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They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that

They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops complaining a developer wants to build flats. For heaven's sake, people need to live somewhere, please do build.

spunker540 5y ago
It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand
- Drunk_Engineer 5y ago
  California and NYC have a declining population.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Along with huge portions of the rural midwest. It all has to do with meeting the demand where the demand exists.
  - yawaworht1978 5y ago
    Just distorted number because of increases homelessness. Sarcasm , however, there is a bit truth to that.
  - viscanti 5y ago
    If you cherry pick data during COVID that's true. But it was the first year since 1900 with any decline and state forecasters say it's more to do with over 50,000 COVID related deaths and less migration from other countries (the largest source of population growth for CA for many years now) because other countries were locked down. As far as I know, no one expect that decline to be anything more than a very temporary thing.
    - adventured 5y ago
      California's population expansion clearly hit a wall back in 2017-2018, pre-pandemic. 2019 saw their population expansion de facto stop. The rate of growth has been dropping rapidly toward zero for much of the past decade, and they reached that line before the pandemic hit, it's not a new trend due to Covid. This decade it'll go negative. The exodus - a desperate flight from California's particularly horrible governments and epic mismanagement - will get worse yet, not better. Fewer people want to live in California and it's very obvious why. 2010 to 2020, California saw a 6% population expansion. The slowest decade of population growth in a century for the state. Year to year, it went from very slow growth at the beginning, to zero by the end. Next is a contraction. Texas by contrast saw 16% expansion in that time. It's booming and it's also very obvious why.
      - treeman79 5y ago
        Fled California a dozen years ago. I miss the weather, but otherwise glad to have left. Gang violence, over regulation, out of control prices, etc. Can’t imagine going back with all this nonsense around legalizing shop lifting, segregation coming back. Let the downvotes start
        peter422 5y ago
        I’m sure the place you moved is perfect with no problems whatsoever. Just like California used to be back in the good old days before things changed.
        bsder 5y ago
        Yeah, I note that these kinds of spammy comments used to always mention Texas. Now I note they don't mention Texas quite so much, anymore.
        pempem 5y ago
        It doesn't need to be downvoted. You identified yourself with your word choice. Separately I hate the over usage of the word "fled". No one was chasing anyone. In an age of basically yearly refugee crises in the world it's terrible to see its overuse.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > so supply > demand Nope. Japan has a declining population, but the population keeps urbanising. So while there's hefty supply (literally millions of unoccupied housing inventory) in places nobody wants to live in, there is not in places where people are moving to (large cities). There's very regularly news and posts about unoccupied houses ("akiya") being literally given away by government and local authorities because even at auction for pennies nobody wants to bid on rural properties. There was one going through here just last week. Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000.
  - adventured 5y ago
    Yep. Japan's urban population is somewhere between stagnating and declining, not increasing. The contraction trend is even worse in most of their cities other than Tokyo. Simultaneously the percentage of the population that is urban, is very slowly increasing. Those are two very different things. Their cities are net contracting in population. They're now nationally losing people faster than they're urbanizing. They're currently losing around a quarter of a million people per year nationally. Their cities are not expanding faster than that drop. And given their already very high urbanization rate (and very slow rate of urbanization increase), it's unlikely anything will significantly change in that regard. This decade will see either a mostly flat population trend in Tokyo, or a modest contraction. What it won't show, is a meaningful expansion, as their national population contraction gets worse. The pandemic put enough pressure on Tokyo that it actually contracted for the first time in ~25 years. February 25, 2021 "Tokyo, Feb. 25 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo's estimated population fell by 662 from a year before to 13,952,915 as of Feb. 1, marking its first year-on-year decline in about 25 years, the metropolitan government said Thursday." https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2021022500969/ https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2021022500969/ However, if you go back further, you can see the trend was already toward decline. This is from 2019: June, 2019, The Guardian "Has Tokyo reached ‘peak city’?" "One could argue that the world’s biggest city has hit a sweet spot: a flatlining population, pervasive transit and little gentrification. But is ‘peak city’ even possible – and where does Tokyo go from here?" "Unlike many megacities, the world’s largest metropolitan area has largely stopped growing, either in land or population." https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/14/has-tokyo-reached-peak-city https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/14/has-tokyo-rea...
