the waiting for prices to go up is a consequence of zoning laws. There's pretty much a fixed supply of housing in Paris and a rising population, so people just

the waiting for prices to go up is a consequence of zoning laws. There's pretty much a fixed supply of housing in Paris and a rising population, so people just sit on it. The population point isn't super relevant because people are still moving into Tokyo (for work or school mainly), so Tokyo's actually growing _faster_ than Paris is (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+Tokyo+over+population+of+Paris http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+Tokyo+ove...) The big difference being that almost nowhere in the Tokyo metropolitan area has low-density buildings (compared to people in nicer suburbs on the outskirts of paris with huge housing.) The fact that there are so many old buildings in Paris is also a consequence of making things hard to build in Paris. There's more than enough demand to make obscene amounts of money with a decent sized apartment complex in downtown Paris (if you could build it). It's not like Tokyo is falling over every 10 years to earthquakes. One thing is that houses in some Tokyo suburbs are built like crap, so old houses are falling apart (not building many houses out of stone). I think more recent housing is built more sturdily (not sure though) Anyways, the comparaison is fair, because the prime difference is what we're talking about : Zoning laws. There is nothing magical about Paris which makes it impossible to use the same techniques to solve this problem.