Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.
1. Japan's urbanization stopped long ago,
2. and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough,
3. so the urban areas have stopped growing.
1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.