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Comment by PebblesHD | Hacker News Reader

In some countries with absurdly high house prices, I think some level of nationalisation of housing is an eventual inevitability. Much like Seoul, places like Sydney are so expensive that unless you already own a house, or are eventually going to inherit one, no amount of hard work or education can reliably get you into the market.

Entry level prices within 25 miles of the city are around A$1.5m for a detached house, and apartments are predominantly 1 or 2 bedrooms and poorly built, so not really suitable for families. Many people suggest ‘moving west’ to the new suburbs being built, but even 30-40 miles out the prices are still around a million dollars. Given an average full time wage in the range of $50k, saving a deposit after rent is almost impossible. Not totally impossible, but very close to…

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And places like Sydney are expensive in no small part because of issues like negative gearing and zoning controls, all in direct control of the government. Also the government is under no incentive to change the status quo because like any good mafia they take their cut of every transaction with stamp duty "oh you two want to trade, where's mine?".

You’re not wrong, but I would hope that by the time we work ourselves into a situation where there is no unskilled labour within commuting distance of where the work is, the government might finally realise that lack of workers is bad for business, which seems to be the main concern. I’m still wondering if we will reach a point where normal people don’t have any disposable money to spend in shops because it’s all going to landlords and utilities/basics, and if at that point they might go ‘oh wait that’s bad’

I can't really see politicians allowing the inflated housing market to deflate. So many people will lose years/decades worth of saving this way - that would mean a lot of angry voters, not to mention another potential banking crash, as mortgages would no longer be backed by houses of enough value. I think high housing prices in developed world are going to stay with us for a long time.

I find it very funny that right wing libertarians think the government is some all powerful force hell bent on taking their daddy’s tax money, when no politician dare cross a $10,000 dollar donor.

The weather must truly be perfect in their fantasy world, they don’t even peek out of it.

Please stop posting flamebait/or unsubstantive comments to HN, and please stop using the site for ideological battle. You've been doing this repeatedly lately, and we ban that sort of account—regardless of what they're battling for or against—because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And yet Tokyo does not have this problem despite growing 50% in population over the last two decades. If you make building housing illegal prices rise. Demand and supply are going to meet somewhere and if you restrict supply prices will rise. If you restrict it more they'll rise more or faster. Compare San Francisco, Seattle and Houston in a US context. The more you restrict supply the more prices rise.

I completely agree, but Tokyo also has sensible tax policies to encourage providing housing, and a government that aims for zero unemployment. I really like their model of ensuring jobs are available so people have money to consume private sector housing, and that there is always such housing available because there is always someone to consume it. There’s about 50 seperate policies places like Sydney and Seoul would need to change to head down that path, but the interests of those in power are largely in keeping prices high it seems…

If there is demand for housing and you do not make supplying that demand illegal someone will supply it. People live in dormitories in Hong Kong right now. Perfectly safe but middle class busybodies don't like flophouses, SROs or dormitories so they make it illegal.

If it was legal to provide housing in San Francisco in dorms it would be done. If it was legal to build residential skyscrapers in New York Queens would look like Brooklyn if not Manhattan.

Make building housing legal and the market will provide.

When you build roads, you get more traffic.

I wonder if the following is true?

When you build more apartments you get more density and more inward migration and more concentration of opportunity, until the marginal migrant can't afford or doesn't want to live there. The same sort of people are miserable when there's more density as when there was less, except there's more of them.

[NOTE: I mostly agree with you and this comment is a bit of a non-sequitur but I hadn't thought about the idea that the problem might actually be "moloch" (in slate star codex terms)].

Not building roads/apartments is not a solution, unless you really want to cosplay middle ages in your country.

So you will have to build something, somewhere.

Actually, roads and apartments are in counter-balance. More resedential high-rises in semi-walkable distance from business districts and public transit = less roads are needed (but there is still congestion due to bottlenecks). More spread-out houses - more traffic as people will drive tens of miles to work.

