Comment by hamiltont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamiltont | Hacker News Reader

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Not who you replied to, but I believe the current popular answer is to refer to Japan. Numerous articles have been written regarding how they managed their housing crisis by deregulating zoning and building permits. You'll have to read up on it yourself, it's beyond me to summarize as it's a complex topic and the model is not perfectly exportable. Partially for "real" reasons, such as Japan has so many earthquakes that many houses are not intended to last for 100+ years which affects the home economy. Partially for social reasons, e.g. wealthier nations view homes as investments (more-so than as a place to live, like we view an apartment), and people push tons of local/state/federal rules to ensure their investment always grows in value. The easiest way to make the value grow is to ensure there are no more homes e.g. NIMBY

One article to get you started (nothing special about this one, it's just the first I saw from google): https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

I live in Japan and can tell you that those conditions lead to ugly, low standard buildings that seem to me to be among the very top complaints foreigners living here have about the place. The incentives are completely skewed here and seem just as likely to be corrupt as any other place. There's plenty of discussion about it on these boards, this one comes to mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26399071

As to the earthquakes/natural disasters bit for why they build relatively disposable homes - does that happen on the west coast of the US, for instance? I'm genuinely interested, if anyone knows.

> ugly, low standard buildings

ugly is subjective so I won't touch on that.

The low standard one is reasonable as that is what keeps costs low. The alternative is high standard and high cost. You can't really get high standards for low costs.

If the government dictates that all housing needs to be high standard, the collateral damage to that policy is that you can only build housing that prices people out of the market.

> You can't really get high standards for low costs.

I agree but here they're also expensive, which, in my view, is a symptom of the corruption and lack of a free market.

> ugly is subjective so I won't touch on that.

Again I agree, but if you're into industrial estates with lots of concrete and overhead wires galore, then Japan is the place for you. I'm sure someone likes it, maybe the brutalists who made the ugliest parts of my country (the UK) after the war.

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