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Comment by alwayslikethis | Hacker News Reader

For a developed country where housing is not a safe, lucrative investment, look at modern-day Japan. The zoning codes are loose, allowing you to build far more housing, and the urban infrastructure makes much more efficient use of space (without nearly as much parking, for instance), which enhances the availability of housing. This, combined with the overall declining population, means that houses are viewed as a depreciating asset, much like cars. While the land may still grow in value due to various development occurring, it is not nearly to the same extent.

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The declining population has nothing to do with houses being viewed as a depreciating asset: it was like that long before the population started declining. Houses were (are) simply seen as disposable, having an expected service life, just like a car. After the service life is over, it's demolished and something new built in its place, since the land retains value (and may gain value, depending on local demand). Why anyone would value an older building over a new one, I have no idea, as it's entirely irrational, unless the building has real historic value.

The things that make housing affordable here are the zoning codes and laws which basically prevent neighbors from restricting development. Lack of stupid laws dictating how development must be done help a lot too: things like setbacks, parking requirements, etc.

Properly built older buildings can be much better quality than shoddy new ones. For example, in Australia, many older buildings were double brick (two layers), which is sturdier and insulates better, but virtually all new brick buildings are brick veneer, meaning a single layer on a wooden or steel frame.

Of course, there's significant survivor bias here, because there were plenty of shoddy older buildings that have been torn down.

In Japan, older buildings are much poorer quality than new ones. They don't survive earthquakes well, they have no insulation in the walls, they're really quite horrible. Building standards are constantly rising, so newer units are almost always better than older ones.

Brick buildings don't exist in Japan. Any such structure would quickly collapse in an earthquake. Any older buildings that still exist were either exceptionally well-built for the time, and/or were retrofitted to meet modern earthquake standards. So some historic buildings are still around because they're valuable for cultural or historic reasons, but this doesn't include housing built in the last century.

By double brick do you mean a "full brick" wall that is as thick as one brick is long or a cavity wall with a air cavity? Both have pretty terrible insulation, basically negligible and i can't imagine anyone is building modern wood framed buildings with worse insulation. Even 5 cm of rockwool has 4 times the insulation value of a basic cavity wall, 6 times as much as a full brick wall. With a cavity wall the outer layer is not structural so it's not really sturdier.

I'd take modern wood frame construction or aerated concrete with insulation and a brick veneer over a cavity wall or a full brick wall any day.

I live in a 1920s full brick house in New England. The insulation in the unrenovated spaces is poor, but the mass of brick has the effect of modulating summer temperatures to a reasonable level of comfort without AC for most of the summer. It takes about 4 consecutive days in the high 80s/low 90s before the house gets uncomfortable. Winter gets and stays colder 24 hours a day, so heating costs about $450/mo for December-March. This place will likely be here largely as-is 100 years from now.

We've been having regular long summer heatwaves in the Netherlands the past 10-15 years where it stays 30c+ for over a week. At that point the thermal mass of the brick starts working against you in the summer as well as the short nights (less than 8 hours in summer) are not enough to cool the house down and the brick radiating heat keeps the house uncomfortably warm 24/7.

True. We’re about 10° farther south (than Amsterdam) so we get a slightly longer night in summer, but most importantly we run the window shaker ACs for that week which allows the house to be bearable.

I don't know about Japan, but sometimes older buildings may be genuinely better built than newer ones, which is a rational reason to value them in additional to historical value. The "expected service life" of a building greatly depends on how it was built and maintained. In my country even plenty of wooden houses from 1800s are still around, while modern ones from the 70's are often demolished due to mold problems caused by bad architecture of the time. 2000's apartments tend to to be pretty bad as well because of greed, they lack space and have impractical floor plans & general lack of quality.

To add to this, old growth wood that was used on older housing is of significantly higher quality than modern wood

Japan had a forcing function until relatively recently; the last revisions to earthquake code were in 1981, and post-1981 buildings survive earthquakes at far greater rates than pre-1981 earthquakes, and are priced accordingly.

> Why anyone would value an older building over a new one, I have no idea, as it's entirely irrational

Because new buildings these days are invariably the same boring gray dull shit that robs any place of its identity?

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