Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be affordable. Never.
What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects are great for them, they don't need to care about the market demand.
“Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards.”
You do realize that people can read the articles you link to, right? For example:
> The flood of investment drove the average price for a new condominium in central Tokyo up 60% to a record 129.6 million yen ($865,000) in the first half of this year, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute.
Prices surged. Before the surge, professionals had this dream of owning. So your own article refutes your nonsensical statement that Dems housing can "never" be affordable.
Can you conceive of a cyclical nature to markets that affects pricing? Or is it that now that they went from affordable to less affordable, it means that purchasing will forever be changed now?
Or you assertion of "declining population"? Maybe on the national level, but it's not true of Tokyo!
And what is the difference in cost between renting and owning? Perhaps renting is affordable, but ownership is extremely expensive becuase of irrational speculation or temporary macro factors?
TL;DR your own article refutes your central hypothesis that housing can not be affordable in dense cities.
> Prices surged. Before the surge, professionals had this dream of owning.
You're literally repeating the joke.
A doctor asks a nurse:
- Was the patient sweating prior to death?
- Yes.
- Good, that's a good sign.
> Or you assertion of "declining population"? Maybe on the national level, but it's not true of Tokyo!
Indeed. And that's my point. Tokyo, like a leech, is sucking the life from its surroundings.
> And what is the difference in cost between renting and owning? Perhaps renting is affordable, but ownership is extremely expensive becuase of irrational speculation or temporary macro factors?
No. They are not temporary. The prices will not fall, they have been steadily growing for the last 2 decades.
That's 646 square feet. That's 25'5"x25'5". For an urban area, that's plenty of space. That doesn't mean literally every apartment is that small, just that small and cheap apartments are available for those who want them, and American-sized apartments with American prices are also available for those who want to pay for them.
That's one of the main reasons why housing is so expensive in the United States. We paternalistically decide that 760 square feet is the absolute minimum amount of livable space for a one-bedroom apartment, and instead force people who can't afford that much space to split a 1200 square foot apartment with three people.
Adults are more than capable of deciding for themselves how big of an apartment they would like to live in. Banning 60 square meter apartments doesn't help people who can't afford the legal mandated minimum.
And all while just a hundred miles away, beautiful historical houses can be bought for literally nothing. And that's with a rapidly declining population.
30 million people in the Tokyo area would like to disagree with you, myself included. Why do you think those beautiful historical houses are laying there empty?
I can tell you for a fact that I did not move to Tokyo because I was forced to by economic forces, I chose to move there out of my own accord despite being fully location independent. Just because you hate cities doesn’t mean everyone else does.
This is literally the opposite of everything the article is saying. These are not state-subsidized. They are just vanilla buildings. The city got rid of impact fees, "prevailing wage" union giveaways, and approved projects in 60 days or less, and because this reduced the costs of building by a large amount, it becomes profitable for builders to just do their thing without subsidies.
That's not really what the article says was going on. Those "luxuries" were being mandated by the bureaucratic agencies. Builders seem to have never really wanted them in the first place. The developers are apparently happy to ditch all the niceities and offer affordable housing if allowed it seems.
Not like I've done my own research, but the article was actually interesting.
You can, right this moment, purchase a 2-3 bedroom condo in a glass-and-steel high rise in a central business district from a profit-seeking entity, for less than $400,000. It’s called Chicago. Something SF, LA, Seattle, etc. would be immensely improved by imitating.
Where do these nonsense beliefs come from? There's no data to support them. No examples. Nothing?
It's so odd to see such undying certainty without any evidence, and without any clear path to political indoctrination. Or perhaps this sort of political indoctrination was present before mt times? Its just mystifying to see comments like this stated as if people would agree of believe these views by sheer force of will.
> Where do these nonsense beliefs come from? There's no data to support them. No examples. Nothing?
Have you actually tried to look at the data? Hint: no city in the US managed to lower prices by building new housing within the last 25 years. Not a single one.
Here's the thing: housing in dense cities will NEVER be affordable. Never.
What happened recently (and is happening in other cities like Seattle) is companies pivoting from building "luxury" crappy condos to sweet state-subsdizied housing. These kinds of projects are great for them, they don't need to care about the market demand.