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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

Is there any where in the world that's not feeling pain from housing? I'm pretty sure the entire world is struggling. Peppe I know across the US can't make housing work. Idk how I can realistically purchase a house. I was just in Europe talking with people who brought up how hard it is to buy a home.

I think each little area focuses on some red herring. Transplants, tech workers, digital nomads, foriegn investors, airbnb, but can those really be the same problem everywhere in the world? Idk seems like something else is going on.

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Japan.

Housing is affordable here. There's plenty of supply of single person apartments. Regular people can buy houses. Often the statistics hide this fact by comparing price per square foot, but the average apartment or house here is a lot smaller than in other places.

One of the benefits of a shrinking population.

They also do not have NIMBY legislation. They are able to build and have mixed use buildings ie business on the bottom and homes on top. The reason why there’s so much inventory is that rarely any of it is a single family home with a yard.

They’re an outlier.

But also just more permissive zoning.

I live in a depopulating city, but even so, whenever a single-family home in my neighborhood is torn down, it is replaced with a 3-4 story multi-family unit, increasing densification. An old bowling alley was torn down and is being replaced with a massive 14-floor, 200-unit condo. Empty space near the train tracks has become two huge condo buildings (200 units each, built by Japan Rail, of course). And this is just in the past few years.

Even in depopulating areas, huge projects are happening to increase housing supply as multi-generational households lose favor.

Tokyo is not shrinking yet, but Tokyo housing is still plentiful and affordable.

I wondered if it was just a perception difference...I didn't get the feeling housing was still affordable, but it might depend on individual needs.

To get an external perspective, average house pricing [0] and average rent [1] have stably rose, while average wages have stayed basicslly flat [2] during these years:

[0] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2019/09/new-apartment-price...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202559/japan-rent-for-a...

[2] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01631/

Also houses depreciate there because you don’t own land.

Equivalent house in Japan is far more expensive than in Australia.

You definitely own land in Japan. Even if you buy a condo you own a fraction of the land the building is built on. It's the only thing that doesn't lose value.

This is all true. Looking at that same reality from a different angle though:

- available housing is primarily for single persons. Family housing has become a luxury, which makes having kids all the more expensive.

- those single person apparts are flimsier and less maintained than past homes. Leopalace grade housing is becoming widespread.

- buying anything above 2 rooms apparts will land you in the 30+ years debt area. And to get those you'll have to prove a stability level that's not common anymore thse days.

Your first point is true I think.

Your second is certainly not. The baseline expectation for Japanese homes is constantly improving and something built cheap today is many times better than something built cheap 20 years ago.

Yeah, you get a 30 year loan, but that’s standard. Where do people not do that to afford housing?

On baseline expectations, there's two different standards: the one when you build/buy your primary residency, and the other when it's for rent. In most countries there's not that much of a gap, in Japan I see it as way wider.

Also, appartments can have a very solid foundation cleanly matching mandated standards and very cheap resident rooms with paper thin walls and poor insulation. On paper they will be better homes (free internet, air conditionning, automated bathtub etc), in practice the difference will be less obvious.

On 30y loans, it's fine if you are a full fledged employee of a well regarded company. It's another story if you're a contractor (roughly half of the active population! [0]), and impossible as part timer.

[0] https://www.sangyo-rodo.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/toukei/koyou/ed6fc...

People make less in Japan, population is falling (even Tokyo has tepid growth), housing depreciates (even if land appreciates, second hand houses are often seen as a liability that needs to be rebuilt) and Japan went through a horrible speculative real estate bubble burst that led to their lost decade. Still, I love what can happen when housing isn’t seen as a speculative asset.

You just don't hear news about affordable places because there's nothing to report. In Europe at least, housing is quite affordable outside of major cities and tourist hotspots like Ibiza. A couple with average income can get a nice home with reasonable ease in secondary cities. All you need is a 20% down payment and a steady income, of which your payments must not exceed 35%. This is not a very high bar. And it's not like the price of all real estate is that high either; the average price of 1 sq m was 3k EUR in Germany in 2023 and a typical apartment is 80-90 sq m.

Well yes in Germany.

In the Czech Republic, an average monthly salary buys you about half a square metre. Supposing you don't spend on anything else. And most people earn less than the average...

It’s definitely a combination of airbnb/tourism/digital nomads on the low end, and the rich buying shit up on the high end, with both ends facing little international resistance, and pleasant places get hit hard.

Don’t forget NIMBYS at the middle end.

Housing costs in Italy fell continuously for the last ten years, except in the very recent past, just the last few months, there have been real-money price increases. They have no economy and nobody wants to live there.

I wonder if the "American dream" has managed to spread to the rest of the world and now young people have unrealistic expectations that they can buy a house like young people used to be able to in the States while it was still filling up. This was not a thing in most other places, with multigenerational living being the default.

The 'American Dream' is very similar in a lot of the OECD nations.

NZ'er checking in. Late 40's - a good portion/most of my peer group bought houses in their mid 20's to 30's. Now the same age range can't unless they've got mega inehitances or very, very, good jobs.

Ditto UK/Australia/Canada etc.

All countries to a greater or lesser degree have the same cost of living crisis (arguably NZ is one of the worst at the moment).

America did not have 200 million naturally-occurring houses that needed to be "filled up". 20th century Americans had to build them all. This is still the obvious and best way to relieve housing costs.

This county owns land which it is going to develop for housing. Their goal? $450k houses because that will bring in more tax revenue than the same number of affordable homes.

Clown world indeed.

Would kill for a $450k house. Here a 1970s condo needing complete renovation goes for 750k.

While this is true of course, it is easy for knowledge workers to say this when we aren't the ones pounding in nails all day.

We speak as if the houses just build themselves and we just have to press these buttons in the right combination like software.

Everyone involved basically has better options than to build more housing so it should be no surprise we have a shortage.

Sure but it's a matter of turning some policy knobs, and we know where they are and how much to turn them. The policies that prevent us from building are favorable tax treatment of existing properties and financial penalties for building new ones, favorable treatment of professional labor and penalization of productive labor. The "better options" of which you speak are policy outcomes and we can change the rules.

> Is there any where in the world that's not feeling pain from housing?

Probably 90% of the United States by area. Honestly its just an urbanization problem. There are huge amounts of homes in safe neighborhoods in places you dont want to live in for 200k. See 95% of Pennsylvania for example.

There are many places in the US that still have reasonably affordable houseing.

I am trying to imagine what relief is going to look like, but I can’t think of any easy scenario.

It's not the housing, it's the people making money off squeezing us all for housing, and the laws that allow them to do so.

Japan?

Another comment mentioned it, but Austria, specifically Vienna.

Yeah, it’s silly. There aren’t enough foreign investors to go around causing RE prices to soar everywhere.

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