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Out of all developed nations, Japan is probably the one least affected by housing pricing in the world seeing as though Japanese housing depreciates rather than

• danlugo92 1y ago
  Who would have thought that when you don't artificially limit housing supply people can actually afford it! Lots of examples in Latam as well.
  • modo_mario 1y ago
    Not keeping population increasing for as long as you can with migration helps too People will buffer their prices up often even trough stagnating purchasing power or dips due to construction when land isn't made anymore and the gov will make sure demand keeps growing lest it affect the lines.
• kazinator 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • matheusmoreira 1y ago
    They also resist having children so they will not be resisting immigration for long.
    • eastbound 1y ago
      Why ever would you compare children and immigration? I love my parents and I’d have solidarity for my country fellows (France here). Immigrants don’t generally earn much, let alone work legally and pay taxes. They are not paying our retirement. They require doctors and produce our “medical deserts” (the name we use in France where social security fails because of lack of practicians). They also wouldn’t fight for us if, say, Islam invaded us — in fact they are fighting full-force against us here. Immigrants are not de-facto children. They do not love us, and no-one asks them this question on the path to immigration.
      • wannadingo 1y ago
        He is not saying immigrants are like children, he means that as the population ages and is not replenished by children, there will be nobody left to work unless the country accepts immigrants.
      • _qbxi 1y ago
        In the US, immigrants often do pay taxes, and use up fewer benefits[1]. Moreover, our social security relies on perpetual growth to sustain itself. So if we can't grow our population via children, we must grow it via immigrants, to remain solvent. [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-used-less-welfare-native-born-americans-2022 https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-used-less-welfare-nativ...
        • lttlrck 1y ago
          Hence "natalist" popping up in some corners of the political spectrum.
          • _qbxi 1y ago
            I certainly support efforts to shape US society into one where people might want children. Universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, free education, etc. Not to mention one where land is used in a conscientious way to build community, with walkable spaces, public third spaces, and strong public transit.
  • justlikereddit 1y ago
    The truth, there's numerous studies that support this yet because the holy cow status of mass immigration everyone who tells the truth is hounded
  • fxtentacle 1y ago
    The elephant in the room is that NIMBYs are powerless in Japan. In the US, people value individuality. In Japan, they have this saying: If a nail sticks out, hammer it flat. NIMBYs are ostracized for being a burden on society. No matter if the neighbors like it or not, houses regularly get bulldozed to build new high-rise apartment buildings instead. Replacing a single family home with a 20-floor skyscraper easily 50x-es number of available apartments on the market, thereby massively pushing prices down.
    • kazinator 1y ago
      > NIMBYs are ostracized for being a burden on society. And those are native-speaking, ethnically Japanese locals.
  • klipt 1y ago
    Can Japan even attract immigrants if it wants to? The language is notoriously hard to learn and it's not like they have super high paying jobs the way the USA does
    • decimalenough 1y ago
      Yes. There are nearly 4M migrants in Japan today, up from 1M in 1990.
      • topato 1y ago
        Yes, but what about white Westerners? I considered/am considering doing the whole teaching English/officiating weddings thing, but you hear a LOT of stories of white visitors getting the ol' 'X' when trying to even enter stores....
        • decimalenough 1y ago
          Very rare outside the sex industry, and even if you get the X, speaking Japanese will usually convince them to let you in.
        • xp84 1y ago
          Of everyone I’ve heard that has done that, it’s rare to find someone who felt so excluded as a gaijin that it wasn’t a net positive experience. Most look back on it pretty fondly. In terms of solving their population collapse, I think white Westerners aren’t really an important demographic for them to attract though, with our very foreign culture and values on top of our very different language. If Japan can bring itself to stomach the idea of bringing lots of foreigners in to prevent the country from collapsing, they ought to import people from some of their closer neighbors, with which they have more similar language and more collectivist culture.
    • packetlost 1y ago
      Yes. Lots of (moderately) wealthy westerners. I personally would move there if I could.
    • 1y ago
  • idiotsecant 1y ago
    Yes, because immigrants ... Raise the rent? The US was built by immigrants. Before our slow slide toward christofascism it was on our money. Out of many, one. The reason we work as a society is that we take strength from the many varied cultures and experiences throughout the world. The most bold, the most focused, the most daring have always come to America with a dream of making it big. We destroy that at our own peril. Break that down far enough and we'll become a culturally inbred irrelevant backwater. If you want to become the UK, that's how you do it.
    • pessimizer 1y ago
      Of course immigrants raise the rent, just like anyone else who enters an auction, and the US was built by slaves.
      • kubb 1y ago
        What you’re saying is that population increase raises the rent, whether the new people are immigrants is not relevant. But wealth accumulation means that on the auction for housing you are competing with someone who has 1000x more resources than you.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
      > We destroy that at our own peril. Already largely done, and will take a generation or three to rebuild, if it ever happens.
    • xp84 1y ago
      You sound like a reasonable and good faith person. I want to ask you in particular to consider engaging with the people you disagree with (in this case the Right). Try to understand what exactly it is they’re trying to do when they oppose unlimited open borders immigration. It’s true that 100+ years ago they were trying to bring in warm bodies, there was plenty of opportunity then and it was a great thing to bring in 1,000,000 people to start new farms and work in factories. The immigrants learned the language and customs and followed the rules, and everybody benefited. That isn’t the way it’s working now though. The “asylum” process that was created to help a small number of political dissidents who would be killed or persecuted for unjust reasons, is being abused by shoving a million people into it whose main reason for coming here is “my country’s economy sucks due to gross incompetence of our government.” We can’t accept every single person who would rather live in the US or UK than El Salvador or Lesotho, unless we want our country to be like those countries, and according to the people who constantly try to come here, those countries are much worse than ours. That’s what the people who disagree with you are trying to say. None of this has anything to do with disliking immigrants themselves. I know people of many different races and national origins and I like and respect them all. But just as I don’t think France deserves to have 10,000,000 Americans show up, not learn any French, and just import American culture and customs, I also think immigrants here should be expected to assimilate. That basically worked well for hundreds of years.
