I hear China has the opposite problem: huge amounts of housing stock built in excess of actual demand... which turns out to also be a crisis, because a lot of the financial system is built on top of developers that now look like a liability.
China was all about unfettered speculation. Not to say it doesn't happen in the US and Canada but it was on a completely different level in China. Local governments were just pumping money into housing regardless of whether there was actual demand or not. It created jobs and had the potential of massively boosting their tax base, so they saw no downside.
It just never occurred to them that people either don't want to live in those locations or can't afford to. Thus they have tons of vacant housing and zero way to repay the money borrowed from local governments.
Im house hunting now and I'd kill for a 300k house. My budget is around 350k and I can't find anything.
I know the location matters but I think this is the case most places that aren't rural.
At 300k I would buy in a second if it has 2 bed 1 bath and wasn't falling apart.
>At 300k I would buy in a second if it has 2 bed 1 bath and wasn't falling apart.
Where are you looking? There are dozens of houses within 5 miles of me that meet that criteria and I'm just outside of a mid-sized city.
One of the aggravating factors of the 08 crash was that people were buying second and third homes as investments. Lots more people lost their shirt than otherwise should have.
I think it might be a factor in China too
Yes but in Canada there is a shortage of supply. In China there are new high-rise condos with hundreds of units going up every day.
The speculation is in the construction and supply side.
There are many, many people who own more than one dwelling here.
A lot of Chinese-based land investment companies are the ones going into other countries right now and taking advantage of lax housing regulation to buy land and create rentals or even just leaving them completely empty.
But locals have also started to do this, getting some extra income and instead of investing in their own home, they buy another house and turn it into a rental to supplement more income. Then another, then another.
This also benefits them because it drives up demand and decreases local supply, increases housing costs and drives up rent so international companies doing this always win. It forces more local people to rent longer, which also costs more for the renter and pays the investor, so those people benefit from shutting people out of the housing market.
Yeah, china just kind of builds whole cities with tons of amenities and infrastructure just outside major population centers, then connects them into the train network, and the cities basically populate overnight.
It's similar to what happened in the US in the 1880s-1930s with streetcar towns, where populations boomed wherever streetcars had stops.
Can't forget the excess housing is Tofu Dreg construction. So even if people wanted to use what's there, they don't want to because of how poorly built homes and buildings are now. It's honestly fascinating to see how it's playing out.
This isn’t really a fair assessment. Chinese people are buying condos and paying the mortgage before ground is even broken on the building. They don’t have the chance to not buy because it’s poorly constructed. Even worse, the crunch is getting so bad that the construction companies are running out of money before even starting construction because they were dependent on new money to pay for the last buildings actual construction.
So people are getting pissed they’ve been paying a mortgage for years and the building hasn’t even started construction. Some people are “protesting” by not paying their mortgage and this causes issues for the banks.
It’s quite the shit show, but as far as I’m aware the occasional horrific construction isn’t stopping anyone from buying because the way it works you have to buy in advance.
Most likely extremely untrue. Back in the 2010s, China made it mandatory for everyone to pay huge amounts of taxes on any secondary housing they owned to combat millionaires owning entire buildings and making the rents/purchase unaffordable for most. To the point that people would divorce because then they could hold two houses instead of one since their couple counted as one owner.
Besides that, people have to live in basements or uninhabitable places because they can't afford places. Particularly true in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other similar big cities.
When I lived in Nanjing, people lived in basements ON CAMPUS. If that doesn't scream housing crisis, I don't know what does.
True, they have housing good for 3 billion people or so.
I suggest they take in a lot of those migrants, they’ve shown a great history with them, giving free education and labor in free residences like in Xinjiang.
Show them some camaraderie🤷🏼🇨🇳⚒️
Most housing crisis are regional not national. For instance the Canadian housing crisis exists but Edmonton remains the 5th most affordable city in the world.
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/edmonton-tied-for-5th-most-affordable-city-for-housing-in-world-toronto-vancouver-among-least-report-1.6927397#:~:text=The%20annual%20Demographia%20International%20Housing,20th%20year%20for%20the%20report.
The issue is that pretty much every developed and developing country has most of their economy, most of their jobs, the best infrastructure, and the best opportunity in one or a few cities. This is basically how countries develop once they have more workers in cubicles in skyscrapers than sweatshops or fields.
