Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Also, one thing that I have never seen being talked about that has increased the demand for housing many fold in the last 50-100 years is the fashion of people leaving their family homes in their twenties. In traditional societies, it was common for at least one child to continue living with their parents for their entire life. It was thus very common for every household to include three families - a pair of grandparents, one of their children with their spouse, and one of their children with their spouse.

Instead, today, people tend to live with their parents only until around 20-30. Getting married while living with your parents is virtually unthinkable. This means that the supply of houses has to be at least three times greater than in a traditional society, with a higher percentage of temporarily occupied housing as well (since even though you can eventually reuse your parents' and grandparents' home, you need to live somewhere while they are still alive.

Of course, there are tradeoffs, and I would be extremely hypocritical to claim that I'd like to live with my parents and grandparents as an adult. But, such preferences are formed by fashion and social expectations. The millenia of this being the norm at the very least show that it is workable.

> 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...

> 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.

Population trends and immigration policy are major factors in real estate markets.

Famously stagnant (and for the past decade, even Negative) population growth and low birth rates, coupled with very restrictive immigration policies, together play large roles in Japan's real estate situation.

This stuff about Japanese homes becoming worthless is factually false however; I'm not sure why people repeat it so much.

The structure becomes worthless after 40 years or so, however the land does not. If you're in some dying little town, then yeah, your property will be worth nothing eventually. But if you're in a nice location in Tokyo, that land will always be very valuable, much more valuable than the structure ever was.

Also video from PolyMatter on same topic of cheap Japanese houses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1AOm17ZUVI

You are talking about houses (constructions) being seen as temporary, but people still often own the land, they just want to build a new house where their parents' stood. The point (2) I was talking about would mean that they lose the land after 99 years.

Mobility comes to play. Lots of time people have to move out from their family home because they don’t have a job in local market where their parents lived.

Second thing is that they might make much more money if they move out. Which might be much more beneficial strategy - when their parents get sick and need financial help even if they own their primary living space and don’t have to pay rent - than staying and getting what local market gives.

Singapore did it by purchasing the land incrementally from private owners. It's not like they confiscated it with coercive authoritarian force.

I wasn't implying that they used force to confiscate the land, but that the very act of buying land to only lease it for a limited time would be deeply unpopular, and quickly voted out in a true democracy.

My own country had an authoritarian government that owned all land and property, and everyone was living as renters paying their rent to the government. In most cities, these properties were themselves actually built by the government, often on previously unused land (as they greatly expanded many cities). Once the revolution came and we had a (quasi-)democratic government, one of the very first acts was to give everyone ownership of the property they were leasing from government - and this was hugely popular.

> 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.

This is the policy in Japan, which is not an authoritarian government… well, not in terms of housing anyway.

You just can't get a mortgage for a used home and they don't let local governments control zoning.

>You just can't get a mortgage for a used home and they don't let local governments control zoning.

Huh? Yes, you can get a mortgage for a used home. People do it all the time. Where did you get that crazy idea?

Yes, zoning is controlled at the national level, and in a very permissive way, so that works really well (you can legally build new housing almost anywhere).

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