So there’s a ton of countries that I’ve heard have had truly unaffordable housing for decades, like:
- The UK
- Ireland
- The Netherlands
And I’ve heard of a ton of countries where the cost of houses was until recently quite affordable where it’s also started getting worse:
- Germany
- Poland
- Czechia
- Hungary
- The US
- Australia
- Canada
- And I’m sure plenty others
- It seems to be a pan-Western bloc thing. Is the cause in all these countries the same?
- We’ve heard of success stories in cities like Vienna where much of the housing stock is municipally owned – but those cities have had it that way for decades. Would their system alleviate the current crisis if established in the aforementioned countries?
- What specific policies should I be demanding of our politicians to make housing affordable again? Is there any silver bullet? Has any country demonstrably managed to reverse this crisis yet?
Japan has.
This is both false and true. Japan has a few things happening that are keeping rates lower, but the primary thing keeping costs low in Japan is the fact that the units are tiny. I’m not talking a little on the small side, I’m talking 200 square feet or less per person in a family home. No yards either.
If you compare Japan to the dwelling sizes of other nations, it’s just as bad or worse per square foot.
The end goal for solving housing should not be to make the rooms as small as possible. Especially in countries where land space isn’t the limiting factor.
By making the rooms smaller you’re just kicking the can down the road. Eventually the price inflation will catch up and even those shoeboxes will cost a fortune.
I mean there are a ton of efficiencies to be gained with using communal resources.
Why can’t a bunch of people share a park rather than needing their own back yard?
Not saying it shouldn’t be an option, but the American obsession with detached housing at the cost of higher density housing is a major contributor to insane housing costs.
Sure, but apartments at 1000 square feet shouldn’t be unaffordable in north American cities, but they are.
The main thing is that it greatly limits creative types and entrepreneurship at a grass roots level. I would have a lot more shop tools and mess around a whole lot more if I just had more space than this tiny house I live in, but the location here I’d awesome. Without a back yard and some safe space I can’t do metal casting. I don’t have room in a 1 car garage for a smallish mill and lathe. I would absolutely use old aluminum wheels and heads from the auto recyclers to cast and machine my own stuff if I had the space. There is a decent chance that that kind of crafting leads to starting a new business.
As someone that has started a business twice. Never start a business cold. You do something for awhile on the side and once you are turning down work regularly, only then do you look into quitting a day job to do your own thing. Eliminating space eliminates most of people’s opportunities to innovate. Community spaces make cleanup and large projects a management nightmare and take much longer because you must clean up everything not to mention transportation and logistics.
Not everyone is creative or capable, and that is fine except that, if space is made into a luxury, escaping poverty with intelligence and persistence becomes considerably more impossible than it already is.
The housing I remember in Japan was the coffin box. A little space long enough for you to lie down in, with a small cubby for items. I think it was about 30 sq. ft. and maybe 90 cu. ft.
Japan is an outlier for numerous reasons, the biggest of which is that housing value there decreases over time (without going into the causes, the result is a feedback loop where housing isn’t built to last because it’s a poor long-term investment, so it depreciates like other semi-short-lived products, such as cars). This isn’t something the government planned, it came about naturally. So I wouldn’t say they’ve “solved” housing so much as their situation has made it a non-issue.
Japan also has longtime low population growth due to a mixture of nationalist anti-immigration and just generally low birthrates. So with the passage of time, less and less older homes will be in use.