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The housing thing is part of how Anglo countries have generated generational wealth. Homes in America have always been seen as an investment and thus it’s impossible, politically, to let housing prices fall, or even slow the growth of housing prices.
This is the YIMBY/New Urbanist/Pod People story. But it isn't true. The Case-Shiller index, adjusted for inflation shows large drops in real housing prices. In fact, housing has been flat (though at a very high level) in real terms for a couple of years.
Generational wealth, in terms of inheritance, isn't much of an issue in America. We live too long. If your parents die in their 70s, you probably get your inheritance in your 50s. Whoopty-doo; by that time either you're already well-established (and your kids, if any, probably are too) or it's too damned late. So housing wealth is either borrowed to provide a cushier retirement, or borrowed to burn in the furnace of the health care/nursing care system.
This series tells the real story, I think. Single-family housing completions crashed after the bubble. The reason for the crash is obvious, but they never recovered. Why not? Well, this gets into more speculation, but my read is that the New Urbanist anti-sprawl pod people were able to use the crash to seize control of housing policy. And they preferred multifamily. However, most actual buyers don't, which limited that; you will notice that when people post about how expensive housing is over on the birdsite, they nearly always use a single-family detached home as a benchmark. Population, in terms of households, of course, kept growing. More demand, less supply... what do you expect? And COVID made things worse by making multifamily even LESS desirable.
Good news is there's a medium-term solution. All those empty-nester boomers are going to be leaving their homes, one way or another. And Z and Alpha are smaller generations. I don't know if the (mostly Millennial) anti-sprawl people will ever lose their grip on new housing policy, but I expect there will be a lot of renovation to provide single-family housing for Z and Alpha and the following generations.
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I'm skeptical about this policy you describe, which I will refer to as PHP ("protect housing prices").
How does the PHP policy work in practice? For example, there are parts of the US which are very pro-development. Texas comes to mind. There are also places which are very hostile to development, for example California. There are also areas where housing is very inexpensive, for example the area around Rochester and Buffalo, New York.
How is PHP implemented in all of these different areas?
Also, how do you explain housing prices in non-Anglo countries? I mentioned above that it's crazy expensive to get a house or apartment in or near Tel Aviv. I'm pretty sure the same is true of Rome or Oslo or Stockholm. Is every developed country implementing PHP?
Tokyo (and Japan more generally) doesn't implement PHP. Houses are culturally considered depreciating goods that are worthless after a few decades, and zoning is extremely liberal compared to all other developed countries.
To some extent you're correct, part of the problem is just urbanization, and inevitably lots of money chasing physically limited space drives up the price. The best areas of Tokyo are still extraordinarily expensive despite every pro-development policy possible and significant amounts of Japanese housing would be considered unlivable by American standards.
Despite this, there's clearly a massive difference in house price growth between Anglo PHP major metros where prices have been exploding, and Tokyo where growth has been much more sedate in comparison; even within the States, the difference between Austin and SF is palpable.
Assuming you are correct, it seems to me that's more of an accident of Japanese culture than a conscious plan to prop up (or not prop up) housing prices.
Yeah, from what I understand there is extremely inexpensive housing available in Japan in various remote areas.
Anyway, since you bring up liberal zoning in Japan, I think it's worth noting that Houston is pretty well known for having lax zoning compared to other large cities. And indeed from what I understand, there's much less of a housing crunch in Houston than there is in other big cities in the US, for example San Francisco or New York. I just having a hard time believing that the difference between these areas is the degree to which government has been captured by greedy baby boomers.
Rather, I think that Houston has plenty of land and more of an individualistic libertarian mentality among people of all age ranges. While in the New York City area, land is much scarcer and the mentality is more statist and authoritarian.
Well, the point is that culture shapes economics and politics.
Anglo people (and many other cultures e.g Chinese) view housing as an investment and hence over time laws are shaped around this preference e.g strict zoning laws to keep property values high and the population happy. To the extent that boomers are at fault it's because most are homeowners, but millennial homeowners have all the same impulses.
Japanese people don't value housing as an investment as much, and so the economy and politics are less captured by the interests of homeowners. It's not to say that this is perfect e.g Chinese investment into Tokyo has become a hot topic lately, and urban land is fundamentally scarce, but it's clearly a lot better than whatever Anglo society is doing in this regard.
I disagree that this is a cultural issue. There is a very very good reason people don't like buying houses > 30 years old: they're considerably less earthquake-proof + more likely to have wooden structural elements that may be damaged from earthquakes + humidity.
That to my mind is a temporary factor. It's entirely possible that the current culture shifts considerably now that anti-earthquake tech has got good enough that you can broadly assume buildings are going to hang around for 100 years.
You could well be right, but when and how much these things shift is of course impossible to predict.
The obvious examples that comes to mind are pork taboos; the cultural taboo against eating pork in many cultures and religions has lasted well beyond the actual danger of eating pork.
That's a fair point, but Japan is such a strong outlier in terms of how people treat houses that it strengthens my suspicion that this attitude is a temporary aberration. I hope you're right.
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Well what's your evidence for this link? Do agree that zoning laws are rather lax in Houston? And if so, are you saying that the culture on the Texas gulf coast doesn't see housing as an investment?
I guess I'd say that like most things it's a spectrum rather than a binary; I know little about Texan culture (or the Hispanic culture that Texas is increasingly intertwining with) but I'd guess it's probably between SF and Japan in terms of treating housing as an investment, and thus the level of zoning also lies between SF and Japan in rigidity.
For sure I agree that high housing prices are poly-casual and not solely because of boomers or whatever; e.g geography, Houston can sprawl in all directions while the most expensive places in the world like SF and Hong Kong have to deal with mountains and ocean.
Hard to believe that Texas is unusual among US states in terms of seeing housing an investment.
But anyway, I take it your evidence for the link you posit is (1) the example of Japan; and (2) your guesses about the cultures of other jurisdictions?
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