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Comment by bennysomething | Hacker News Reader

They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices.

Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops complaining a developer wants to build flats. For heaven's sake, people need to live somewhere, please do build.

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Japan not so much scrapped various regulations as their regulations are just different - and nationwide.

One of the effects of how their zoning classes work is that you don't have "residential-only" zones with no shops or other amenities - instead you have zones defined along the lines of maximum nuisance and with overlapping uses. You have a total of 12 zones, which start from "exclusively low rise residential" that are essentially low density houses that can be also small shops or offices + schools, to exclusively industrial zones that prevent residential or other construction - but it's a spectrum between them.

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

Every now and then I watch one of these Japanese "video walk" channels on YouTube and find myself despairing at how wildly better their land use is than in the US.

Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. And yet, so much of Tokyo seems like it's built at the scale of a small-town main street: Between the major roads with their skyscrapers sit networks of pedestrian-friendly streets with little shops and restaurants, often crossed by even smaller yokocho which themselves have bars and flats. Quiet side streets intermix residential buildings and even single-family homes, and yet somehow these little districts are all linked up together into the world's largest metropolis.

> Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one.

It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a while before cars happened.

In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods.

Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning?

Japan traditionally had a caste system where certain people were restricted to certain neighbourhoods. There was a lot of official effort to break that up after the war, but you can still tell which neighbourhoods are which.

google burakumin

The public schools I taught at in Japan kept (private) lists of which kids came from burakumin families.

It's my understanding that Japan's housing regulations are mostly driven by a long history of all their buildings falling over in an earthquake every couple of decades.

This was one of the biggest things that struck me when I visited Japan. Their cities are just so much friendlier/better than 99% of American cities.

Thank you for posting that.

I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and I've never seen the topic so clearly explained.

Edit: BTW, in case you were wondering about the special zoning classification, "bathhouses with private rooms" are in a very different business than bathhouses without private rooms.

I live in Edinburgh in Scotland. Best feature is tenement flats with shops or bars below. Old town is especially mixed use and it's brilliant because of it.

One of the more personally infuriating aspects of Brexit for me is that I can't just drop in to Aberdeen or elsewhere in Scotland and move there for longer. :(

Deregulation of the construction market was a disaster for New Zealand, and cost the country billions of dollars [1].

Also, New Zealand has some of the least affordable housing in the world, and it's only getting worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis

> I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices.

I don't know about Japan, but that can't possibly be right about NZ. Nobody in our generation will ever be able to afford a home in Auckland.

Land Value Tax sorely needed.

Same in Canada. I am in the top 3% of wage earners in the entire country and can not "afford" to buy. Average price is > 1 million. At > 1 million, a 20% down payment is required in cash. That would basically take my well balanced portfolio into pure real estate holdings not to mention a massive tax hit to sell 200k+ of my portfolio. I used quotes in afford because I could afford it, but I feel it would be a huge mistake

Similar story here. We modified our expectations and bought a smaller home AND kept the well balanced portfolio. So far so good.

Sounds like you need to grow balls like your fellow Canadians and go “all in”. Most folks I know buying throw every dollar they have into a house plus a hundred thousand from the bank of mom and dad.

You’ll never be able to afford unless you do it.

I'll stick with never. Rents keep dropping. It's almost like it's... pure speculation with no fundamentals. Surely that can't be the case, otherwise rents would keep dropping! Oh no!

Rent is not dropping. It is going up, rapidly.

Oh you checked the numbers for me? Oh darn. If rent is rapidly going up and purchasing is more and more impossible, I guess the only natural conclusion is everyone making mid six figures will all be unable to live in homes any more. Maybe even homeless? I should probably just drop out.

NZ has not got anything near price stability. It’s going mental as they all sell the same houses to each other over and over

Throwing Canada in the mix! We got excited over our 5%+ GDP growth in Q1 until we realize 4% of it was housing!

It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand

> so supply > demand

Nope.

Japan has a declining population, but the population keeps urbanising. So while there's hefty supply (literally millions of unoccupied housing inventory) in places nobody wants to live in, there is not in places where people are moving to (large cities).

There's very regularly news and posts about unoccupied houses ("akiya") being literally given away by government and local authorities because even at auction for pennies nobody wants to bid on rural properties. There was one going through here just last week.

Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000.

>>>Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000.

That's crazy to me, Tokushima in Shikoku was on my short list of "ideal relocation spots". With just a few hours of scenic driving, you can be in Kochi, Takamatsu, Matsuyama, Okayama, or Wakayama. All with populations of 300,000-700,000 (so decent mid-tier cities). So you could easily geographically distribute 4-5 girlfriends across those towns and combine them with some awesome driving experiences in-between.

Osaka and Kobe aren't much further if you really want a big-city party nightlife occasionally too.

> So you could easily geographically distribute 4-5 girlfriends across those towns

This comment took an unexpected turn. Why can you not have girlfriends in the same town?

