15 ms·

I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no

I really don't understand why governments around the globe just throw their hands in the air and pretend housing is an unsolvable problem for which they have no obligation to fix. It wasn't always like this - in 1922 in Australia we realised there was a shortage of 25,000 homes, so they just made it happen [1]. Why are we so impotent today? Do we just not care enough? Are the vested interests too powerful? [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FlSIML5aYAAVmvf?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FlSIML5aYAAVmvf?format=jpg&name=... https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2947838631/view?sectionId=nla.obj-2959070613&searchTerm=%22high+rent%22&partId=nla.obj-2947971754# https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2947838631/view?sectionId=nla.obj...

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
In Vancouver is pretty common to buy homes and sit on them empty as organization mean. Can you blame them? The price is meant to double on 10 years, but any apartment or house quadrupled in price over the last 15, giving incredibile yields... I don't have access to the data, our realtor showed us many times data across the last 50 years.
TedShiller 4y ago
I really don't understand why people are thirsty in the desert when they don't have water. Why are they so impotent?
fullshark 4y ago
A very large % of the population's entire wealth is in their home, and their life plans involve that asset appreciating forever.
pxue 4y ago
Supply is artificially controlled by voters who don't want density to increase, masked behind preservations, environmental concerns or just plain corruption
- plantain 4y ago
  What changed? Governments used to aggressively intervene in the housing market.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    My hypothesis has been that renters stopped voting. They tend to be transient, younger, non-voters while landowners tend to be older, rooted and vote fervently. Density hurts landowners by decreasing property values and landowners vote.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > renters stopped voting Renters also got co-opted into being NIMBYs out of fear of gentrification.
      - stoppingin 4y ago
        This idea is pure fantasy. This condition of classifying people as NIMBYs if they disagree with you on this topic is incredibly toxic. There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth Totally agree. But the counterpart of that is rising housing costs. If you accept that tradeoff, you aren't a NIMBY. This covers many homeowners. But renters opposed to development while complaining about housing costs are trying to suppress their housing costs by increasing others'. That externalization is textbook NIMBY.
        stoppingin 4y ago
        Thank you for taking the time to make a nice reply, and for not taking my criticism of your post personally. I really appreciate that. I feel like you have a very arbitrary definition of NIMBY. I'm writing this post right now from the 14th floor of a highrise building in Sydney's inner city, in the apartment I rent from a landlord who lives in mainland China. There are still rows of historic terrace houses in the nearby suburbs that have been heritage listed. I'm sure property developers would love to turn these into more highrise apartments. Even though I'm renting, I don't want these to be replaced with endless new apartments. I could list a dozen reasons too. For one, I don't think this would help create a city that people would actually enjoy living in. I've been told by people who would know that one of Sydney's big problems is that property developers are able to artificially inflate property value by staggering the release of newly developed property onto the market. So more development isn't necessarily going to solve any of this country's problems with property value. It hasn't so far.
RC_ITR 4y ago
The downside to making home ownership popular by making it a “no brainer” asset is that you have to keep making it a “no brainer” asset indefinitely. 2008 was people finding the boundaries of the equation (“just how quickly can we make prices go up?”) and the foreseeable future is a slower continuation of that game: housing will keep getting more expensive but not better because current asset holders will pull all the levers they can (outright blocking supply, making it more expensive to build via things like below-market-rate requirements, etc) to keep the train rolling. Honestly the inevitable fallout is probably one of the greatest risks to the current societal structure (probably tied with climate change). Let’s hope Gen Z is up to tackle both.
mc32 4y ago
Previously demand was induced locally as a basic need. Beginning with Japanese surpluses and no better place to reinvest, their corps. began picking up real estate as foreign investment. Today high worth individuals with excess cash are driving worldwide demand. They are not going to live in most of that real estate. Todays dynamics are different. It looks like Canada is tackling the problem in the right place.
yodsanklai 4y ago
I wonder what's the impact or Airbnb in big touristy cities. Has it been quantified somehow?
stoppingin 4y ago
Sydney's metropolitan area is already oversized. People are already regularly commuting for well over an hour to the city center on congested public transport, or driving on congested roadways. I don't think Melbourne is much different Where would we put 25,000 new homes today?
- xvilka 4y ago
  Just do it like any big Asian city: 1) build high-rises 2) build more metro lines Look at Tokio or Shanghai, as an example.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    Tokyo doesn't have many high rises. Shanghai has lots of high rises; well, they are mostly 30 story apartment buildings that can be reliably built with concrete and unskilled labor. Yet, there is a lot of speculation market in the China so prices are still high even if supply expands (and many apartments are empty because they are just being used as speculative investments). One of the reason I didn't look at Shanghai was commute times (Microsoft's Shanghai office is in the boonies vs. Beijing where the office is at least inside the 4th ring rood).