p_l 5y ago
Japan not so much scrapped various regulations as their regulations are just different - and nationwide. One of the effects of how their zoning classes work is that you don't have "residential-only" zones with no shops or other amenities - instead you have zones defined along the lines of maximum nuisance and with overlapping uses. You have a total of 12 zones, which start from "exclusively low rise residential" that are essentially low density houses that can be also small shops or offices + schools, to exclusively industrial zones that prevent residential or other construction - but it's a spectrum between them. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
- mortenjorck 5y ago
  Every now and then I watch one of these Japanese "video walk" channels on YouTube and find myself despairing at how wildly better their land use is than in the US. Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. And yet, so much of Tokyo seems like it's built at the scale of a small-town main street: Between the major roads with their skyscrapers sit networks of pedestrian-friendly streets with little shops and restaurants, often crossed by even smaller yokocho which themselves have bars and flats. Quiet side streets intermix residential buildings and even single-family homes, and yet somehow these little districts are all linked up together into the world's largest metropolis.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a while before cars happened.
    - kelp 5y ago
      In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods. Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning?
te_chris 5y ago
NZ has not got anything near price stability. It’s going mental as they all sell the same houses to each other over and over
- refurb 5y ago
  Throwing Canada in the mix! We got excited over our 5%+ GDP growth in Q1 until we realize 4% of it was housing!
joe_the_user 5y ago
A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the neighbors want to protect. You need regulations that encourage dense, ideally very dense, housing. Enough dense housing and you can "preserve the character" (if not the home values) of the smallish towns.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because you'd need to buy up the land that the current builds are on. It's not as simple a solution as "build dense housing" makes it sound.
  - babyshake 5y ago
    What about throwing as much money as it takes to not only build new towns with dense housing in places where those towns don't already exist, but to make those new places to live much more desirable than a pre-planned new development normally would be? I imagine the political will isn't there. The answer to me would be an ultimatum. Either yes in your backyard, or a tax is levied for a new development that won't be total crap.
    - eric-hu 5y ago
      This sounds like the original motivation of some ghost towns in China.
      - babyshake 5y ago
markdown 5y ago
> I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. I don't know about Japan, but that can't possibly be right about NZ. Nobody in our generation will ever be able to afford a home in Auckland. Land Value Tax sorely needed.
- beiller 5y ago
  Same in Canada. I am in the top 3% of wage earners in the entire country and can not "afford" to buy. Average price is > 1 million. At > 1 million, a 20% down payment is required in cash. That would basically take my well balanced portfolio into pure real estate holdings not to mention a massive tax hit to sell 200k+ of my portfolio. I used quotes in afford because I could afford it, but I feel it would be a huge mistake
  - refurb 5y ago
    Sounds like you need to grow balls like your fellow Canadians and go “all in”. Most folks I know buying throw every dollar they have into a house plus a hundred thousand from the bank of mom and dad. You’ll never be able to afford unless you do it.
    - beiller 5y ago
      I'll stick with never. Rents keep dropping. It's almost like it's... pure speculation with no fundamentals. Surely that can't be the case, otherwise rents would keep dropping! Oh no!
      - itwy 5y ago
        Rent is not dropping. It is going up, rapidly.
        beiller 5y ago
        Oh you checked the numbers for me? Oh darn. If rent is rapidly going up and purchasing is more and more impossible, I guess the only natural conclusion is everyone making mid six figures will all be unable to live in homes any more. Maybe even homeless? I should probably just drop out.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
Deregulation of the construction market was a disaster for New Zealand, and cost the country billions of dollars [1]. Also, New Zealand has some of the least affordable housing in the world, and it's only getting worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis

