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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Almost every capital city in the developed world (and big parts of developing) is struggling with unaffordable rent, insane house price rises etc.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

So there is the minor problem that I have with YIMBY people - why do you think that building more will actually solve the problem with unaffordable housing?

Simple arithmetic. The problem is a lot of people want to live in or near central london or wherever, but there are too few houses for them. If we double the number of homes and they aren't vacant, twice as many people have satisfied their desire to live in or near central london.

If prices are still high, we probably just didn't add enough homes.

We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.

A congested 10 lane highway is helping twice as many people reach their destination as a congested 5 lane highway. So it sounds like the main problem is that we didn't add enough lanes.

There are plenty of empty highways, which indicates that one can build highways that meet and exceed the demand.

Should we even solve it? Is it ok to infringe on the right to move to actually strike a balance.

That probably is what california NIMBYs would like.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

Non existent birth rates, low immigration, massive construction and tiny apartments.

No.

https://www.themotte.org/post/304/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/52358?context=8#context

The first two points don't really matter because of massive internal migration.

The last point doesn't really matter either, the average apartment in Tokyo isn't that small by international standards.

It's America that is the outlier with its huge homes.

The most special thing about Tokyo is that people don't live in human anthills like they do in places like Hong Kong.

People have actually been leaving Tokyo recently. And Tokyo apartments really are outrageously small, I worked with middle class people who had a wife, two kids, and a 45 minute commute and still lived in a 65m² "two bedroom" apartment (2LDK). Not to mention they're constructed with low quality materials (the crappy insulation is especially egregious). To be clear, this is in a suburban area far outside of the Tokyo core (western Suginami-ku). None of that is really tolerated in other first world countries.

The problem is a lot of people want to live in or near central london or wherever, but there are too few houses for them.

Let's say that supply increases significantly, but a lot of people want to live in or near central london at prices slightly below the current price. So price decreases a small amount, a lot of new homes are purchased at that small price, but not much else changes. The basic supply and demand theory is that some number of 'people want to live in london' at specific price points - but if the price elasticity of demand is very high, price might not decrease much. This is the 'induced demand' problem with roads - add a lot more lanes, a lot of people who weren't willing to drive at current congestion are now willing to drive at slightly less congestion, so congestion barely decreases.

A congested 10 lane highway is helping twice as many people reach their destination as a congested 5 lane highway. So it sounds like the main problem is that we didn't add enough lanes.

At least for lanes, one does run out of room eventually.

I have no idea how this applies to cities, and if cities are as useful as people bid their prices up to be, then a large amount of construction in cities that's quickly filled at a slightly lower price does benefit those people, even if prices aren't lowered.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

Saitama.

Prices are crazy out to Gunma now if you're on a shinkansen line.

Saitama the sprawling suburb or Saitama the One Punch Man?

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Tokyo isn't. Guess why.

Because Japan is utterly stagnant as a whole?

Tokyo is not stagnant in terms of population.

https://viz.wtf/post/158158642063/tokyo-population-over-the-years-look-at-what (Yes, the graph is bad, but it's the only one I can find with years after 2010.)

Since about 2000, Japan is (on a per-capita basis) no more stagnant than the US. If Tokyo were full of NIMBYs, people could afford to pay more.

https://i0.wp.com/fabiusmaximus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Per-Capita-Real-GDP-of-US-and-Japan.png?resize=889%2C400&ssl=1

If you want to find a metric on which Tokyo and major US cities/metro areas differ, try housing units built. In Tokyo, this was about 100k units/year since 1998.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00782/

So why don't landlords increase prices to capture more of that GDP growth? Because Tokyo has nearly 1M vacant apartments and if a landlord increases prices too much their flat will join the vacant pool. Simple as that.

At peak housing bubble, the entire state of California managed 150k houses/year and as of 2016 it was about 50k.

https://journal.firsttuesday.us/wp-content/uploads/California-Annual-Construction-2017.png

As I mentioned in another thread, we could build 19M homes in Santa Clara alone if we simply increased the density to that of San Francisco. We just choose not to.

Because they've built more houses in Tokyo than in like all of California in the last decade. Zoning in Japan is not local so they've added tons of new housing units where demand rose.

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