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They'll do a study on this by studying Japan, but a better place to study is France. Or even Europe altogether; the high-speed part here is a red herring, what
by niftich 8y ago
They'll do a study on this by studying Japan, but a better place to study is France. Or even Europe altogether; the high-speed part here is a red herring, what matters is seating-room, few-transfer commutes of tolerable duration to outlying towns where road-bound price pressure doesn't currently extend. Many countries in Europe accomplish this with trains of "conventional" speeds.
On the other hand, it's hard to argue that places like Tracy, Stockton, Modesto, and Sacramento aren't already in the gravitational pull of the Bay, or Lancaster and Palmdale aren't already in the commuter belt for LA. Desirability in these places is likely to rise with the option to trade a long car commute to a shorter P+R train commute.
The toss-ups are Bakersfield and especially Fresno. These are metros far removed from others, can't significantly interface daily commuters with others, so their housing and job markets stand on their own. But for the same reasons, among California metros they're also the least subject to existing affordability crises. If their access to the Bay and LA improves, this will change -- and already-sprawling, already-transit-poor Fresno and Bakersfield can hardly distribute this rise in demand evenly in their grid.
EDIT: 'Organic' affordable housing has always been greenfield, because it's cheap to turn peripheral land to inexpensive dwellings. But HSR will serve built-out city centers, where expensive redevelopment is required if one wants to satisfy demand. And if the demand is there, the asking price will reflect that.
- bsder 8y ago> They'll do a study on this by studying Japan And miss the point that the way real estate works in Japan is fundamentally different from the US. In Japan, land ownership doesn't really help build wealth, so people are happy to densify.
- einarvollset 8y agoNote that I'm not disagreeing with you, nor trying to be confrontational, but I'm curious why land ownership in Japan does not build wealth?
- myoon 8y agoNot sure about land values specifically, but residential real estate in Japan generally doesn't appreciate much, if at all, outside the center of the most major cities. There are multiple factors I imagine, like shrinking population and the general aversion to buying used homes. Until fairly recently, homes weren't generally designed to last that long anyway. A lot of homes of the deceased are just abandoned due to the costs of demolition. It's possible this could change somewhat going forward as newer homes have much better construction. This would still depend on the country figuring out how to grow the population though.
- Aeolun 8y agoOne point is that most people do not want to live in an old house that someone lived in (or worse, died in) before. There is a strong tendency towards building new houses on old land. I can only speak for Tokyo, but it basically means that if you buy land for $400k and build a house for $200k, the value of the second will slowly approach zero, while the price of the land does what it does. In Tokyo this appreciates a bit, so your wealth remains more or less the same. If you go outside of Tokyo though, where the ratio becomes more like $50k land, $100k house, it’s easy to see that it’s not something you do as an investment. Land won’t increase in value there either as everyone is leaving for Tokyo.