You'd be surprised at how easily they can run into each other, or have overlapping social circles. It's a drama risk. Different cities that are hours apart is a "good enough" risk mitigation compromise short of dating women in different countries and flying them (or yourself) around regularly.

The parts of Shikoku that are right next to bridges to not-Shikoku are doing alright. But even then, it's hard to make a case for Tokushima over an equivalent place across the water (I guess Himeji?).

Yep.

Japan's urban population is somewhere between stagnating and declining, not increasing. The contraction trend is even worse in most of their cities other than Tokyo.

Simultaneously the percentage of the population that is urban, is very slowly increasing.

Those are two very different things. Their cities are net contracting in population. They're now nationally losing people faster than they're urbanizing. They're currently losing around a quarter of a million people per year nationally. Their cities are not expanding faster than that drop. And given their already very high urbanization rate (and very slow rate of urbanization increase), it's unlikely anything will significantly change in that regard. This decade will see either a mostly flat population trend in Tokyo, or a modest contraction. What it won't show, is a meaningful expansion, as their national population contraction gets worse.

The pandemic put enough pressure on Tokyo that it actually contracted for the first time in ~25 years.

February 25, 2021

"Tokyo, Feb. 25 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo's estimated population fell by 662 from a year before to 13,952,915 as of Feb. 1, marking its first year-on-year decline in about 25 years, the metropolitan government said Thursday."

https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2021022500969/

However, if you go back further, you can see the trend was already toward decline. This is from 2019:

June, 2019, The Guardian

"Has Tokyo reached ‘peak city’?"

"One could argue that the world’s biggest city has hit a sweet spot: a flatlining population, pervasive transit and little gentrification. But is ‘peak city’ even possible – and where does Tokyo go from here?"

"Unlike many megacities, the world’s largest metropolitan area has largely stopped growing, either in land or population."

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/14/has-tokyo-rea...

California and NYC have a declining population.

If you cherry pick data during COVID that's true. But it was the first year since 1900 with any decline and state forecasters say it's more to do with over 50,000 COVID related deaths and less migration from other countries (the largest source of population growth for CA for many years now) because other countries were locked down. As far as I know, no one expect that decline to be anything more than a very temporary thing.

California's population expansion clearly hit a wall back in 2017-2018, pre-pandemic. 2019 saw their population expansion de facto stop. The rate of growth has been dropping rapidly toward zero for much of the past decade, and they reached that line before the pandemic hit, it's not a new trend due to Covid.

This decade it'll go negative. The exodus - a desperate flight from California's particularly horrible governments and epic mismanagement - will get worse yet, not better.

Fewer people want to live in California and it's very obvious why.

2010 to 2020, California saw a 6% population expansion. The slowest decade of population growth in a century for the state. Year to year, it went from very slow growth at the beginning, to zero by the end. Next is a contraction.

Texas by contrast saw 16% expansion in that time. It's booming and it's also very obvious why.

> This decade it'll go negative. The exodus - a desperate flight from California's particularly horrible governments and epic mismanagement - will get worse yet, not better.

"You can tell that the government has failed and nobody wants to live their by the fact that it's too expensive" doesn't really add up to me...

Texas cities have lots of empty surrounding land to sprawl into further, which massively helps with supply and prices. This is not some magic feat of government. They're less dense, not more dense.

People leave California primarily because of housing prices, or because they are in industries which are leaving California because they're not longer growth companies (e.g. HP)

First of all, the data actually shows that while 90-100k people moved from CA to TX every year since 2019, about 40-50k moved from TX to CA, and the demographics of the TX->CA move is higher income, educated earners, and the move from CA->TX is far less Silicon Valley elite, and far more from the central valley, and tends to be blue collar.

Growth follows an S-curve, and in every major successful city in the world, be it NY, London, Seoul, Shanghai, or Tokyo, eventually you run into a slowdown, as cost of living increases.

A contraction in CA's population won't be bad, because CA is still brain draining the rest of the country and still receiving a higher chunk of investment funds compared to other states.

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019... https://www.statista.com/statistics/424167/venture-capital-i...

Reducing the burden of non-growth industries by sending them to TX along with blue collar workers, while taking the lions share of immigration of people with advanced degrees, as well as the lionshare of VC investment, seems like a good trade.

Honestly, Arizona is looking a lot better to me than Texas over the next decade. With 6 new state of the art semiconductor fabs under construction (2 TSMC, 2 Intel, 1 Samsung, 1 NXP) totalling $50 billion, another $100 billion in investment promised by TSMC, and the recently enacted $50 billion Senate semiconductor package, if you're looking for the next Silicon Valley, the Silicon Desert looks more like an early real estate opportunity than the Silicon Hills.

