. will tend toward creating housing that meets those needs. If it doesn't, it's probably because people place more value on other things (e.g. proximity, price, etc).
The fact is that the market doesn't even get a chance to work itself out in the U.S. because cities encode a particular set of living preferences in law.
Absolute statements like that are just clearly not true. I've been to Japanese friends' apartments, even visited friends' family barbecue or wine tasting night.
Less common doesn't mean it never happens.
Probably because most of my friends in Vancouver live in sharehouses or basement suites where they aren't allowed to have guests by their landlord, while my friends in Japan had small but respectable spaces that they had much more permissive ownership of.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...
This seems like a totally fair thing for regulation to require, considering the majority of Californian homes are going to be hanging around for 40+ years or more.
Fighting for something like this here will be one of the fights of the younger generations, otherwise they will be permanently locked out in any city with jobs. (There is plenty of housing where there are no jobs.)
Local NIMBY zoning must die. Its basically a cartel: collusion to restrict supply and drive prices artificially high.
As of late I have started to question the long-term prospect of indefinite economic growth, and what the implications of challenging the status-quo here are. I would be interested as to what people's perspectives are around the likelihood of advanced nations inevitably sharing a fate similar to Japan's.
Plus Tokyo is almost 100km wide. That's a huge area and of course there are places where housing is dirt cheap because people are fleeing away.
In the US, say at a 3.5% and 30 year loan, your monthly payment would be closer to $1,350. Add property taxes and insurance, and you are probably closer to $1,500.
Places like Seattle are a little better, with an emphasis on "little." https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...
i’m of the opinion that weiner’s various housing bills, while lovely and worth passage in their own right, didn’t go far enough to break this construction gridlock in california.
In the 1980s, Japan had an enormous economic bubble. (This was the period when MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, was the ultimate Platonic ideal of how to run a country's economy and the Japanese Fifth Generation computing project was going to eliminate "programming" as a job category.) This bubble burst in 1990-1991. It was bad.
"GDP fell from $5.33 trillion to $4.36 trillion in nominal terms, real wages fell around 5%,... Many Japanese companies replaced a large part of their workforce with temporary workers, who had little job security and fewer benefits. As of 2009, these non-traditional employees made up more than a third of the labor force. For the wider Japanese workforce, wages have stagnated. From their peak in 1997, real wages have since fallen around 13%..[as of 2013]."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)
"Japan's annual land prices averaged nationwide have finally risen since the asset bubble collapse, though only mildly at 0.1%, a process that has taken 26 years to show up statistically. [undated]
"By 2004, prime "A" property in Tokyo's financial districts had slumped to less than 1 percent of its peak, and Tokyo's residential homes were less than a tenth of their peak,...
"The Nikkei 225 at the Tokyo Stock Exchange plunged from a height of 38,915 at the end of December 1989 to 14,309 at the end of August 1992. By 11 March 2003, it plunged to the post-bubble low of 7,862."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
"After a long climb during the decades of Japan’s economic miracle, prices exploded in the late eighties in the frenzy of the bubble economy. Over the following decade, prices collapsed by over 80%, hitting a low in 2002. Since then however, prices have increased and we are not in the middle of a stable period of growth with a positive outlook for the future."
https://housingjapan.com/buy/history/ [I note: "Housing Japan is the leading real estate agent for international clients looking to rent, buy or invest in the Tokyo property market."]
"Tokyo’s property market has had its ups and downs. At the peak of the bubble in 1989, some condos were selling for more than 1 billion yen, and buildings with more than 30 floors started springing up.
"After the bubble, prices plummeted. In 2002, the price per tsubo was about half that of the bubble era. But easier housing loans and low interest rates helped spur demand for new condos."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Tokyo-prop... [Has a nice graph of Tokyo condo prices, per-tsubo (3.3 sq. meters).]
I've heard it put that Japan's economy makes it relatively easy to live a stable middle class lifestyle, though almost impossible to accrue substantial wealth. I understand why this may seem horrifying to some, but looking at the relative affluence of the average Japanese compared to the average American, I don't see their situation as particularly dire.
Agreed. If they fixed up their lack of work/life balance it would be a workers paradise.
Which countries would that be? There are very few with economies of comparable size. The next above Japan is nearly three times larger (China).
Besides, it's super easy to avoid that GDP / population confusion by looking at GDP per capita.
The US GDP per capita figure ($65,111) for 2019 was 59% higher than Japan ($40,846), which has been tumbling down the per capita rankings for 25 years.
For reference, in 1995 Japan's GDP per capita was $43,440, nearly the highest of any nation. The inflation adjustment on that is $74,600. So not only is Japan missing $34,000 just to break even on inflation, by contracting 6% over that time, they've actually shrank drastically in real terms.
Since 1995 US GDP per capita has increased by about 127% by contrast, exceeding inflation by about $15,000.
The other legitimate comparables: Germany is ~15% higher per capita, Britain and France are nearly the same (only slightly higher than Japan). In 1995 Japan had a GDP per capita 100% higher than Britain, now they're even. Japan ranks #19 on GDP per capita (excluding tiny nations like Luxembourg).
> and also in that their real wage losses 1) pale in comparison to America's, and 2) mean that their real wages are still much higher than most of the world's.
