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It seems like many major cities of the world are experiencing this problem, and no city has been able to come up with a good solution. It always leads to displa

• dnlhmt 11y ago
  Singapore has been able to solve it to a certain extend. 90%+ of land is owned by the government and leased/purchased back to its residents at an affordable rate. This generates revenue the government can re-invest into the economy. It also reduces the impact of a small group of rent seekers siphoning billions out of the local economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
  • tempestn 11y ago
    Tough to employ that model if the government doesn't already own the land though.
• ghshephard 11y ago
  Singapore has a pretty good solution for this sort of thing. Socialize Housing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board), and then drop 10s of thousands of new units onto the market continuously, subsidize citizen ownership (with further subsidies if you live close to your parents), and further, create a culture of constantly wiping out the older (20-30+ year) apartment blocks that were lower density, and replacing them with taller, higher density buildings. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_En_bloc_Redevelopment_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_En_bloc_Redevelopmen... ) Pricing has stabilized, and, even is dropping a little bit.
• badloginagain 11y ago
  That requires the government to acknowledge there is a problem and come up with a clear strategy to solve the problem. The BC Provincial Government is working very hard to ignore it as a problem, where they won't even commission studies to generate data on how bad the problem is (or isn't). The federal government has also signaled their distancing from the Vancouver housing issue. Also, the real problem is foreign ownership. Canada has some of the loosest foreign ownership laws in the world, and provincial/federal governments do not punish foreign ownership with taxes or anything of the like. That means if you are making a lot of money in a corrupt country (China/Saudi Arabia), the Vancouver housing market is a great insurance policy. The result is you have entire neighbourhoods with no available properties, but are virtually empty (Coal Harbour), and new buildings are built small and shoddy (meant for investment, not livability). My wife and I make over 100k per year combined, and we will absolutely be leaving the city when we start a family. It all stems from the fact that the local government is willfully ignoring what can be compared to a cancer. It'll only get worse.
  • refurb 11y ago
    Also, the real problem is foreign ownership. What evidence is there that foreign ownership is a major problem? I've heard plenty of anecdotes, but no actual data. I do know that Vancouver real estate agents are milking the "yellow peril" for all it's worth. "Buy now before China owns all of Vancouver!". Suffice to say, Canadians are doing what American's did in the early 2000's. They are going into a crazy amount of debt to buy housing, which is only pushing prices up even higher. Some of the stats make Canada look even worse than the US did at it's peak[1]. [1]http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/canada-housing-bubble.png http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
    • badloginagain 11y ago
      Unfortunately, the provincial/foreign governments refuse to even study the problem. So all we get is anecdotes and investigatory journalism[1], which do not make for good data points. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/the-real-estate-technique-fuelling-vancouvers-housing-market/article28634868/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/the-real-...
• skewart 11y ago
  "1. Build really tall. Hasn't worked out all that great in Hong Kong, though." What do you mean when you say it hasn't worked out great in Hong Kong? Is it because prices are still high in a lot of neighborhoods there? I'd say the build-really-tall strategy has worked out quite well in HK. There is a range of affordability in close proximity with good transit, and lots of parks and open space. It's a remarkably livable city. The fundamental problem is that real estate in major cities has become a scarce luxury good covered by the wealthy. Restrictions on building - rent control and aggressive property taxes basically fall into this category - only make things worse. The only way to make Vancouver, SF, and anywhere else affordable is to radically increase supply relative to demand. In practice things aren't that simple. The best bet for someone looking to live and raise a family is probably your fourth option. There are a lot of really nice cities out there.
  • msvan 11y ago
    I'm basing my judgment on hearsay. I was under the impression that HK property prices were through the roof, so I stand corrected.
    • skewart 11y ago
      They certainly are in plenty of neighborhoods - especially compared to other cities in China. The thing is that despite the tall buildings there isn't actually that much supply on HK island itself because it's so tiny. Still, I think there's a much bigger range relative to overall quality of urban life compared to, say, SF. And things get a lot more affordable across the harbor in Kowloon and in the New Territories. Though, even there it's probably not cheap compared to most cities in mainland China. I'm far from an expert on this though, and maybe I'm off base here. I've just spent time there and looked at real estate and been struck by how not impossible it was to find reasonable places at reasonable prices compared to the Bay Area.
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• neves 11y ago
  German has some solutions: http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2011/06/how-germany-achieved-stable-affordable-housing/ http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2011/06/how-germany-achieved...
  • sauere 11y ago
    I think the conclusions drawn in this post are outdated. The german real estate market was undervalued for a very long time. In the last 10 years there has been a very rapid (100%+) rent increase in the cities and a massive property rush from foreign investors in the in major cities (especially Berlin). Another factor to consider: seeing that 1.5million+ "refugees" came to Germany in 2015 alone, these increases will become even sharper over the next few years.
• thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  > Rent control. This is often unfair and inflates price of non-rent controlled apartments. There's the rub. Virtually all rent control schemes in North America only apply to a subset of properties (usually the shitty ones), which isn't fair and often doesn't work. Meanwhile, Germany has a long history of successful rent control, perhaps not coincidentally because it applies universally.
  • brc 11y ago
    They are crappy because of the rent control. It is always and every time a terrible idea. It should never be implemented anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Price fixing destroys markets and creates a tiny subset of winners at the expense of everyone else.