Korea is not sufficiently large that you could stick people so far they're not able to come to megapolis and congest it.

Korea frequently tries to decentralize and build new districts and cities from scratch.It just does not work because of korean culture.

It does not work anywhere in the world. Business and people are quite content with "old" districts and cities.

It's not that.It's the korean approach of doing things.The "bbali bbali" culture where korean ingenuity gets pushed back by their impatience and the need to re-invent themselves very quick.

They like to designate certain areas to specific industries and then wonder why it's not such a good approach.

Look at Songdo or Pangyo Techno Valley.Both rushed and without much thought. As soon as the gov subsidies ran out the companies wanted to move back because it was both as expensive as in Seoul downtown with little of other benefit.

Also 99% of the companies there were korean anyway.

I am wondering if a super super block model would work. You take a 3x3 block of houses and label it a super block. Then you build a 5x5 block of super blocks and then put commercial zoning in the middle.

It's not about building it.It's about having a plan what to do with it.Koreans are incredible and efficient builders.

Korean culture favors one time hit wonders instead of gradual development and continuous improvements.It's the nature of korean culture to just try new things because that is deemed to be better than trying to go with existing ones.

So you build a city and just because you built it you expect everyone to just go there.And it has to succeed or it is deemed to be an irrepairable failure.

Koreans dream of grandiose big projects that will put them on the world stage like Chaebols once did and they dont see the local opportunities or challenges.

I'm not sure that South Korea has a single flat area to put 5x5 block of super blocks. The landscape is very rugged.

Also, putting any number of buildings in the middle of nowhere is not solving any issues. And near Seoul there's no land.

> When you build roads, you get more traffic.

Because roads are practically free to drivers. If you gave me a bigger house for free I would live in it alone even though it was designed for a family of 6.

If you charged a sufficient toll on congested roads the congestion would be gone.

https://hongkongfp.com/2017/02/16/1-killed-2-injured-blaze-s... The subdivided flats are not perfectly safe.

One wonderful thing about Japan is that houses are as much of an investment as toothbrushes. The minute someone uses it, its value drops immensely.

10 years is old but still somewhat livable and generally cheap. Once you get past 20 years, locals basically see the house as scrap. It's really easy to buy cheap houses or apartments over 20 years old. Some clueless foreigners new to Japan see these prices and think they can flip them and resell to get rich, and they're always disappointed to find out it doesn't work that way.

40-50 year old houses can be bought for around car prices if you're willing to live 30 minutes from a smallish city. You're basically just paying for the land at that point.

Sounds like a monumentally wasteful practice from environmental standpoint. Are these disposable houses made from wood, or brick/concrete?

It's necessary given that regular earthquakes cause unseen damage to houses.

That doesn't quite make sense. You're basically paying for the land in many European cities, too, so how is the price of the building an important factor? It's the land that's very expensive.

Random land outside of the middle of urban centers isn't that valuable, especially when population isn't growing. What is someone going to do, hold onto it for decades and hope someone buys it from them at a 10x markup and be enough to offset the taxes they paid?

In some places (or at least the US), old houses generally gain value. Of course, land is valuable in and of itself, but there's no shame in buying a 100 year old house in the US. There's no worry of earthquake damage, generally no risk of extensive mold due to a drier climate than East Asia, nobody really worries about ghosts infesting the home, etc. Plus, 100 year old American houses are quite honestly probably better than the cardboard and paper mache houses that have been common recently. In my experience, 1920s apartments were much nicer than the post 1970s places I lived in.

Depends where i guess. In the capitals? sure. outside? not so much. my brother bought land, 70k in our hometown. the house will be 350k.

The demand for black-market money concrete sugar cubes to store investment money far outstrips the actual need and thus there is no market anyway.

Aren’t prices a good signal to not move there? Or is the goal to have all our housing and jobs concentrated into one city?