    - xvilka 4y ago
      > Tokyo doesn't have many high rises. Right, but only because of the seismic activity, from what I know. In most other places that wouldn't be an issue. Nevertheless, Tokio is still relatively dense with tightly packed mid-rises, and actively building.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        Tokyo is dense with mid-rises, they also have a lot of 2-3 story SFHs packed closely together with no yards.
    - raziel414 4y ago
      > Tokyo doesn't have many high rises. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "high rises", but I don't think this is true. I live in Tokyo, inside a 10+ floor building, that's surrounded by similar buildings. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a lot of places with multiple blocks full of high rises, such as Ginza, Shibuya, Akihabara, etc
m00x 4y ago
Why doesn't Australia do that now? Housing prices are abominable again.
tempestn 4y ago
The article quotes a shortage of 3.5M homes. That's somewhat more than 25k. Perhaps a more difficult problem to solve.
markus_zhang 4y ago
Politics is pretty complicated, sadly. It has nothing to do with reason, but has everything to do with interests.
Negitivefrags 4y ago
There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such. In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it. Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.
- ams92 4y ago
  It's NIMBYism. Most people in a state like California will agree that more affordable housing needs to be built, but no one wants it in their back yard.
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  Decades ago when the West was developed, there was very little value placed on the existing stuff. Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? I bet human life was valued much less back then. Similarly, lots of neighborhoods were erased to make way for highways, railroads and industrial plants. Nowadays, try constructing an industrial plant in a major city center and you will discover that people care a lot of their clean air and clear water. There is also a related but separate aspect where environmental activists erected barriers to slow down any development. You still feel its effects today where CEQA is weaponized to slow down a small apartment housing.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Of course all cities should strive to be like Houston, a city surrounded and intersected by highways. The lower part of Manhattan would have had a highway through it but instead it'sa cultural epicenter (https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-robert-moses-lower-manhattan-expressway-lomex/ https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-rob...)
TrackerFF 4y ago
Zoning laws limit where and what you can build. Who sits on these boards, lobby, and vote on zoning regulations? Homeowners in the area. The first thing that happens when a company announces a new building projects, is that they get deluged with protests from the neighboring homeowners. Sometimes this process will take years and years - there's no worse sin than taking away sunlight from neighbors, "visual pollution", and what have you.
- katbyte 4y ago
  crazy fact about Vancouver: 85% of residential land is zoned SFH
  - dionidium 4y ago
    I think the even crazier fact that explains the housing crisis is that the perception in Vancouver is that the city allows tons of new housing. If you ask residents, they'll tell you all about how much the city has changed. People are naturally conservative with respect to their immediate environment.
    - QIYGT 4y ago
      Same in NYC which has been creating ~3x more jobs than homes in recent decades.
      - asdff 4y ago
        In SF the ratio is like 7 jobs per unit of housing built, its really really bad https://sf.curbed.com/2017/7/26/16040938/san-francisco-jobs-housing-ratio-homes https://sf.curbed.com/2017/7/26/16040938/san-francisco-jobs-...
themagician 4y ago
There are a lot of answers, but they all stem from one core answer: Because governments do not want to fix it, because those with wealth (largely) do not see it as a problem. Three generations of people (silent, boomers, and gen x) were told that real estate was the best investment they could make for their ENTIRE LIFE. Millennials also heard this growing up. In the US we even took extra steps to make sure that homeownership was "the thing". We created non-market solutions (the 30yr mortgage via Fannie & Freddie) that made homeownership available to every American, and then kept going and essentially turned homeownership into the forced savings and retirement program. Now, *decades* later, home values must go up. They must go up always and forever. The entire world economy revolves on the appreciation of homes in highly developed countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. People with homes need those homes to go up in value or they can't borrow against them. They can't retire. Governments need the value of homes to go up for tax revenue. The entire world monetary system, as least as it relates to the dollar, pound and euro needs homes to continue to appreciate and the easiest way to do that is by limiting the supply of homes. If someone waved some magic wand tomorrow that removed all building restrictions and made it so people could easily build homes, and those homes would be sold at market rates, average home values would plummet and global markets would collapse. The only "solution" that is ever going to actually happen is more government subsidization. Longer loans. More federal guarantees. More federal tax credits. Home values must go up. Supply must be kept scarce. Our system is built on this.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Except we know they can't and won't go up forever in those countries as they mostly have a declining birth rate, a long with many other countries. So going to be a fun crash?
  - themagician 4y ago