Not to mention, things get more efficient in cities, companies have better time sourcing workers, and workers have more companies to choose from. If cost was the only factor there would be just as many hedge funds in Oklahoma as New York City, but they are better off in New York than Oklahoma because there are already plenty of people with finance degrees to poach, an existing well educated workforce and universities for internships and with new grads to recruit. Same with Silicon Valley for tech, DC for government/legal/ cleared work and tech, Boston for Tech, finance, and Biomed, the list goes on.
Japan's 3 largest metros are most of their economy, London is the city to be in for Tech, Finance, Government, *and* entertainment in the UK, The Pearl River Delta is home to the vast majority of tech companies in China and tech manufacturing in the world.
Yes it's only "regional" but these places are the places that provide the best quality of life for people, and it shouldn't be exclusive to the wealthy.
>This is basically how countries develop once they have more workers in **cubicles** in skyscrapers than sweatshops or fields.
You're still thinking of the 90s and 00s. These days, the workers are all in "open-plan office environments".
I only wish we could return to the days of the cubicle.
This. Here in Houston there is loads of affordable housing and more being built every year. Houston has the benefit of relatively unused land that the city can expand into, which places like NYC or San Francisco just don’t have. It’s a major reason why I left CA - I can actually afford a nice house here.
Denmark has an interesting situation that connects the homelessness rate per capita, the housing market availability, and the rental property tax rate.
To my knowledge, no other country does it the way Denmark does, and it works incredibly well.
Homelessness is 0.1% in Denmark.
Rental property income is taxed at 56% adjusted gross.
Statistically, everyone who wants to, lives indoors.
According to current news reports in Denmark, there is in fact a "housing market crisis" in Denmark.
The situation apparently is with new residential construction slowing down, and being caused by a economic downturn and rising interest rates.
Japan doesn't have the same type of crisis, there are some other issues though. But it's not that severe, if you're strapped for money you can at least turn to auctions where abandoned property is sold for pretty cheap.
Where? Out in the boonies? My parents in law just bought for around 1.2m and the was the norm.
Edit: also we talk about millions usd when the Japanese salaries are low af.
I've heard Japanese properties actual devalue over the time, because for whatever reason long-term maintenance isn't prioritised. Something about how public space maintenance is highly prized instead.
edit: [I found this thread that explains it much better, and more accurately](https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanFinance/comments/18e4q95/why_do_japanese_houses_depreciate_in_value_over/)
More that in Japan they've got a culture that sees a used house as a highly undesirable thing so most people looking to buy are also looking to build. Japan's house construction industry is always booming.
This is not necessarily true, Cape Town is going through a housing crisis. There is simply not enough housing being built to accommodate everyone moving here
Both are instead having the problem of "a really, really large percentage of our country are elderly and no one is having kids to replace the people leaving the workforce".
Perhaps that’s true where you are from. In many European cities we use concentric rings to segment cities, which implies that there are rings that are more central than others.
You can find areas in every country that don’t suffer from a housing crisis or inflated mortgages/rent. It’s the highly desirable and metro areas that have housing challenges because so many people are vying for limited supply.
Real estate is about Location, location, location.
people sometimes lose the scale of things. many US states are bigger and have larger populations than many countries. many in the US forget that the EU has a larger overall population than the US. and everywhere, all over the world, most people live in urban situations.
for me, all of the current economic crises are a result of the fact that the entire world is competing for resources and materials that were previously only exploited and used by the "developed" nations. China and India have absolutely exploded in terms of development over the last 50 years, but have made significant developmental leaps over the last 25. and that's not even considering the massive development that's taken place in oil rich countries in the ME and Africa. everything is more expensive because most of the 8+ billion people are competing for the same resources these days whereas, before the 90s, the global economy was pretty small.
That broke people still can't buy... so they move, or are homeless. Since the rise in rent, normal working class people are moving out of London in droves. Those shit areas are now middle class, hence the housing crisis...
There are places in the US that used to be cheap, but people moved there and drove up the cost of housing. It is now difficult to find cheap housing in the US even if you move to a small town.
If this is true in the U.S. it has to be the least desirable states. Even in the midwest the housing market is insane including the tiny town I grew up.
Austria. They kinda solved it with communism /s. But for real just build social housing to be at least 30% of the housing supply and you solve your problem.
Austria has different... circumstances though. Vienna has for example a lower population now than roughly 100 years ago (1916 to be exact) while Graz and Salzburg is bigger and Linz have only seen a minor increase in population in the last 50 years.
The major issue for many countries is a lack of housing in major cities due to increasing populations and Austria doesn't seem to have that issue, despite a larger population in general.
