It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, 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.
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.
This comment took an unexpected turn. Why can you not have girlfriends in the same town?
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
Now I note they don't mention Texas quite so much, anymore.
It all has to do with meeting the demand where the demand exists.