    That can, and will, be pushed out for generations. It's a declining birth RATE—there are still more people. Plenty more people. And we will continue to limit the number of homes. If we need to, we will shrink the number of homes available. Home values must go up. They will go up. You should bet on them going up. Because if, for some reason that were to reverse global finance implodes and nothing else really matters. A permanent, long term downward trend in home values may as well be the end of "money" as we know it all together. And it sort of would be, literally, since much of money creation these days is via mortgage loans.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Regional and cultural specificities aside, as the population pyramid becomes more inverted the incentives of older citizens (who are more likely to own property) should be expected to outvote the interests of younger citizens (more likely to rent).
TedShiller 4y ago
It’s only simple if you don’t care about crime, pollution, etc. Then, it’s very simple yes.
ironman1478 4y ago
Why would you do something when you can do nothing and get elected and paid? It's cynical but that's it. There is no punishment for poor performance, so why would people try?
philliphaydon 4y ago
Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives up prices. Let's not forget, most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner. You have have to have a spouse or buy via a 3rd party who owns it and you pay them fees to hold it for you. 2) Houses are no longer valued based on your income, they are based on what you can earn. This is difficult to solve. You need rentals to assist with foreign labour. But you want to remove rentals to prevent houses being investment properties. Maybe they should cap the number of houses a family can own, and a business cannot rent out a home. It's built for sale, not built for rental. 3) Housing shortages. Housing supply should be assisted by the government via BTO's. Built to Order. Rather than taking huge loans from banks, you can buy a house from the government at a fixed price, that you will pay back. If you don't pay the government takes it back, otherwise you cannot sell that house for the first 10 years of ownership. You cannot rent it out for the first 5 years of ownership. Somewhat similar to how Singapore runs their BTOs.
- josho 4y ago
  I don’t necessarily see a problem with point 2. Renting a house often creates supply. The owner will create a basement suite or a nanny suite over the garage. If housing shortage was solved then that also kills the profit motive of renting out all but the most ideal houses for renting. The root cause in Canada is the neoliberal policy that started in the 90s that ended government building low income housing. They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed.
  - christofosho 4y ago
    Is this meant to argue against a limit on the quantity of properties that one individual can own? If corporations were not permitted to own property, and other individuals were allowed only two properties (what real need would there be for more), the quantity of available property for purchase would skyrocket. The prices would plummet, and far more people would be capable of owning their home. I don't disagree that there is disincentive for developers to build mid-level properties. They want huge expensive homes or the ability to cram many people into one space. I think this is a problem, but is not the only reason for the lack of availability, as described by the grandparent and in my former paragraph.
firecall 4y ago
One of the problems we have today in Australia is a lack of trades! A few large Home Building Companies have recently collapsed. We also have a shortage of qualified tradespeople that are capable of contributing to the building of homes. I'd link sources, but a quick Google will tell you all you need to know! Material costs have risen sharply too!
- glitchc 4y ago
  Well, you know, there's nothing preventing you from switching from SWE into the trades if you consider it to be more lucrative. Why not jump at the opportunity while it's still hot? Snarky notwithstanding, my point simply is that if the trades are not a desired occupation, that must be for a reason, likely a socioeconomic one. You cannot force people to enter an undesired occupation.
QIYGT 4y ago
The people who vote in local primaries and show up to community meetings are older and wealthier than their neighbors and don't want to see anything change. Here's a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-Politics-Americas/dp/1108477275 https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-...
Spooky23 4y ago
Because values have to climb in order to keep the real estate shell game going. Buildings depreciate, so increasing demand is the way to make magical money. The old technique, redlining, is illegal. Commercial real estate is architected around tax avoidance strategies. 1031 exchanges, depreciation rules, etc. In many cases, it’s literally possible to build a commercial development with zero out of pocket. Residential is all about building asset value through mortgages. Key markets like California are distorted to be even worse because the property tax laws encourage holding and not improving property. Unless there’s a constitutional convention or ballot, you’ll have homes worth $100M in 2080 paying property taxes based on a $100k valuation in 1980.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
The answer is capitalism, plus a bunch of terrible incentives that come from capitalism as a philosophy. We could also solve homelessness and have known we could for less money than we spend avoiding the solution, but government spending money for actual people and their wellbeing isn’t consistent with bootstraps and whatnot. Everyone has to suffer for some homage to personal responsibility that has never existed.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Let's say, for the sake of argument, there is some city called Fan Sanfrisco. In this city, all the people that own houses are worth at least a million dollars, because they have a house that's worth that. Now, a bunch of uppity kids want to build a TON of housing. What's that going to do to your property values based on supply and demand? Oh right, it's going to drop. Doesn't matter if you are a republican or democrat, if you're a home owner you defend your home values. When they say "all politics is local" THIS is what it means. A property value drop means: 1) you are underwater in your mortgage (for newer buyers) 2) you are losing a lot of your retirement savings (for older voters, and boy howdy do they like to vote and protest)