I’ve spent time in SE Asia and those countries would love to go back in time to avoid have cities with >10M people in them.

> apartments are predominantly 1 or 2 bedrooms and poorly built

It is just amazing that Australia does not good regulations for building apartments. You work hard, you save money, buy an apartment and then you find out there are some major structural issues in the building.

Housing is expensive because there is a lot of demand. By nationalizing or similar policy forcing people to sell cheaper all you achieve is creation of a class of preferential buyers (who are allowed to buy cheaply or get housing for free from the government) while excluding others from the market altogether. Those policies just hide the demand it won't magically disappear.

Things you can do are:

-increasing supply by changing laws around zoning, allow building more/higher etc.

-introduce policies that makes it more attractive to live in less populated areas where land is cheaper (hard to say what works but maybe better/faster public transportation, more wfh, preferential tax treatment for companies that move to other areas, if enough of that happens new business/population hubs might start)

Why can't people move to some other city if the current one is to expensive? How would nationalization actually deal with situation when there's much more people who want to live in Seoul than houses? A 15 years long waiting list?

This usually boils down the the chicken and egg problem of infrastructure and jobs. In Korea, the majority of the population is within the Seoul area, so most of the jobs are there and all the infrastructure to support them is concentrated there. Sydney and Melbourne are much the same in Australia, and the results are the same, where as soon as you leave these centres, there are no jobs or infrastructure available. As mentioned by another commenter above, Tokyo did this right with central planning and a more decentralised business district, where ‘Tokyo’ is basically 4 or 5 cities around each other, and there is infrastructure and transport there to support the intended population.

> Tokyo did this right with central planning and a more decentralised business district

What central planning? A more decentralised business district is what happens if you don't make it illegal. People will buy up residential property and turn it into commercial or office if it's not illegal to do so. It's not about planning. It would be more accurate to call it not planning.

> there is infrastructure and transport there to support the intended population.

Again, no one intended this. They didn't decide to make Tokyo this size. They just didn't actively get in the way. They built the infrastructure and transport that they had good reason to believe there was demand for. In contrast the NYC subway system is basically teh same as when it was taken over by the government and public transport is significantly worse than 1940 insofar as there are no street cars.

Then you will just have different classes: "people who have the public apartment" and "people who don't, and have to stay out of opportunities". The inequality: still there.

From "not being able to afford" to "stuck on a waiting list for an indeterminate time" heh

And of course there will be ways to move to the top of the waiting list... if you have money, and know the right people.

It's worth noting most housing in Singapore is state-owned

It is.

99 year lease, you don’t own it. Can’t get one unless you’re married or over 35. Most people live with their parents until they move out. Lottery system and severely oversubscribed (can take multiple tries to get allocated a place) and once you “win” up to 5 year wait while it’s built (govt isn’t interested in overbuilding again). Lucky folks get one of the super desirable locations and after owning for 5 years sell it for big profit.

And yet Singapore has low taxes (by some considered even a tax haven) and is not a welfare state. That is by design, LKY having been a big supporter of personal responsibility.

In my opinion income tax should be massively reduced in favor of land value taxes.

Singapore has low income taxes but high CPF (forced savings for retirement, health, housing, etc) requirements - 20% of gross income on top income taxes. The total take isn’t that low.

And Singapore is most definitely a welfare state - just not a super generous one. Housing, healthcare, education are all heavily subsidized but also very strongly means tested. If you’re truly destitute in Singapore you will have a place to live, free healthcare and lots of government support.

> Singapore has low income taxes but high CPF (forced savings for retirement, health, housing, etc) requirements - 20% of gross income on top income taxes. The total take isn’t that low.

Which, compared to western states, isn't taken away from you. It's your own private pool of money, just with a restricted use. The government is just aware, people are not great at saving for their future, so they have to be forced to do it properly.

Housing is not really subsidised, it's just build and sold without markup. Singapore's healthcare is also one of the "cheapest" and most efficient in the world.

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