That's not even remotely close to being true. The US has outperformed Japan dramatically on both GDP per capita and incomes. At the end of 2019, real US wages (both median and average) were at new all-time highs, according to the Federal Reserve. The full-time median income in the US hit near $50,000 for 2019, Japan doesn't come close to that.
Japan's peak on real incomes was hit 25 years ago. They've lost about 1/3 of their real personal income since then.
Japan went from having one of the highest income figures, to struggling to remain in the top 20. US wages remain among the highest of any nation (including on disposable incomes), comparable only to countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway.
Here are the average wages in the OECD. Japan ranks about 10% below the OECD average. The US is dramatically higher, ranking just behind Switzerland.
https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average-wages.htm
Here is the OECD better life index page on incomes:
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/
Japan ranks in the middle of the pack, the US ranks at the front of the pack.
Here is the Wikipedia page on median incomes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Japan again ranks well behind the US, and on disposable income ranks dramatically far behind the US.
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
>Besides, it's super easy to avoid that GDP / population confusion by looking at GDP per capita.
Not so much. A high GDP per capita is a poor measure of the average person's economic wellbeing on its own. Looking at it within the context of measures of economic inequality helps to mitigate the misconceptions that could otherwise arise.
For example, according to this Wikipedia article and its cited sources [1], Japan's rich/poor 10% average income ratio is 4.5. Compare to America, whose 18.5 is much closer to China's 21.6, and far away from France's 9.1 and Germany's 6.9.
What this means is that America's GDP per capita is substantially more affected by the high incomes of the highest earners than Japan's. In other words, the average American sees less of the benefits of that high GDP per capita than the average Japanese sees of their somewhat lower GDP per capita.
That's just income. Japan's wealth GINI indicates substantially more equality in that regard than for America. [2]
>At the end of 2019, real US wages (both median and average) were at new all-time highs, according to the Federal Reserve.
I'd like to see that citation. It's well-known that most wages for Americans, indexed against GDP, have fallen or remained flat since the 70s. The vast majority of the income gains have accumulated in the hands of the upper 2 quintiles. This is especially troublesome for Americans as (re: the subject of this comment section) the housing situation in Japan differs greatly from America's skyrocketing housing values in major metro areas; medical insurance and care in America is substantially more expensive; and the cost and quality of education is higher and less stable, respectively, in America than in Japan. This is today, after our respective economic histories over the past few decades.
What your numbers suggest is that Japan was very wealthy for a limited period of time and is now regressing towards the mean that would be suggested by their population size and level of development. However, the character of their economic and institutional policy is making this decline smoother and more comfortable than anything we're likely to see. I continue to hold that this is preferable.
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq...
Highpoints:
2018: 63179
2007: 60985
1999: 61576
1989: 56678
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
P.S. GDP in constant dollars since 1985: Japan, US, EU, and the OECD countries.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?end=2018...
This is also concerning:
>Thus, use caution when comparing median incomes above $12,000 for people or $18,000 for families and households for different years
Tokyo is also an absolutely enormous city with even more massive metro area. There's very few examples on the planet that come close. Tokyo is sometimes called "the infinite city" for good reason. This means that yes, you can pay huge money for a coffin in some areas, and little money for an entire house elsewhere in the same city. New York is kind of the same way in that respect, but is actually still smaller and less diverse.
I could write a ton more, but I think this series from "Life Where I'm From" which is pointed out in the article is a fantastic overview of housing for a nuclear family in Tokyo.
How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home - https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w
Brand New Japanese House Tour - https://youtu.be/Jv6SbFlZMbU
Are Japanese Homes Really Worthless After 30 Years? - https://youtu.be/1SiPGP_BDS4
Old Japanese Apartment vs. New House - https://youtu.be/SI3_PJoAa04
What a Very Old Japanese House is Like - https://youtu.be/r8zECc4JM1Y
Living in Traditional Japanese Townhouses: Kyo-machiya - https://youtu.be/NljSnaZ2WiY
Checking Out New Japanese House Design and Technology - https://youtu.be/5AiLSyNhEXg
I'd also point out this young couple who are expecting their first child (Paolo from Tokyo)
What a Japanese Moving Company in Tokyo is like - https://youtu.be/q0RX59G2jaA
$1500 Japanese Apartment Tour in Tokyo Shibuya - https://youtu.be/Qtc_zrpRIs8
Average Daily Living Cost in Tokyo Japan - https://youtu.be/xrgrBJc-64c
You can either have private equity buying up foreclosed homes and house flipping tv shows or housing being used as housing that most people can afford. America chooses the former, Japan, the latter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...
There's some state by state adjustments to try to benefit owner occupied properties, but the degree to which it helps varies greatly; the California owner occupied exemption saves abou $70/year in taxes (woo?). I'm not aware of progressive property taxes, but there's a lot of different jurisdictions.
Even in very expensive markets like Silicon Valley, foreclosures are typically less than 1% of total home sales.
Homes are not a speculative investment either. Recent studies have shown investing in housing to be safer than investing in stocks, but with similar returns, over a time period stretching back to 1870: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th...
I've earned a lot on owning a home, and even have friends who "earn" more per year in owning the home than their salary for a particular year.