zaphirplane 4y ago
Perhaps because like everything that appears simple it’s complicated. Having a large number of new dwelling requires an infrastructure to support the people. The growth in housing rate needs to match the rate of infra growth A large influx of properties will affect the property market which will affect the industries that affect the housing industry and the consumer confidence and wipe out retirement funds With all due respect and not in anyway being rude, Is this fundamentally different from Saying let’s print more money and give it away to people (directly or indirectly)
napier 4y ago
Vest interests absolutely one way to put it. Not yet fully vested property wealth dependent influencers at the heart of business, politics and media culture and revolving door regulators makes relatively a simple problem that has been solved innumerable times and contexts in the past seem far more complex and challenging to address than it needs to be. It's difficult to convince someone of something or even create a discourse that entertains something is doable if their livelihood depends on them not believing it is. Perhaps we need a reshoring powered return to a higher growth productive economic topology in the west rather than the predominantly rent seeking norms, so that boomers, pension funds and REITs have someplace else to shift their capital attention when cashing out their chips.
Jemm 4y ago
Two things. 1. Corporate lobbying has insane control over decision making. 2. Highly vocal and critical constituents who are spurred on by propaganda and hatred. Now politicians who want to survive pass the buck and pass toothless laws like the one in Canada claiming to making housing affordable while adding fire to the crisis by bringing in 1,000,000 immigrants a year to stave off a recession which would hurt the corporations.
kennend3 4y ago
As a Canadian I can tell you my views of what is wrong here. NIMBY - Any time anything is proposed the locals consider how it could remotely impact them and protest. They protest ANYTHING. As a quick example - we built wind farms, people protested, we built Solar farms, protesting.. Try building anything in Canada and you will meet NIMBY protesters. I ride my bike a lot and there are areas where they can infill and proposed a modest three story unit. The entire area is full of signs about how this small unit "doesnt fit with the area"? This very same area is desperate for housing? Politicians dont care about the citizens, they care about getting reelected so they qualify for their gold plated pensions. Trying to address the NIMBY issues and actually build housing could cost them an election so inaction is their best strategy.
wkat4242 4y ago
In Holland we're seeing that we've made such a mess of environmental (nitrogen in particular) and neighbor objection laws (NIMBY) that evening just takes so extremely long to proceed if it does at all. And these are all artificial hurdles. Sure the environment is important but people need a place to live and this crisis is totally out of control.
jasmer 4y ago
Central planning caused the problem so central planning will fix it? I think this is upside down. Canada has a migration policy completely at odds with reality, and, foreign home ownership as a form of international export which is a deeply corrosive to civil life. There is a much easier way to solve the problem and that is to limit the externalisations. Migration returned to normal levels (and 'normal' for Canada is still higher than most other places) and a total ban on foreign ownership of residential policy that should have been enacted 30 years ago. As the world 'globalises' things like 'homes' in wealthy, well-run countries become global commodities, which is extremely bad for the population - they need to be removed from that context. FYI we might be able to sell foreign investors something else. Or - we could introduce a heavy foreign ownership tax that made the situation actually net beneficial to Canada as a whole to make more of a 'win-win'. If foreign entities want money to be in something 'safe' we should be able to provide that. On the migration side, since half of the Canadian migration policy is oriented around goodwill and helping others, Canada should probably seek to export the one and only real thing Canadians do well and that is consistent, b-grade governance: nothing is done very well, but almost everything is done 'well enough' and that creates some very prosperous conditions. I think there is a ton of good that could possibly be done, especially in places like the Caribbean with some deeper economic and social integration. And win-win economic outcomes as well, aka 'money to be made', a bit of prosperity and surplus for everyone if we can just get things working bit more consistently.
snapplebobapple 4y ago
It's pretty much always the vested interests. Paige Saunders made a decent series on the problem with a Canadian slant (since he lives in Montreal, which is usually in Canada, depending on who you ask and in what language). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28&list=PLTNrJFli7ocgtZNW5IzFs33DsXPudL_Cl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28&list=PLTNrJFli7o...
rfwhyte 4y ago
It's because the current entrenched rules and regulations surrounding the housing markets in pretty much every western nation were written by landlords and property developers and the current system, like pretty much every system in the world these days was designed to exclusively benefit the already wealthy. Governments do nothing about the "Problem" because to them its a feature rather than a bug. The system is designed to protect the wealth and power of the wealthy, rather than provide public goods like housing. I mean if anyone could build housing wherever they wanted, that would make land and house prices go down, which would mean rich people who own lots of land and lots of houses would therefore be less rich, so that will obviously never happen. Much better for the rich to stay rich and for the rest of us to be homeless according the powers that be.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago

