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I agree that the best solution is a variety of solutions, there's no one silver bullet that's going to save us all.

I've heard this line about the Japanese before and I wonder how they got to this point. I recently learned about the Japanese housing bubble associated with their pre-90's collapse, and it seems the conditions before that crash were very much more similar to what the real estate market is like in the US today, with big conglomerates and banks able to buy and hold huge amounts of land.

I think the responses to the crash probably has something to do with it, the Japanese response was very different from the USA's[0]... but I haven't unpacked this fully enough to have a final analysis.

[0] https://www.lynalden.com/economic-japanification/

> the Georgian land-value taxation system Japan implements, meaning almost everywhere the land on which the building sits is 10-1000x more valuable than any building could be

How does that work out, wasn’t the point of Georgian land value tax to reduce land value?

Yeah, that seems like opposite of Georgism. You don't have to look very far to find examples of land being worth much more than what's built on it, that's the case in much of the US.

I would disagree and say that most land is cheap in the US.

I'm not saying that it's the case for most land, I'm just saying that the land that people live and work it's not uncommon. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

> I also visited Japan and I learned that people generally tear down their houses and rebuild from scratch every 20-30 years.

From what I understand, the Japanese has a strange cultural aversion to housing that's been lived in or in which people died.

This was what I observed as well when living in Japan. While the other reasons given seem to be valid as well, the most common reasoning for new home construction I heard amongst my coworkers was this cultural/spiritual reason.

Yea, my dad was threatened with a lawsuit because he didn’t disclose my grandmother died in her bed.

This was in San Francisco.

"Departures" a Japanese movie from 2008 deals with this phenomenon in a very pleasing way. I recommend it.

Your friend was exaggerating. 250 years is very old even for the UK. Most houses are less than 100 years old, though 1908 wouldn't really be considered unusually old.

A quick Google proves you wrong, Georgian period began in 1714 with King George I and lasted until the death of King George IV in 1830. There are certainly many Georgian properties in London right now, for example my brother rents one...

London isn't representative of the UK mate. Likewise, OP said on average, not that it wasne possible.

The bit I’m saying is wrong is “your friend was exaggerating” by saying his house was the youngest on his street at 250 years old. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that and in many parts of the UK extremely common.

Good point. Of course, you'd imagine if many on the street are older houses then most are.

There were ~11 million homes in England in 1939, and ~23 million in 2019. Even if we allow for single homes being split into multiple smaller ones, and assume that every 1939 home was still standing in 2019 (ignoring the effects of the Blitz, and of the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s), that would still suggest that half of English homes are less than 80 years old. I doubt things are significantly different in the rest of the UK.

No. Old houses are not distributed on average, the point I was making is it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say that a 250 year old house is the youngest on a specific street. Could easily be true, common even.

You need to improve your Google game:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/292252/age-of-housing-dw...

Japan is at about the same latitude as California, and completely surrounded by water. The need for thick insulation is much less.

Perhaps that's true on average, but there are some very cold places in Japan and the housing is the same there as I understand it: built to last 20-30 years.

For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asahikawa#Climate

Anyone who lives in a Japanese house will attest to the awful feeling of waking up in a freezing house in even a mild winter in Tokyo. Or the murderous hot of summer that it has its own word for trying to escape it (避暑). The poor insulation means you can spend myriads of yen and never feel comfortable inside.

Incidentally, this is also a reason my colleagues wanted to go to work. Offices are often better setup than homes. (At least this was their excuse to stay at work)

Less than northern continental climates sure, but you're ignoring the jet stream. Tokyo is considerably colder in the winter and hotter in the summer than, let's say Monterey at a similar latitude.

Historical post-WWII housing stock in Japan was for the most part pretty... bad. Not the kind of thing you’d want to keep around.

Also construction standards for earthquake resistance changed (iirc in the late 90’s) so values even for rentals fall off a bit of a cliff for older houses. Modern housing is a lot better though so habits may change.

Not sure what you mean about land tax though. If anything being taxed annually on land holdings should drive the value of land down. I’ve even heard of people trying to give away land in rural areas to escape land taxes.

Jelly with all your hones, amazing how people back then built structures that outlive mutiple generations of them

You just don't see those buildings that did not survive. Survivorship bias.

Another reason might be lack of engineering science. People did not now how thick wall should be, so they built them as thick as possible. Nowadays people prefer to build cheap structures which will work good enough for their needs and will have guaranteed lifetime of 50 years. Science made it possible.