spunker540 5y ago

It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand

Drunk_Engineer 5y ago
California and NYC have a declining population.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Along with huge portions of the rural midwest. It all has to do with meeting the demand where the demand exists.
- yawaworht1978 5y ago
  Just distorted number because of increases homelessness. Sarcasm , however, there is a bit truth to that.
- viscanti 5y ago
  If you cherry pick data during COVID that's true. But it was the first year since 1900 with any decline and state forecasters say it's more to do with over 50,000 COVID related deaths and less migration from other countries (the largest source of population growth for CA for many years now) because other countries were locked down. As far as I know, no one expect that decline to be anything more than a very temporary thing.
  - adventured 5y ago
    California's population expansion clearly hit a wall back in 2017-2018, pre-pandemic. 2019 saw their population expansion de facto stop. The rate of growth has been dropping rapidly toward zero for much of the past decade, and they reached that line before the pandemic hit, it's not a new trend due to Covid. This decade it'll go negative. The exodus - a desperate flight from California's particularly horrible governments and epic mismanagement - will get worse yet, not better. Fewer people want to live in California and it's very obvious why. 2010 to 2020, California saw a 6% population expansion. The slowest decade of population growth in a century for the state. Year to year, it went from very slow growth at the beginning, to zero by the end. Next is a contraction. Texas by contrast saw 16% expansion in that time. It's booming and it's also very obvious why.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Fled California a dozen years ago. I miss the weather, but otherwise glad to have left. Gang violence, over regulation, out of control prices, etc. Can’t imagine going back with all this nonsense around legalizing shop lifting, segregation coming back. Let the downvotes start
      - peter422 5y ago
        I’m sure the place you moved is perfect with no problems whatsoever. Just like California used to be back in the good old days before things changed.
        bsder 5y ago
        Yeah, I note that these kinds of spammy comments used to always mention Texas. Now I note they don't mention Texas quite so much, anymore.
      - pempem 5y ago
        It doesn't need to be downvoted. You identified yourself with your word choice. Separately I hate the over usage of the word "fled". No one was chasing anyone. In an age of basically yearly refugee crises in the world it's terrible to see its overuse.
masklinn 5y ago
> so supply > demand Nope. Japan has a declining population, but the population keeps urbanising. So while there's hefty supply (literally millions of unoccupied housing inventory) in places nobody wants to live in, there is not in places where people are moving to (large cities). There's very regularly news and posts about unoccupied houses ("akiya") being literally given away by government and local authorities because even at auction for pennies nobody wants to bid on rural properties. There was one going through here just last week. Some prefectures are nearing 20% vacancy rates, but they're places like… well basically all of Shikoku which is largely mountainous and rural, and has been bleeding population at a rate of 5%/decade since 2000.
- adventured 5y ago
  Yep. Japan's urban population is somewhere between stagnating and declining, not increasing. The contraction trend is even worse in most of their cities other than Tokyo. Simultaneously the percentage of the population that is urban, is very slowly increasing. Those are two very different things. Their cities are net contracting in population. They're now nationally losing people faster than they're urbanizing. They're currently losing around a quarter of a million people per year nationally. Their cities are not expanding faster than that drop. And given their already very high urbanization rate (and very slow rate of urbanization increase), it's unlikely anything will significantly change in that regard. This decade will see either a mostly flat population trend in Tokyo, or a modest contraction. What it won't show, is a meaningful expansion, as their national population contraction gets worse. The pandemic put enough pressure on Tokyo that it actually contracted for the first time in ~25 years. February 25, 2021 "Tokyo, Feb. 25 (Jiji Press)--Tokyo's estimated population fell by 662 from a year before to 13,952,915 as of Feb. 1, marking its first year-on-year decline in about 25 years, the metropolitan government said Thursday." https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2021022500969/ https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2021022500969/ However, if you go back further, you can see the trend was already toward decline. This is from 2019: June, 2019, The Guardian "Has Tokyo reached ‘peak city’?" "One could argue that the world’s biggest city has hit a sweet spot: a flatlining population, pervasive transit and little gentrification. But is ‘peak city’ even possible – and where does Tokyo go from here?" "Unlike many megacities, the world’s largest metropolitan area has largely stopped growing, either in land or population." https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/14/has-tokyo-reached-peak-city https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/14/has-tokyo-rea...