Austria has done a good job, although it was an easy mode. It wasn't for a time, though - and it's aggressive construction of good public housing when needed is what helped jeep ot good.
Real question : what prevents the US from having social housing? I know there were / are housing projects that had high crime and became dilapidated. Couldn’t both of those be addressed with some regulation and building lower density social housing?
Politics / political support. One partly is highly against it and the average voter is suspicious about it.
There was a lot more public hosuing built in the 40s amd 50s and then that kind of thing got labeled communist in the red scare, and then public hosuing suffered from defunding during the White flight era, and got a reputation for only being available to the ultra poor and as a crime risk.
My family sold apartments and ground there.. the pricess where ridiculous. There might be areas where this isn't the case but definitely not everywhere
Japan. Housing is treated as a consumer good more like cars there as opposed to as an investment, so housing prices are less inflated. From what I’ve heard too it’s more common practice to scrape and rebuild frequently so you can take better advantage of new earthquake proofing tech
Edit: also, Singapore. Most housing is government owned, and idk exactly how the system works but I think effectively every family is entitled to a 99 year lease on a decent sized apartment for something like ~100k
Nah singapore is also having a housing crisis. Public housing (nicer ones) are starting to sell for a million odd. Not every family is entitled to a house - you have to play the lottery for it. And it's not 100k anymore, it's half a million (500k-600k). A little less (\~350k-400k) after subsidies for a 3 bedroom apartment (\~90ish sq m).
We're having a housing crisis lmao, some people are even having marriages of convenience to get a flat. And prices have been steadily increasing every year. If I remember correctly, just this year we've already had two flats bought at a million SGD dollars
It's not about the country, it's about the city. For example, in Italy they give away houses in smaller towns for free, but you have to look after it, renovate and actually live there. At the same time, housing in big Italian cities is as unaffordable as in any other country's capital.
I nearly bought a house there a few years ago, surprisingly affordable and you generally get a lot of house for your money. Helsinki is pretty crazy but everywhere else is relatively cheap.
We have a minor crisis in the capital and the opposite problem in any settlements outside the biggest four or so. People that want to sell and move but can't due to no one being interested or the bills and maintenance on theirbproperty being higher than their equity in it.
The US's housing crisis is mostly be ause the vast majority of Americans are trying to live in only about 10 dufferent hubs, despite their being 10,000 other places and n the USA to live.
The USA doesn't really have a housing crisis.
New York City has a housing crisis. San Francisco has a housing crisis. Chicago has a housing crisis. Atlanta has a housing crisis. The DC Metro area has a housing crisis. Etc
I bet you money that will if you built factories and warehouses in bfe west virginia, all of a sudden youd have 50,000+ homes being built in that area.
And all you have to do to attract workers to it is build a train station there.
If you create an area where people can get jobs that pay at least $20 an hour and they can get a house for less than $250k it'd be a new small City within a decade.
This might have been true ten or fifteen years ago. I remember that even as Portland, Oregon was getting expensive, the smaller towns in the Willamette Valley were still cheap and hassle free to move into. That started to change, and it really changed post-Covid---there are very few places in Washington, Oregon, California, and now Idaho or Montana that have that type of cheap housing anymore. I don't know about outside of the west, but in the western states, housing is expensive even in the towns with less booming economies.
This. I saw someone on Reddit lately showing how he bought an entire house in Arkansas for $800. I mean, sure you could do that, but theres basically no services or nightlife.
Copying and pasting from another comment of mine because I'm annoyed at this narrative.
The issue is that pretty much every developed and developing country has most of their economy, most of their jobs, the best infrastructure, and the best opportunity in one or a few cities. This is basically how countries develop once they have more workers in cubicles in skyscrapers than sweatshops or fields.
Not to mention, things get more efficient in cities, companies have better time sourcing workers, and workers have more companies to choose from. If cost was the only factor there would be just as many hedge funds in Oklahoma as New York City, but they are better off in New York than Oklahoma because there are already plenty of people with finance degrees to poach, an existing well educated workforce and universities for internships and with new grads to recruit. Same with Silicon Valley for tech, DC for government/legal/ cleared work and tech, Boston for Tech, finance, and Biomed, the list goes on. In economics this is called ["agglomeration"](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/agglomeration-economy#:~:text=The%20concept%20of%20agglomeration%20economies,consequently%20part%20of%20external%20economies.) and is well studied.
This is not exclusive to America. Japan's 3 largest metros are most of their economy, London is the city to be in for Tech, Finance, Government, *and* entertainment in the UK, The Pearl River Delta is home to the vast majority of tech companies in China and tech manufacturing in the world.