In Vancouver is pretty common to buy homes and sit on them empty as organization mean. Can you blame them? The price is meant to double on 10 years, but any apartment or house quadrupled in price over the last 15, giving incredibile yields... I don't have access to the data, our realtor showed us many times data across the last 50 years.

TedShiller 4y ago

I really don't understand why people are thirsty in the desert when they don't have water. Why are they so impotent?

fullshark 4y ago

A very large % of the population's entire wealth is in their home, and their life plans involve that asset appreciating forever.

pxue 4y ago

Supply is artificially controlled by voters who don't want density to increase, masked behind preservations, environmental concerns or just plain corruption

plantain 4y ago
What changed? Governments used to aggressively intervene in the housing market.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  My hypothesis has been that renters stopped voting. They tend to be transient, younger, non-voters while landowners tend to be older, rooted and vote fervently. Density hurts landowners by decreasing property values and landowners vote.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > renters stopped voting Renters also got co-opted into being NIMBYs out of fear of gentrification.
    - stoppingin 4y ago
      This idea is pure fantasy. This condition of classifying people as NIMBYs if they disagree with you on this topic is incredibly toxic. There are a plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > plethora of totally valid reasons why people would be opposed to endless urban sprawl, consolidation, and population growth Totally agree. But the counterpart of that is rising housing costs. If you accept that tradeoff, you aren't a NIMBY. This covers many homeowners. But renters opposed to development while complaining about housing costs are trying to suppress their housing costs by increasing others'. That externalization is textbook NIMBY.
        stoppingin 4y ago
        Thank you for taking the time to make a nice reply, and for not taking my criticism of your post personally. I really appreciate that. I feel like you have a very arbitrary definition of NIMBY. I'm writing this post right now from the 14th floor of a highrise building in Sydney's inner city, in the apartment I rent from a landlord who lives in mainland China. There are still rows of historic terrace houses in the nearby suburbs that have been heritage listed. I'm sure property developers would love to turn these into more highrise apartments. Even though I'm renting, I don't want these to be replaced with endless new apartments. I could list a dozen reasons too. For one, I don't think this would help create a city that people would actually enjoy living in. I've been told by people who would know that one of Sydney's big problems is that property developers are able to artificially inflate property value by staggering the release of newly developed property onto the market. So more development isn't necessarily going to solve any of this country's problems with property value. It hasn't so far.

RC_ITR 4y ago

The downside to making home ownership popular by making it a “no brainer” asset is that you have to keep making it a “no brainer” asset indefinitely. 2008 was people finding the boundaries of the equation (“just how quickly can we make prices go up?”) and the foreseeable future is a slower continuation of that game: housing will keep getting more expensive but not better because current asset holders will pull all the levers they can (outright blocking supply, making it more expensive to build via things like below-market-rate requirements, etc) to keep the train rolling. Honestly the inevitable fallout is probably one of the greatest risks to the current societal structure (probably tied with climate change). Let’s hope Gen Z is up to tackle both.

mc32 4y ago

Previously demand was induced locally as a basic need. Beginning with Japanese surpluses and no better place to reinvest, their corps. began picking up real estate as foreign investment. Today high worth individuals with excess cash are driving worldwide demand. They are not going to live in most of that real estate. Todays dynamics are different. It looks like Canada is tackling the problem in the right place.

yodsanklai 4y ago

I wonder what's the impact or Airbnb in big touristy cities. Has it been quantified somehow?

stoppingin 4y ago

Sydney's metropolitan area is already oversized. People are already regularly commuting for well over an hour to the city center on congested public transport, or driving on congested roadways. I don't think Melbourne is much different Where would we put 25,000 new homes today?

xvilka 4y ago
Just do it like any big Asian city: 1) build high-rises 2) build more metro lines Look at Tokio or Shanghai, as an example.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Tokyo doesn't have many high rises. Shanghai has lots of high rises; well, they are mostly 30 story apartment buildings that can be reliably built with concrete and unskilled labor. Yet, there is a lot of speculation market in the China so prices are still high even if supply expands (and many apartments are empty because they are just being used as speculative investments). One of the reason I didn't look at Shanghai was commute times (Microsoft's Shanghai office is in the boonies vs. Beijing where the office is at least inside the 4th ring rood).
  - xvilka 4y ago
    > Tokyo doesn't have many high rises. Right, but only because of the seismic activity, from what I know. In most other places that wouldn't be an issue. Nevertheless, Tokio is still relatively dense with tightly packed mid-rises, and actively building.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      Tokyo is dense with mid-rises, they also have a lot of 2-3 story SFHs packed closely together with no yards.
  - raziel414 4y ago
    > Tokyo doesn't have many high rises. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "high rises", but I don't think this is true. I live in Tokyo, inside a 10+ floor building, that's surrounded by similar buildings. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a lot of places with multiple blocks full of high rises, such as Ginza, Shibuya, Akihabara, etc

m00x 4y ago

Why doesn't Australia do that now? Housing prices are abominable again.

