> Excessive regulation is 90% of it.
Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa). I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.
Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa). I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.
If there's a problem, it's too many empty homes in aging rural areas. Cities are doing just fine, even with a growing population in Tokyo.
New apartment prices in Tokyo are double what they were a few years ago. [1] The reason is foreign investors buying up loads of properties and sitting on them or turning them into AirBNBs. Locals can't afford them because wages aren't increasing. The concept of buying a property to resell it also isn't a thing amongst locals, so it's clueless rich people and corporations buying up properties and thinking they can flip them, which won't be happening any time soon.
But after a few years of squeezing, locals may have no choice but to pay their entire paycheck to foreign investors. Though thankfully the government is planning to take steps to potentially outlaw foreign buyers. If we're lucky, and some parties get their way, they might just strip the properties from them. If you're not living here, you have no business owning dozens of homes.
[1] https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC183D80Y4A110C2000000/
so the original owner got a nice priced deal out of the sale. Then, when said clueless rich person decides to sell in the future due to being unable to hold on to it any more, they make a loss (which is a gain for that future buyer, whoever they are).
> after a few years of squeezing, locals may have no choice but to pay their entire paycheck to foreign investors
why the squeeze? If the airBNB is being occupied, then it simply means the price for the rental was correct, and it was artificially low before (due to the demand not being met for short term stays).
People who see homes as a mere unit of value meant to be priced on a global scale, and not something people should be living in, are simply inhuman. People in cities around the world are getting fed up with it, with justified protests and even riots happening.
Rentseeking has no limit. Unimaginably rich corporations can buy up every property and leave almost everyone homeless. They can take 90% of the paychecks of everyone else. And they'll say "well prices were artificially low before." No. Now they're artificially high. People in desperate situations pay more and take out debt because they have no other reasonable choice.
Everybody maximizes their profit and thinks first and foremost about themselves and only then about the rest. Case point - a better half of this forum works/worked for faangs and their variants who destroy privacy and more of whole mankind for the sake of profit for themselves, and even pat themselves in the back how effectively they helped the 'the goal'.
> if you dont like situation change laws, thats the way for a change
Which is done by protesting and advocating for it. Not being in a "that's the way things are" attitude.
> Everybody maximizes their profit and thinks first and foremost about themselves and only then about the rest.
What a sad way to see life. It is so easy to find countless examples of people doing exactly not that. American individualism really got to your brain.
I see a difference in-between selling your property at current market rate and having a business which relies on destroying the housing supply to make profit. I don't work for companies who "destroy privacy and more" even though it would be in my interest, many of us are not pure profit-maximizers.
The idea that a city hall would need to organize some sort of public meeting before approving a construction project is a fairly new one. The city council is elected to represent the people. If they need "community input" why are they even here? (Nevermind the obvious problem with such participatory process - sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy.)
If you told someone in the 1980s that the British parliament couldn't impose its will on QUANGOs and local governments to build a rail line, they'd look at you as if you were insane. Parliament's power is supposed to be absolute. Yet that's what's happening with HS2.
While true, times have changed. The information flow is orders of magnitude faster and have you seen any sane and normal people lately? The norm is spending hours scrolling social media. The argument that nobody has spare time/attention and thus we all need representatives falls flat to me.
We need to explore alternative forms of representation to allow people to choose their level of engagement in various levels of government. Perhaps I'm happy to delegate all national matters to a representative I trust but want to regularly weigh in on local decisions.
Between the technical challenge of trust/security and the inevitable political resistance to such ideas, I sadly don't expect to see them implemented any time soon.
That is, I'm claiming that government can't scale to the levels that the 20th Century escalated it to, with any degree of efficiency at all.
Add UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands to the list of countries with housing crisis.
You mentioning Japan gives out that you maybe don't know what you are talking about.
> I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.
Or maybe the case it, that also globally most urban areas tend to develop a version of excessive regulation.
And in many parts of what we might label as third world.