• infecto 1y ago
  Isn’t the depreciation story kind of an outdated idea? While yes that was the case but it was also true that the 50s-90s comes were generally not very modern, built with not much comfort in mind and so it was expected you would be rebuilding. In most of the larger cities I am not sure that is the case except for severely outdated units.
• kiba 1y ago
  It's the land and other non-reproducible privileges, not all form of wealth. The imbalance is not between capital and labor, but land. Land can be in the form of copyright, patents, even domain names, the orbitals in the sky, the electromagnetic spectrum. Capital can be used to produce more capital, but you cannot produce more land, more electromagnetic spectrum, more orbitals, etc. The housing crisis is a restriction on what activity are allowed on land, and incentive structure that prioritize hoarding of land over engaging in societal beneficial activities. I suggest you read up Georgism, the tax ideology that had largely disappeared from political life in the west.
  • skissane 1y ago
    I’m sympathetic to your overall point - I’m not a convinced Georgist but I’m open-minded about the idea - but I’d question some of your specific examples > even domain names, With an alternative DNS root, you can have any domain name you like, except for legal constraints such as trademarks, defamation, obscenity, etc. The problem is none of the alternative roots ever took off, in part because the browser vendors didn’t want to get on-board (they saw it as a high risk low reward feature)-and alternative browsers offering that feature failed in the market. This really isn’t comparable to land, in that the scarcity isn’t imposed by the laws of nature or laws written by government, it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market. > the orbitals in the sky Orbit is huge and while it is getting more congested, I don’t think that congestion is (as yet) a significant barrier to new entrants. The primary barrier remains the launch costs. The governments of major spacefaring powers don’t see orbital slots as a revenue source, their regulation of them is purely about avoiding conflict, and the fees they charge are about recovering the cost of that regulation, not contributing to general revenue. Some equatorial states tried to claim geostationary orbit slots over their territory as part of their territory, in order to charge for access to them - but the claim failed because the major spacefaring states refused to accept it, and these states lacked the geopolitical power to compel anyone else to take this claim seriously-and, anyway, with the growth of LEO constellations, geostationary orbit arguably isn’t as economically important as it was when those claims were first asserted
• anovikov 1y ago
  Isn't housing exactly the most accessible of all the world save for 2-3 totalitarian countries like Oman, in the United States? According to the Numbeo data exactly. It also has nothing to do with labor vs capital. Billionaires don't invest (much) in housing. Sometimes they do invest in commercial real estate, but never into housing. It's the middle class who buys up everything - now almost exclusively in cash - and then won't leave those houses till death, as Silent generation currently dies.
  • varjag 1y ago
    Yep. It's kind of like with gas prices: Americans, with some of the world's lowest prices complain the loudest. Which appears to point out that the maladies discussed here have less of an economic nature but more of social/psychological/technological.
    • HPsquared 1y ago
      Maybe the complaining is what keeps the prices low.
    • anovikov 1y ago
      Another side of it is that they do indeed spend a bigger fraction of their incomes on both housing and gas. Because they have the biggest houses on biggest plots, plus not just the elite owns separate houses, but most of population - which means they also live very sparsely by necessity, in endless suburbs and exurbs - which in turn means they have to drive a lot - which they do in world's biggest cars. And it's no longer an individual choice because you have to do it to still remain a member of society, and in case of driving, it's either unsafe (too much crime in inner cities) or impossible (no public transport, because dwellings are too sparse making it impractical) to do otherwise. Thing is, they do it because they can. Because their disposable income is by far the biggest in the world, so their needs in everything else are more than satisified: they already overeat, have full two-car garages filled to the brim with "stuff", have enough of everything that people might want in "multiple" quantities. So what's left to spend money on, is either investments (this is their stock market is so insanely huge), or things one don't really need in more than single units - so they don't have many houses, but single BIG houses, same for cars. Which makes a picture of unaffordability, as natually if people's residual free incomes are so large, so much money is going to be pushed into these, they will indeed become very expensive as a portion of entire income, just because everything else (except healthcare) makes a so much smaller proportion. It's simply that it just means huge houses, a lot bigger than anywhere else except Australia (which is also Anglosphere!). Want to make housing truly afforable? Make people poor, also make them die off to free up space. Japan does both with great "success".
• somenameforme 1y ago
  Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070. Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of debt. It predictably leads to endless price appreciation until you fill the bubble up enough to burst it, then we simply repeat again. Same thing happened to education. It's a 'commodity' seen as priceless and the government ensured access to endless debt to purchase it. You'll never guess what happened next. [1] - https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-japan/ https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-jap... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
  • vannevar 1y ago
    The analogy of education to housing "bubbles" doesn't work. Housing bubbles are economically destructive because dropping prices induce new sellers to drop their price even further, which reduces the market value for everyone. There is a reinforcement loop. No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.
    • somenameforme 1y ago
      Of course there's a connection. The most realistic reason people go to college is to earn more money later in life. Nobody would ever voluntarily go 6 figures into debt with the understanding that, at the end of it all, the best job they're going to be able to find is to go serve coffee. And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.