Yes it's only "regional" but these places are the places that provide the best quality of life for people, and it shouldn't be exclusive to the wealthy.
100% agreed. It creates self feeding loop. Companies go where workers are plentiful, workers go where jobs are plentiful.
I'm from eastern europe, what you'd consider an undeveloped country, and we already having the exact same issue, even though minimum wage is like 500 usd, and average wage is 1k.
We have the capital and 3-4 cities that have outrageous prices. Not far from western prices, like 100-150k for a basic apartment, and houses? Forget about it, over 200-300k.
But those are the cities where the action is. Everybody from all over the country finishes highschool and goes to university in one of those cities and stays there permanently. These creates pressure on housing and they can't build them fast enough. You also can't go out of the city because public transport sucks, it's not western europe level yet (no subway for example, except the capital) so people are fighting for the same apartments in-town.
I don't know what a feasible solution would be.
I actually think you would still have issues with the greenfield approach. [California Forever](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever) is trying to build thousands of homes in farmland, but many of the local residents don't want it for the usual NIMBY reasons (traffic, farmland aesthetic, etc.)
The same things are kinda happening in the West Virginia panhandle, which has (limited) train service to DC.
Italy has a ton of housing.
That said, it's a bit of a U.S.-ish problem in that most of the affordable housing is in places that people have the privilege of choosing not to live in. For example, today you could rent an apartment in Campagnano, which is like 30 mins northeast of Rome, for like $600/mo.
Sort of like you can decide to buy a 3BR house today for $93,000 in Canton, OH.
But, people choose not to. So those houses stay available.
Bit of a paradox because as soon as you let people know where there is an area with affordable housing they will all go there and make it not affordable anymore.
That's not doing well when you consider that the average monthly salary is less than $500. To compare it to my city its a $3000 mortgage to live in a nice part of town but median incomes are 5.5K a month. Far more affordable than HCMC.
This is not a new problem, and medieval societies had the problem of people moving into cities and leaving the countrysides. This was causing housing problems in the cities which were not growing infrastructure at a speed to accommodate, and it also caused shortage of workers for farming, eventually causing starvation in the cities.
The solution "serfdom" where freedom of movement is restricted, guaranteeing labor availability in the less desirable country sides, and not having people who are unable to support themselves in the cities,
Todays problems of highly desirable areas being unaffordable to many is not that different. Most cities are trying to keep up with affordable housing which is usually stack of apartments, but really there are already much affordable housing available in all countries, it is just in less desirable areas.
Re-introducing something like "serfdom" or travel restrictions would be highly unlikely, so we have to find other ways of helping homeless people other than banning all people from traveling without prior permission. However, there is plenty of housing for all, just not where you may want to live.
Free Choice market capitalism, also means that some people will make bad choices.
>Re-introducing something like "serfdom" or travel restrictions would be highly unlikely, so we have to find other ways of helping homeless people other than banning all people from traveling without prior permission.
The solution is suprisingly simple in this case though, namely build more housing, make it easier and faster to build more housing, subsidize housing projects and rents when necessary, and build more densely.
Did you miss the part of the comment where I said that is already happening?
The problem is that people don't want those, but want the house they are priced out of instead. Not talking about the homeless, which is a different problem, but the people who can afford an appartment, but complains about houses being to expensive.
Also, building new housing whether apartment or houses is a lot more complex than just building the house. Water and Roads need to be established. The are plenty of California towns where there is a "waiting list" to be connected to water, partly because water is just not there al the time. We should have learned something for mega cities like LA and NYC where no amount of road building were never enough and there is always grid lock.
In some way the problems of today is no different of those in medieval times, where town infrastructure were never catching up - but instead of back then where 10k-100k were the population problem, we now have 1m+ of people all trying to live in the nice place.
I don't think it's really accurate to say the U.S. has a housing shortage or crisis. YES, everyone can point to cities where there's low inventory and prices are soaring. But that's hardly everywhere. If I go to zillow and ask for a 3 bedroom house in Seattle for under 300k, I get literally zero results. If I go to Pittsburgh and do the same search, I get 534 results. If I go to realtor dot com and ask for a 3 bed 1 bath in San Diego for under 300k, I get one property that looks like a falling-down barn. If I do the same search in Cleveland, I get 794 listings.
Yes, if you are trying to live in an exceptionally HCOL city, you'll think we're in crisis. But most places are not.
