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They buried the lede (presumably since it was inconvenient to the thesis of the piece): “Housing is seriously unaffordable in Tokyo-Yokohama, with a 4.4 Averag
by timr 10y ago
They buried the lede (presumably since it was inconvenient to the thesis of the piece):
“Housing is seriously unaffordable in Tokyo-Yokohama, with a 4.4 Average Multiple (average house price divided by average household income). Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto has an Average Multiple of 3.5 and is thus rated as moderately unaffordable. Despite these ratings, Japan has the most affordable housing of any megacities (over 10,000,000 residents) in the Demographia Survey.”
If you think real estate in Japan is "affordable", you need only talk to Japanese people. Salaries here are low, and the economy has been stagnant for decades. Younger people tend to live with their parents until marriage, and if you ask them why, they'll tell you: they can't afford to live on their own.
Yes, Construction is rampant, but that's mostly because buildings here are ripped down every few decades, not because cities are necessarily building more or larger buildings. There's just tons of churn.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you want affordable cities, a big part of the "secret" is tanking your economy for a few decades.
- ska 10y agoAnd yet it is much more affordable than, say, San Francisco (9.2) or Vancouver (10.3) by that same metric, which was their point. By this metric at least, Tokyo fares far better than comparable cities - no lede buried.
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- timr 10y ago"By this metric at least, Tokyo fares far better than comparable cities - no lede buried." But to make that comparison fair, you need to control for a lot of important factors. I've named a couple of big ones. There are others (like land area - Tokyo is huge. SF and Vancouver are tiny and constrained by geography.) This article simply asserts that Tokyo is affordable (which, again, it is not), and that its "affordability" is due to construction. There's no real data here that supports that conclusion. It might be "relatively" more affordable than the frothiest global markets, but SF and Vancouver have been experiencing much higher population growth over the last decade, and SF in particular has been ground zero for a massive speculative bubble. The comparison is apples and oranges.
- ska 10y agoYou can argue with the conclusions or methods , sure. But to claim that they buried the lede was just disingenuous.
- timr 10y agoThe article's thesis is contradicted by the evidence cited by the article itself: Japan's cities are not "affordable" to the people who live there. Arguing that Japanese cities are "more affordable" than other, less-affordable cities is a truism; by definition, every city that is less expensive than another city is doing something that makes it cheaper. This fact alone provides no useful information. But some people really want to believe that Japan's building habits are the answer, and not, say, their 30-year recession, or sprawl, or any of dozens of other factors. Perhaps "buried the lede" is not the right phrase for this kind of thing, but it's still nonsense.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoThe Tokyo metropolitan area contains the entire population of California in a region the size of the Bay Area.
- cthalupa 10y agoThey have buried the lede, though. They can say 'More Affordable' megacities, but still not affordable. And they include Yokohama, which is still a lot cheaper than Tokyo proper. They've basically included commuting distance cities outside of Tokyo in the calculation to reach these numbers. What happens if you do the same for SF or Vancouver?
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- Retric 10y agohttp://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.htm http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht... Tokyo added around 1.5 million people from 2000 to now. That takes a lot of construction.
- timr 10y agoTokyo Metro's population (2016) is 13 million. So it grew by 13% in ~16 years, or about 0.88% per year. Whether or not you consider that "a lot", it's not an exceptional number. It's also impossible to know how that translates to "new units" without knowing a lot of other factors.
- Retric 10y agoIt gets harder not easer to add housing as population increases so the % growth is almost meaningless. Also you can look at utilization numbers from 2000 to see it really is new housing and largely from replacing smaller buildings with larger ones which means each building starts with the deficit that it needs to replace the old buildings population.
- saosebastiao 10y agoIf you think the situation is bad, you need some perspective. That is massively better than any major coastal city in the US, and better than any first world city that is growing. And even if it were bad by global standards, I'm pretty sure stagnant wages and declining housing costs is a way better situation than ours with declining wages and rapidly increasing housing costs.
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