p_l 5y ago

Japan not so much scrapped various regulations as their regulations are just different - and nationwide. One of the effects of how their zoning classes work is that you don't have "residential-only" zones with no shops or other amenities - instead you have zones defined along the lines of maximum nuisance and with overlapping uses. You have a total of 12 zones, which start from "exclusively low rise residential" that are essentially low density houses that can be also small shops or offices + schools, to exclusively industrial zones that prevent residential or other construction - but it's a spectrum between them. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

mortenjorck 5y ago
Every now and then I watch one of these Japanese "video walk" channels on YouTube and find myself despairing at how wildly better their land use is than in the US. Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. And yet, so much of Tokyo seems like it's built at the scale of a small-town main street: Between the major roads with their skyscrapers sit networks of pedestrian-friendly streets with little shops and restaurants, often crossed by even smaller yokocho which themselves have bars and flats. Quiet side streets intermix residential buildings and even single-family homes, and yet somehow these little districts are all linked up together into the world's largest metropolis.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a while before cars happened.
  - kelp 5y ago
    In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods. Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning?

te_chris 5y ago

NZ has not got anything near price stability. It’s going mental as they all sell the same houses to each other over and over

refurb 5y ago
Throwing Canada in the mix! We got excited over our 5%+ GDP growth in Q1 until we realize 4% of it was housing!

joe_the_user 5y ago

A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the neighbors want to protect. You need regulations that encourage dense, ideally very dense, housing. Enough dense housing and you can "preserve the character" (if not the home values) of the smallish towns.

RHSeeger 5y ago
Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because you'd need to buy up the land that the current builds are on. It's not as simple a solution as "build dense housing" makes it sound.
- babyshake 5y ago
  What about throwing as much money as it takes to not only build new towns with dense housing in places where those towns don't already exist, but to make those new places to live much more desirable than a pre-planned new development normally would be? I imagine the political will isn't there. The answer to me would be an ultimatum. Either yes in your backyard, or a tax is levied for a new development that won't be total crap.
  - eric-hu 5y ago
    This sounds like the original motivation of some ghost towns in China.
    - babyshake 5y ago

markdown 5y ago

> I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. I don't know about Japan, but that can't possibly be right about NZ. Nobody in our generation will ever be able to afford a home in Auckland. Land Value Tax sorely needed.

beiller 5y ago
Same in Canada. I am in the top 3% of wage earners in the entire country and can not "afford" to buy. Average price is > 1 million. At > 1 million, a 20% down payment is required in cash. That would basically take my well balanced portfolio into pure real estate holdings not to mention a massive tax hit to sell 200k+ of my portfolio. I used quotes in afford because I could afford it, but I feel it would be a huge mistake
- refurb 5y ago
  Sounds like you need to grow balls like your fellow Canadians and go “all in”. Most folks I know buying throw every dollar they have into a house plus a hundred thousand from the bank of mom and dad. You’ll never be able to afford unless you do it.
  - beiller 5y ago
    I'll stick with never. Rents keep dropping. It's almost like it's... pure speculation with no fundamentals. Surely that can't be the case, otherwise rents would keep dropping! Oh no!
    - itwy 5y ago
      Rent is not dropping. It is going up, rapidly.
      - beiller 5y ago
        Oh you checked the numbers for me? Oh darn. If rent is rapidly going up and purchasing is more and more impossible, I guess the only natural conclusion is everyone making mid six figures will all be unable to live in homes any more. Maybe even homeless? I should probably just drop out.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

Deregulation of the construction market was a disaster for New Zealand, and cost the country billions of dollars [1]. Also, New Zealand has some of the least affordable housing in the world, and it's only getting worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis