How does Japan do this successfully?
I know there was stuff like proposing to pay people to move away, but I don't know if that's a real thing?
If you reward people for conserving a scarce resource, they'll use less of it.
If you reward people for wasting a scarce resource, they'll use more of it.
There's some natural human value attached to space, but in the current system people are incentivized to own more than they need, because to do anything else would be giving up free money, but the fact that everyone else is doing the same, ruins things for everyone.
[1] https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-ar...
Helps that the whole country is on a fault line; nothing is going to stand up for a while anyways so you may as well establish a culture of rebuilding.
https://gestaltu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/120927-Japan...
Buildings always depreciate, and North America has its fair share of homes not intended to last generations. In Vancouver it's become common for wealthy homebuyers to knock down houses that are less than 20 years old to put up something fresh, but that didn't stop property values from appreciating.
And in China it's perhaps even more the case that homes aren't built to last, and they even have an oversupply issue if anything, as well as a much more advanced population decline than Japan did circa 1990. And yet real estate in China has still attracted so much investment speculation that it's even less affordable, and my guess is it's following the same trajectory that Japan did. Property speculation is a powerful force.
I think a much better explanation is that the Japanese RE bubble taught Japanese speculators a lasting lesson, and the subsequent demographic decline, universal zoning, and widespread availability of mass transit kept it cheap.
Land and real estate are also a huge income shelters for Chinese elites. They cannot appear too wealthy, so they buy real estate to hide their wealth. Only recently, last 5 years, has China instituted a national real estate registry. I wonder how much of the market disruption of the last few years is due to large players trying to divest themselves.
It's not clear that tilting the rent/own preference toward ownership results in a net increase of housing prices, because for every unit of homeowner demand it adds to the market, it also removes one unit of landlord demand.
And when they do stop, it’s only to tear down a building so they can build another one in it’s place.
Japan is a deflationary case study.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14538387#:~:text=Tokyo's%....
Things have changed a lot since then but it seemed to have been very successful at fixing the housing crisis of the time.