I don't think California has much to worry about, everything that makes the state great: It's natural environment, weather, colleges, parks, industry nexii, it's diverse culture, food, wine country, etc is still there. I know you desparately want to run with the conservative talking points on taxes and regulations, but CA's population growth issues have little to do with "high taxes" as many conservatives claim. Median CA household income is $57k, the State effective tax rate on that income is 3.7%, which puts CA in the middle of the pack when it comes to state tax burdens. CA only really takes a big bite of you if you make a lot of money, but as I've already explained, CA has net positive migration of high income earners, and net positive business migration/creation too.

The proposed semiconductor fabs seem legitimately crazy. It's a desert state with 87% of the desert in extreme drought. The state is already planning on needing "mitigation" water. Don't fabs need water? I recall reading something about tsmc and water usage.

Fled California a dozen years ago. I miss the weather, but otherwise glad to have left.

Gang violence, over regulation, out of control prices, etc.

Can’t imagine going back with all this nonsense around legalizing shop lifting, segregation coming back.

Let the downvotes start

It doesn't need to be downvoted. You identified yourself with your word choice.

Separately I hate the over usage of the word "fled". No one was chasing anyone. In an age of basically yearly refugee crises in the world it's terrible to see its overuse.

Fled means to “run away”. What does have to do with “chasing” and refugees?

I’m sure the place you moved is perfect with no problems whatsoever. Just like California used to be back in the good old days before things changed.

Yeah, I note that these kinds of spammy comments used to always mention Texas.

Now I note they don't mention Texas quite so much, anymore.

Along with huge portions of the rural midwest.

It all has to do with meeting the demand where the demand exists.

Just distorted number because of increases homelessness. Sarcasm , however, there is a bit truth to that.

A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt).

Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the neighbors want to protect. You need regulations that encourage dense, ideally very dense, housing. Enough dense housing and you can "preserve the character" (if not the home values) of the smallish towns.

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because you'd need to buy up the land that the current builds are on. It's not as simple a solution as "build dense housing" makes it sound.

What about throwing as much money as it takes to not only build new towns with dense housing in places where those towns don't already exist, but to make those new places to live much more desirable than a pre-planned new development normally would be? I imagine the political will isn't there. The answer to me would be an ultimatum. Either yes in your backyard, or a tax is levied for a new development that won't be total crap.

This sounds like the original motivation of some ghost towns in China.

Yeah I agree. I can't think of many examples where this seems to have worked. Very much a chicken and egg problem, but I'd think with enough funds available there would be a way to make it work.

Bootstrapping.

Generally the area gets bootstrapped by some major need or force that is so potent that it establishes a vibrant economy around, and if it's potent enough, even after the need has passed.

Major civics projects like damns might do this. (Grand Coulee damn along the Columbia River comes to mind.)

Ongoing jobs like military bases might provide enough logistical need. Or a factories / exploitation of natural resources (fishing, forestry, coal, iron, processing / shipping along waterways) where there's sufficient density. Sometimes it's conditions favorable for the flow of talent, like good worker protections and a rich field of jobs so that someone can settle and build resources: Opportunity that, IMO the rich have largely denied those born in the 80s and after via housing policies and investments exactly like those mentioned in the article.

You've got it exactly backwards. Density is cheaper and more sustainable than running miles and miles of brand new sewerage, roads etc into spread-out suburbs.

The big difference between Japanese and American cities is that Japan is built for trains, which scale up really well, and the US is built for cars, which don't.

I don't have it backwards, you're just not following what I'm saying. I agree that denser housing and construction in general is far more efficient. However...

I'm not talking about constructing a town from scratch. I'm talking about an existing town. Adding the infrastructure for high density housing to a town that wasn't originally designed for it is very expensive.

Current "trend" is medium density housing, with smaller roads. Most of US is 9+ months out of the year a walkable climate.

Putting down a small self driving street car for short trips removes a lot of road congestion in town. And if you just place navigation tags into the pavement - you avoid the need for expensive AI based nav system.

In addition to the other replies, I've see cases where the city only approves construction on the condition that some of the land is allocated to city use. That means if the edges are developed first, it's possible for the city to get the room to expand infrastructure.

Japan sometimes don't care much about such issues caused by building large apartment, like extremely crowded station/train and lack of nursery school. I don't know it's good thing, but these are often complained.

You can't just ignore things insufficient sewers or water. And insufficient roads isn't much better.

Density brings in more tax revenue to pay for expanding the sewers and can support more mass transit to reduce traffic -- no street widening needed.

In many cities, it's the poorer denser neighborhoods that subsidize the more affluent less dense neighborhoods.

Scroll down to red and green map here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/10/lafayette

You can really add things like sewers after the fact. You either need to add them before or during the addition of more (higher density) housing. Generally, this means that the builder of the new housing is required to foot the bill for that added capacity, which can make it not worth the cost.

The same tends to be true of roads, but with less catastrophic results. In a town where going 2 miles can take 20 minutes, adding a lot more housing without adding road capacity is not a great plan.

I meant to say that you can't add sewers after the fact, but now it's too late to edit. My apologies for any confusion.

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