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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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