tempestn 4y ago

The article quotes a shortage of 3.5M homes. That's somewhat more than 25k. Perhaps a more difficult problem to solve.

markus_zhang 4y ago

Politics is pretty complicated, sadly. It has nothing to do with reason, but has everything to do with interests.

Negitivefrags 4y ago

There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west. Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like. I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such. In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it. Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.

ams92 4y ago
It's NIMBYism. Most people in a state like California will agree that more affordable housing needs to be built, but no one wants it in their back yard.
RestlessMind 4y ago
Decades ago when the West was developed, there was very little value placed on the existing stuff. Five people died constructing the Empire State building. Do you imagine the uproar if that happens today? I bet human life was valued much less back then. Similarly, lots of neighborhoods were erased to make way for highways, railroads and industrial plants. Nowadays, try constructing an industrial plant in a major city center and you will discover that people care a lot of their clean air and clear water. There is also a related but separate aspect where environmental activists erected barriers to slow down any development. You still feel its effects today where CEQA is weaponized to slow down a small apartment housing.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Of course all cities should strive to be like Houston, a city surrounded and intersected by highways. The lower part of Manhattan would have had a highway through it but instead it'sa cultural epicenter (https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-robert-moses-lower-manhattan-expressway-lomex/ https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-rob...)

TrackerFF 4y ago

Zoning laws limit where and what you can build. Who sits on these boards, lobby, and vote on zoning regulations? Homeowners in the area. The first thing that happens when a company announces a new building projects, is that they get deluged with protests from the neighboring homeowners. Sometimes this process will take years and years - there's no worse sin than taking away sunlight from neighbors, "visual pollution", and what have you.

katbyte 4y ago
crazy fact about Vancouver: 85% of residential land is zoned SFH
- dionidium 4y ago
  I think the even crazier fact that explains the housing crisis is that the perception in Vancouver is that the city allows tons of new housing. If you ask residents, they'll tell you all about how much the city has changed. People are naturally conservative with respect to their immediate environment.
  - QIYGT 4y ago
    Same in NYC which has been creating ~3x more jobs than homes in recent decades.
    - asdff 4y ago
      In SF the ratio is like 7 jobs per unit of housing built, its really really bad https://sf.curbed.com/2017/7/26/16040938/san-francisco-jobs-housing-ratio-homes https://sf.curbed.com/2017/7/26/16040938/san-francisco-jobs-...

themagician 4y ago

There are a lot of answers, but they all stem from one core answer: Because governments do not want to fix it, because those with wealth (largely) do not see it as a problem. Three generations of people (silent, boomers, and gen x) were told that real estate was the best investment they could make for their ENTIRE LIFE. Millennials also heard this growing up. In the US we even took extra steps to make sure that homeownership was "the thing". We created non-market solutions (the 30yr mortgage via Fannie & Freddie) that made homeownership available to every American, and then kept going and essentially turned homeownership into the forced savings and retirement program. Now, *decades* later, home values must go up. They must go up always and forever. The entire world economy revolves on the appreciation of homes in highly developed countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. People with homes need those homes to go up in value or they can't borrow against them. They can't retire. Governments need the value of homes to go up for tax revenue. The entire world monetary system, as least as it relates to the dollar, pound and euro needs homes to continue to appreciate and the easiest way to do that is by limiting the supply of homes. If someone waved some magic wand tomorrow that removed all building restrictions and made it so people could easily build homes, and those homes would be sold at market rates, average home values would plummet and global markets would collapse. The only "solution" that is ever going to actually happen is more government subsidization. Longer loans. More federal guarantees. More federal tax credits. Home values must go up. Supply must be kept scarce. Our system is built on this.

bamboozled 4y ago
Except we know they can't and won't go up forever in those countries as they mostly have a declining birth rate, a long with many other countries. So going to be a fun crash?
- themagician 4y ago
  That can, and will, be pushed out for generations. It's a declining birth RATE—there are still more people. Plenty more people. And we will continue to limit the number of homes. If we need to, we will shrink the number of homes available. Home values must go up. They will go up. You should bet on them going up. Because if, for some reason that were to reverse global finance implodes and nothing else really matters. A permanent, long term downward trend in home values may as well be the end of "money" as we know it all together. And it sort of would be, literally, since much of money creation these days is via mortgage loans.

