> Your (2) proposal is never going to work without an authoritarian government, such as the one in Singapore. People like owning and passing on their homes. An

> Your (2) proposal is never going to work without an authoritarian government, such as the one in Singapore. People like owning and passing on their homes. And yet: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed-a-lot https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed... > In fact, Japan’s fervor for constant scrap-and-build construction is a major reason why rent there is so affordable, and why local politics haven’t halted dense development as they have in the West. Wingfield-Hayes opens his article by complaining that Japanese houses tend to depreciate instead of appreciate: > "In Japan, houses are like cars." > "As soon as you move in, your new home is worth less than what you paid for it and after you've finished paying off your mortgage in 40 years, it is worth almost nothing. > "It bewildered me when I first moved here as a correspondent for the BBC - 10 years on, as I prepared to leave, it was still the same." > Weirdly, this is presented as a chronic problem — something Japan should have fixed long ago, but hasn’t. But in reality, depreciating real estate is one of Japan’s biggest strengths. Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway. > As a result, Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall, even as people continued to stream from the countryside into the city.