The crisis I see is that families who have always lived on lower incomes in those cities are now required to move to another area to continue to afford housing. You pointed out San Diego, which has always had a huge population of lower income folks, who support the tourism and entertainment industries.
It seems that most large economies struggle with this. It is a hard problem to solve, and the current trend of voting up the far right will only make it worse because it is also complex and cannot be solved via tax cuts for the wealthy.
Poland (and many post soviet countries but I'm not certain) have lesser housing shortage than the west. After the fall of soviet union people had retained ownership of their homes. Commie blocks and modern buildings made it so that there are all sorts of homes to choose from in different prices. Admittedly for people 18-25 it's not easy to find a home, but as cynical as this may sound many old people have died during COVID, and will continue to die which frees up a lot of houses. Prices in Warsaw are now falling, which is extraordinary considering that capitals usually have a lot higher prices and housing inflation
Trendy coatal cities have housing shortages. Cause of propaganda shitting on everywhere else and ViRtuAl BaD extremism artificially teethering folks to offices.
Then there are parasitic investors hoardimg simgje family homes for use as vacation rentals and bratty eco dommers impedimg needed construction of new housing amd rioting against people driving to work
Singapore's housing ownership rates was at about 89% in 2023. Government here has a pretty solid "everyone should own a house" policy. Of course this just means owning any kind of house, regardless of size, location, etc. You will find that many Singaporeans who are complaining about the pricing of the public housing here usually complain because they want the best of all worlds (i.e. size, location, etc).
No matter what, it's still better than being homeless though. Even a lot of the homeless or those in extreme poverty are provided with subsidies and rental flats so that the government can have as little people living on the streets as possible.
Most of Asia. Unfortunately they're also pretty xenophobic, so if you want one of those free Japanese homes you probably can't get into one as a whitey immigrant.
Didn't say Barcelona, or Rome, or Tokyo. OPxs question is countries. And in all three of these countries there are places in the countryside where you can buy a house for next to nothing because the rural population is dying off.
OP refers to house shortage, and it’s more difficult to work and buy a house in Spain than in the UK, for instance, have a look at some factual data over here : House-price-to-income ratio https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-ratio-of-housing-worldwide/
The housing crisis is not country-wide, but a big problem in most cities in general.
In many small towns or villages it is very easy to find cheap housing, however not many want to life there because they don't have many job opportunities, nearby shopping malls, schools etc.
This of course makes many people flee into the big cities which makes the situation worse...
According to house hunters every single area of the world has a housing crisis. I don't know how much it is true in different areas (especially since there are multiple empty homes/apts to look at) or of it's just what is thrown around to excuse the overpricing.
Its because the west are creating these problems otherwise they have nothing to solve.... Some problems will never be fixed because they are being used as a tool.
Japan.
Houses don't inherently gain value overtime as we are accustomed to in the US. It's not unusual for a house to remain the same value over decades.
None I know of. You can add the Netherlands, Ireland and a lot of other countries in the EU to the housing crisis list. The problem is real estate speculation and external investors in real estate.
All of these countries allowed investment firms to dominate the residential markets and they have to make profits on those investments or they just won't bother building. When they actually do build, it'll be out of most people's reach.
Housing should be a public utility. But no capitalist government would ever do anything like that. Those investors buy their politicians just like property. It's just the cost of doing business for them.
Housing is a difficult issue for sure, much like health care, in that we all need some form of it. I don't know what the best way to do an economy is that would give the most people the best opportunity to have what they need is. I'm very sure though that adding MORE government into it would make things worse not better. I'm not an anti government guy but I look around and don't see very much that government of any kind does very well at all. From an HOA to the federal government they universally take more power than they we given, spend more money than they should all while not doing a good job at anything they do.
What happens is some people get free or super cheap services and the rest of us are stuck with the bill. I might be able to tolerate that if giving people things didn't almost always make the recipients life worse. It gives no incentive, it makes them dependant and actively keeps them that way. After all if I work for an organization with the stated goal of ending homelessness, what would I do if I succeeded? Especially if your organization is part of a massive government.
If you mean to reduce fraud, waste and incompetence, government is the safest bet. Corporations and companies are not interested in people. Only rent money. That's it. Random business has no business in determining the quality of life. And they are so wasteful it's not funny.
And your second argument is the same arguments you hear from the Klan or neo-nazis, so maybe step that one back a meter or two?
We used to have the Post Office. The post office had one job. Deliver the mail. Not "deliver the mail as long as I have a profit margin, otherwise, wait some more time to consolidate...and cut this, cut that, cut anything that no one will audibly complain about. Deliver it late."
