Japan has plenty of societal ills, but at least Tokyo has been doing amazing on this front.
I have stayed and visited japan for the last 35 years, and find all of the "Tokyo is so affordable and buildable" is hilarious. The breathless articles I read about it leave out fundamental aspects (the incredible density, the absolute destruction 70 years ago, the corruption [especially in Shinjuku], the size of the "livable apartments", the need to rebuild anything from before 1980 for earthquake safety, that youth population falling by half, the stagnation of wages), and the fact that most people who can leave Tokyo to raise children do (even if it means commuting 2hrs each way every day on a train).
This just doesn't match anywhere in the US or frankly almost anywhere else in the world. I know 2 people who actually still live in Tokyo. One is a 28 year old single foreigner, and the other is stuck in a 100 year mortgage with their extended family. All the rest moved.
Is that why the population is 14M - 34M in the metro? Bigger than every American city and about the size of all of Canada combined? They just can't get out to where it should by all accounts be cheaper? Is there a fence or something?
Because ALL of the jobs are in Tokyo (or Osaka, or Fukuoka). Note that Chiba city is growing faster than Tokyo and it's a suburb (same with Tsukuba)! Shin-Yokohama is getting too expensive.
It's not just housing. Look at bare land or abandoned buildings in CA. Those also grew by similar amounts or even more! Why develop it when it goes up in value? Why not own multiple empty homes when they "only" go up in price. Well, welcome to higher interest rates and likely a less deflationary world (deglobalization) with non-wage inflation that prevents the Fed put.
Everything you point out isn’t driven by interest rates but instead by artificial supply constraints on housing.
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/interest-rate
No housing is not a financial asset in Japan.
However, China where they have built massive quantities of housing, it is an exceptionally expensive financialized asset, because that is where lending went.
It's not going to be a US-style giant house with a green lawn, but it isn't some dystopian hole in the wall or giant share-house like non-wealthy San Francisco residents are stuck in.
You can fire up Netflix and watch some of "The Full-Time Wife Escapist" on there to see a normal small apartment in action. It's tiny by US standards, but people can live there comfortably.
Said "breathless articles" usually just grab some "rate of price increase" chart benchmarked to the most severe recession in recent decades and start celebrating just because Tokyo also has good housing policy. But in trying to advocate for good policy elsewhere, they just end up championing national recession, international stagnation, depressed wage growth, and more.
see charts & data etc here: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/japans-housing-crisis-...
I lived in Japan so I understand where you're coming from...but the fact that "fleeters" are even a thing should tell you they are doing something right with housing prices. Can you imagine an American person in Seattle deciding to just work 30 hours at a conbini and being able to rent a studio?
A couple things:
1. Sure, Tokyo is dense and can be kinda soul crushing...but the option of having a roof even at incredibly low income is better than none.
2. Zoning to allow residential to be on top of business, and allowing smaller apartments and 2 very obvious things that make it literally "easier to build" in Japan than the US.
This isn't even just a Tokyo thing. When I lived in a pretty nice suburb in Okinawa a lot of my friends were paying like 300-400$ usd for rent, and I rarely ever saw homeless people. I live in Honolulu now and there's homeless everywhere and good luck finding any studio under $1300. There's a pretty obvious difference.
That probably means something of a couple hundred ft2, not 1000. However, the reasons for homelessness in Hawaii vs Tokyo (I've actually seen some in the last 5 years!) has a lot to do with weather, social acceptance, and income from panhandling (which doesn't happen in Tokyo).
Also, a lot of the homeless I see outside (not the hidden homeless who have one or more jobs) in the US have problems that would lead to incarceration in Japan (drug use, untreated mental illness). At the same time I've known older people in Japan who would be in memory care in the US who were helped by the community to remain living in their houses in Japan. It is much safer in Japan, but at the same time any activity that makes it feel less safe is much more likely to be "policed".
Otherwise, simone.brunozzi at gmail if you're willing to :)
We need to use a state or federal authority to take the power of municipalities in the same way the builders remedy works.
For instance, there are laws that prevent certain stores (alcohol sales, for example) from being within X miles of a school. There are cities where the central location where the central location of the town where all commerce happens and where the school is is less than a square mile.
Unless you're proposing legislating the removal or limiting of zoning on the federal level, it seems like an incredibly bad idea.
In other words, we must learn how to improve the economy without turning the cities into antlers.
Most martial arts schools with ties to China have stories of expatriation or of practicing in the dark in basements.
All those houses bought in Vancouver aren't just about financial investments, they're also a potential bolt-hole if things get ugly again.
As a Chinese-American, whose family and friends all profited greatly from China's rise, I do wonder, how much of that profit was just being lucky enough to support the "winning team," and how much blood was shed on the other side.
I guess the only true mindset is a neutral one.
In China, things have come back. People who escaped were invited back with promises of better treatment, even given platforms (eg, martial arts) but who knows what we Earthlings have lost from people who didn't. Biomechanics, biology, art, technology, philosophy...
The buyers would have to fund ALL the infra to power, water, feed such ghost city homes, and where will they work?
I used to work with a guy in SF that had a consultancy that would bring chinese 'students' on tours of the US to various universities to have them pick where they wanted to go to school.
These were the children of chinese oligarchs - and they would land in SFO with luggage full of cash - and, not knowing how things worked in the US, would jusr bribe their way through every transaction at ~$10,000 a time...
The chinese oligarchs own more of america than you may know.