• rsync 11y ago
  I have witnessed and seen the day to day effects of a city (albeit, a very small one) that did find a solution to this problem: Aspen, Colorado. It's a tremendous outlier - both in population (8000 full time residents) and in pricing (even more expensive free market housing than any of the big markets that are typically discussed). The solution was to build city-subsidized "resident housing" that actual residents (as opposed to seasonal) enter a lottery to win, which gives them the ability to purchase the property (again, subsidized) and become property owners inside Aspen. Although the property itself can appreciate with the market, the owner can only realize 2-4% appreciation per year - the rest goes back to the city. It works. There is a legitimate, affordable path to actual home ownership for regular folks in Aspen, and it takes those people out of the "affordable" rental pool which softens the pricing pressure for people who aren't staying forever or who haven't won a lottery share yet.
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  • chaostheory 11y ago
    They already have this lottery system in various cities in the SF Bay Area. I'm sure it helps some, but it hasn't made a big dent in the housing problem.
• mahyarm 11y ago
  Whenever I look at hong kong on google earth, I see a lot of empty green space that tall buildings could be built on. I also see an area in the north that isn't really dense, large open sports areas and green areas on the south island. HK the territory seems to be much larger than HK the city and it smells suspicious that prices are high but land is not being used. And don't say, we need parks! I'm fairly certain that large amounts of that parkland is unused because you need to hike in pretty deep to enjoy it. And highrises can be built on mountains.
  • Nicholas_C 11y ago
    >And don't say, we need parks! I'm fairly certain that large amounts of that parkland is unused because you need to hike in pretty deep to enjoy it. So we should monitor how far people hike into these parks? And if the number of people in a remote part of a city park falls below X number of people a day for Y days we should just bulldoze that part of the park for buildings?
    • mahyarm 11y ago
      It's one of the most populous, unaffordable and dense cities in the world, where people live in metal cage bunk beds because it is so unaffordable. On top of that, the majority of the land in HK is park land. I think a few acres of park land can be developed to release pressure on the housing market so people are not forced by circumstance to live in such situations. And by developing on some park land, the deep park land will start to get some utilization. Go look at singapore for example, they use a significantly larger amount of their land as actual city space.
  • danieltillett 11y ago
    You do know this is the water catchment for Hong Kong?
• Kluny 11y ago
  5. Legalize and encourage squatting to make life difficult for speculators. Impractical, but fun :)
• sauere 11y ago
  4. is the only solution. Politicians can put as many fancy well-intended laws in place as they want. All these laws will have only have minimal effects on the underlying supply and demand market forces. In fact, chances are that those laws will even increase the overall average rent due to the added bureaucratic overhead und regulations that are indirectly passed on to the tenants.
• api 11y ago
  I think it's a symptom of something else: the hyper-centralization of relevance and cultural center of gravity in only a few places. When I was younger (1990s), I don't remember it mattering so much where you were located. I've spoken to older people and they concur: they've all said that when they were young being in, say, Indianapolis or Toledo was not a big deal. Today, at least in the USA, there's a strong sense that you're nobody unless you are in one of about eight big coastal cities. Nothing happens anywhere else. I'm talking about perception here. You can argue that this isn't really true, and that you can do anything most anywhere, but the cultural perception is that you're nobody and can't do anything unless you are in NYC, SF, LA, etc. I'm a startup founder and have been told by several people on several occasions that we are doomed because we are not in the Bay Area. I'm in SoCal but apparently if we're not in SF or its Southern suburbs it's impossible to succeed as a tech company. Obviously I don't believe this, but the meme is strong. If enough people take this stuff seriously, it's going to contribute to a hell of a property bubble in SF/SV. I still don't understand why this is the case, especially since the Internet was supposed to have the opposite effect. By making information globally available and communication easy, the Internet was supposed to flatten the world and make place less relevant. Instead I've noticed a strong and obvious trend in the opposite direction since circa 2000. I can only comment on the USA, but what I see elsewhere seems to support this being a global thing. London has gone totally insane for example. I wonder if the Internet is actually having a paradoxical centralizing effect here, allowing larger cities to broadcast their cultural "signal" and then have that signal amplified enough by network effects to make them appear exponentially more and more influential. This in turn drives a feedback loop in which talent and ambition is drawn increasingly to these cities, etc., and the rest of the country is hollowed out. It's actually part of an even larger trend. Since 2000 everything seems to have gone increasingly power law: wealth distribution, geographic relevance, education, etc.
  • otoolep 11y ago
    As far as I can see this is exactly what is happening. More powerful computers and communications are amplifying the power of individuals, and as a result making relationships even more important. And cities have always been the places of innovation and relationships. Just even more so now.
• oftenwrong 11y ago
  You don't need to build tall to increase density. Areas of Tokyo like Setagaya have population densities in excess of 14000 residents per square kilometer. There are few tall buildings; it is largely single-family homes. Vancouver proper only has a density around 5000 residents per square kilometer. There's plenty of land to infill with housing without building tall.
• Grishnakh 11y ago
  What's wrong with #3? Maybe it wouldn't have been popular 10 years ago, but after seeing the disastrous effects of a housing bubble, I for one would be perfectly happy to see property speculation taxed heavily. For instance, I think a simple solution would be to eliminate property taxes altogether for primary residences, but levy significant property taxes on investment properties and second/third homes. You'd have to design this bit well, though, because you don't want to kill the rental market: a lot of people aren't in a position to buy their own home. Perhaps a tax break for a first rental house, but jack up the rates if you own more than one rental house.