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

Regional and cultural specificities aside, as the population pyramid becomes more inverted the incentives of older citizens (who are more likely to own property) should be expected to outvote the interests of younger citizens (more likely to rent).

TedShiller 4y ago

It’s only simple if you don’t care about crime, pollution, etc. Then, it’s very simple yes.

ironman1478 4y ago

Why would you do something when you can do nothing and get elected and paid? It's cynical but that's it. There is no punishment for poor performance, so why would people try?

philliphaydon 4y ago

Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives up prices. Let's not forget, most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner. You have have to have a spouse or buy via a 3rd party who owns it and you pay them fees to hold it for you. 2) Houses are no longer valued based on your income, they are based on what you can earn. This is difficult to solve. You need rentals to assist with foreign labour. But you want to remove rentals to prevent houses being investment properties. Maybe they should cap the number of houses a family can own, and a business cannot rent out a home. It's built for sale, not built for rental. 3) Housing shortages. Housing supply should be assisted by the government via BTO's. Built to Order. Rather than taking huge loans from banks, you can buy a house from the government at a fixed price, that you will pay back. If you don't pay the government takes it back, otherwise you cannot sell that house for the first 10 years of ownership. You cannot rent it out for the first 5 years of ownership. Somewhat similar to how Singapore runs their BTOs.

josho 4y ago
I don’t necessarily see a problem with point 2. Renting a house often creates supply. The owner will create a basement suite or a nanny suite over the garage. If housing shortage was solved then that also kills the profit motive of renting out all but the most ideal houses for renting. The root cause in Canada is the neoliberal policy that started in the 90s that ended government building low income housing. They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed.
- christofosho 4y ago
  Is this meant to argue against a limit on the quantity of properties that one individual can own? If corporations were not permitted to own property, and other individuals were allowed only two properties (what real need would there be for more), the quantity of available property for purchase would skyrocket. The prices would plummet, and far more people would be capable of owning their home. I don't disagree that there is disincentive for developers to build mid-level properties. They want huge expensive homes or the ability to cram many people into one space. I think this is a problem, but is not the only reason for the lack of availability, as described by the grandparent and in my former paragraph.

firecall 4y ago

One of the problems we have today in Australia is a lack of trades! A few large Home Building Companies have recently collapsed. We also have a shortage of qualified tradespeople that are capable of contributing to the building of homes. I'd link sources, but a quick Google will tell you all you need to know! Material costs have risen sharply too!

glitchc 4y ago
Well, you know, there's nothing preventing you from switching from SWE into the trades if you consider it to be more lucrative. Why not jump at the opportunity while it's still hot? Snarky notwithstanding, my point simply is that if the trades are not a desired occupation, that must be for a reason, likely a socioeconomic one. You cannot force people to enter an undesired occupation.

QIYGT 4y ago

The people who vote in local primaries and show up to community meetings are older and wealthier than their neighbors and don't want to see anything change. Here's a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-Politics-Americas/dp/1108477275 https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-...

Spooky23 4y ago

Because values have to climb in order to keep the real estate shell game going. Buildings depreciate, so increasing demand is the way to make magical money. The old technique, redlining, is illegal. Commercial real estate is architected around tax avoidance strategies. 1031 exchanges, depreciation rules, etc. In many cases, it’s literally possible to build a commercial development with zero out of pocket. Residential is all about building asset value through mortgages. Key markets like California are distorted to be even worse because the property tax laws encourage holding and not improving property. Unless there’s a constitutional convention or ballot, you’ll have homes worth $100M in 2080 paying property taxes based on a $100k valuation in 1980.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

The answer is capitalism, plus a bunch of terrible incentives that come from capitalism as a philosophy. We could also solve homelessness and have known we could for less money than we spend avoiding the solution, but government spending money for actual people and their wellbeing isn’t consistent with bootstraps and whatnot. Everyone has to suffer for some homage to personal responsibility that has never existed.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Let's say, for the sake of argument, there is some city called Fan Sanfrisco. In this city, all the people that own houses are worth at least a million dollars, because they have a house that's worth that. Now, a bunch of uppity kids want to build a TON of housing. What's that going to do to your property values based on supply and demand? Oh right, it's going to drop. Doesn't matter if you are a republican or democrat, if you're a home owner you defend your home values. When they say "all politics is local" THIS is what it means. A property value drop means: 1) you are underwater in your mortgage (for newer buyers) 2) you are losing a lot of your retirement savings (for older voters, and boy howdy do they like to vote and protest)

zaphirplane 4y ago

Perhaps because like everything that appears simple it’s complicated. Having a large number of new dwelling requires an infrastructure to support the people. The growth in housing rate needs to match the rate of infra growth A large influx of properties will affect the property market which will affect the industries that affect the housing industry and the consumer confidence and wipe out retirement funds With all due respect and not in anyway being rude, Is this fundamentally different from Saying let’s print more money and give it away to people (directly or indirectly)

napier 4y ago

Vest interests absolutely one way to put it. Not yet fully vested property wealth dependent influencers at the heart of business, politics and media culture and revolving door regulators makes relatively a simple problem that has been solved innumerable times and contexts in the past seem far more complex and challenging to address than it needs to be. It's difficult to convince someone of something or even create a discourse that entertains something is doable if their livelihood depends on them not believing it is. Perhaps we need a reshoring powered return to a higher growth productive economic topology in the west rather than the predominantly rent seeking norms, so that boomers, pension funds and REITs have someplace else to shift their capital attention when cashing out their chips.

Jemm 4y ago

Two things. 1. Corporate lobbying has insane control over decision making. 2. Highly vocal and critical constituents who are spurred on by propaganda and hatred. Now politicians who want to survive pass the buck and pass toothless laws like the one in Canada claiming to making housing affordable while adding fire to the crisis by bringing in 1,000,000 immigrants a year to stave off a recession which would hurt the corporations.

kennend3 4y ago

As a Canadian I can tell you my views of what is wrong here. NIMBY - Any time anything is proposed the locals consider how it could remotely impact them and protest. They protest ANYTHING. As a quick example - we built wind farms, people protested, we built Solar farms, protesting.. Try building anything in Canada and you will meet NIMBY protesters. I ride my bike a lot and there are areas where they can infill and proposed a modest three story unit. The entire area is full of signs about how this small unit "doesnt fit with the area"? This very same area is desperate for housing? Politicians dont care about the citizens, they care about getting reelected so they qualify for their gold plated pensions. Trying to address the NIMBY issues and actually build housing could cost them an election so inaction is their best strategy.

wkat4242 4y ago

In Holland we're seeing that we've made such a mess of environmental (nitrogen in particular) and neighbor objection laws (NIMBY) that evening just takes so extremely long to proceed if it does at all. And these are all artificial hurdles. Sure the environment is important but people need a place to live and this crisis is totally out of control.

jasmer 4y ago

Central planning caused the problem so central planning will fix it? I think this is upside down. Canada has a migration policy completely at odds with reality, and, foreign home ownership as a form of international export which is a deeply corrosive to civil life. There is a much easier way to solve the problem and that is to limit the externalisations. Migration returned to normal levels (and 'normal' for Canada is still higher than most other places) and a total ban on foreign ownership of residential policy that should have been enacted 30 years ago. As the world 'globalises' things like 'homes' in wealthy, well-run countries become global commodities, which is extremely bad for the population - they need to be removed from that context. FYI we might be able to sell foreign investors something else. Or - we could introduce a heavy foreign ownership tax that made the situation actually net beneficial to Canada as a whole to make more of a 'win-win'. If foreign entities want money to be in something 'safe' we should be able to provide that. On the migration side, since half of the Canadian migration policy is oriented around goodwill and helping others, Canada should probably seek to export the one and only real thing Canadians do well and that is consistent, b-grade governance: nothing is done very well, but almost everything is done 'well enough' and that creates some very prosperous conditions. I think there is a ton of good that could possibly be done, especially in places like the Caribbean with some deeper economic and social integration. And win-win economic outcomes as well, aka 'money to be made', a bit of prosperity and surplus for everyone if we can just get things working bit more consistently.

snapplebobapple 4y ago

It's pretty much always the vested interests. Paige Saunders made a decent series on the problem with a Canadian slant (since he lives in Montreal, which is usually in Canada, depending on who you ask and in what language). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28&list=PLTNrJFli7ocgtZNW5IzFs33DsXPudL_Cl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28&list=PLTNrJFli7o...

rfwhyte 4y ago

It's because the current entrenched rules and regulations surrounding the housing markets in pretty much every western nation were written by landlords and property developers and the current system, like pretty much every system in the world these days was designed to exclusively benefit the already wealthy. Governments do nothing about the "Problem" because to them its a feature rather than a bug. The system is designed to protect the wealth and power of the wealthy, rather than provide public goods like housing. I mean if anyone could build housing wherever they wanted, that would make land and house prices go down, which would mean rich people who own lots of land and lots of houses would therefore be less rich, so that will obviously never happen. Much better for the rich to stay rich and for the rest of us to be homeless according the powers that be.