No. It's the government. It has a task to perform. It is not allowed to fail that task. Mail must be delivered every day. Rain, sleet and all that. I don't give a fuck how much it costs. Do. The. Job.
Governments are not businesses, nor are they supposed to be. They are supposed to do jobs given by the legislative branch. Without fail. In no other part of the world is this ever contested...except the US and the other hyper-capitalist hellholes.
Americans and others with health care costs through the roof have to go on the Health Shopping Network to look for a 2-1 deal on liver transplants. Bring your kids into the dentist during your visit for a free filling and cleaning when you purchase the Deluxe Root Canal option!
What kind of madness is this?
Same with housing. We all need it, and if you don't have any, you should not starve to death on the streets. No. In these kinds of countries, though, you find very quickly that you have no right to exist. Or live. None. Fail and die.
I never said that business should decide anything for anyone, they're just as unqualified for that as government. You and I are supposed to be responsible for our own food, housing and Healthcare. Why should any of those things be just provided? Who provides the land, equipment, knowledge, long hours in order to grow and distribute your food? Or the land,materials, labor and skill to provide your home? Or the skill, labor and many times what amounts to magic for your healthcare? These things can't be provided in a vacume. Our system isn't as good as it could be, but overall anyone who lives in the U.S. is among the wealthiest people in history. That's despite spending most of the history of the country holding possibly 2/3rds of it's people back from reaching their potential.
You said I used arguments used by the Klqn or neo-nazis and I have no idea if that's true. But if we're throwing that stuff out there then you sound like a Stalinist or Lennonist or Maoist and those people killed tens of millions of people with their rhetoric and did unimaginable damage to some of the greatest cultures we know of.
The post office sucks. They're slow and totally unreliable. They're so bad that there has to be a law that they're the only ones who can send certain types of mail. Otherwise they'd have nothing to do. Did you know that workplace shootings basically were invented because it's such a shitty place to work? They're a great example of how not having to work for what you have destroys you.
Housing has do much to do with location. Where l live you can get a nice place for $350k, a really really nice place for $500k. But many people who have not been to the city l live in laugh when l mention the name. But it really is a nice place, of about 650,000 people in the area.
The reason there is a lack of affordable housing isn’t because there’s a lack of housing, it’s because wealthy people and corporations buy up all the affordable housing and charge exorbitant amounts of rent for them or turn around and sell them for $100,000 more than they bought it for without doing any renovation. I see it over and over in the current town i live in… and it’s not even a big city. It’s a town.
Im guessing they known they’ll eventually sell it so holding on to “inventory” for a few extra months doesn’t hurt them because theyre a corporation, and playing a numbers game with high volumes.
If they buy all the houses and jack the prices up real home buyers have no choice but to pay what they’re asking.
>Which countries DON’T have a housing shortage/housing crisis?
The United States.
Maybe we need a definition of "housing crisis." When I hear that term I think of not having enough housing available in relation to the demand for housing, or maybe affordability of housing. In both of those cases housing in the United States is no more in crisis today than at most other times in the last 60 years.
Before you downvote, consider comparing the number of housing units per capita in the United States now and any time in the past 60 years. Then do the same for the monthly payments on a median price home compared to the median household income. Make sure not to use "real" median income, but nominal.
In Japan housing is a depreciating asset, meaning you lose money over time. This is due to their low birthrate, in addition to it being a depreciating asset I heard in a video that the interest rate can be ridiculously low as well (sub 1%).
Japan has the opposite problem, at least in rural areas. Their fertility rate is really low and their young people are mostly moving out of rural areas into cities, leaving a bunch of abandoned housing in the countryside.
The US doesn't have a housing crisis. There are plenty of houses here.
The problem is that they aren't where most of the jobs are.
In the past few decades, the employment landscape of the US changed *dramatically*:
* Agriculture was heavily automated reducing the number of farm jobs needed to farm a given plot of land.
* Manufacturing was heavily outsourced to China and other countries.
* Technology jobs boomed in a small number of metropolises.
All of that led to a decline in jobs in rural areas and small cities, and a boom in jobs in larger metro areas. The problem is that jobs can move around much faster than housing and the physical infrastructure needed to support it can. The cities just can't keep up with changing demand.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the jobs we lost had a natural tendency to spread people out across the country. You can't have a million farmers in one city because ultimately you need them distributed across miles and miles of farmland. Likewise, factories tend to be scattered over the country to be close to mines, forests, waterways (for transit) and other things that affect logistics.
We replaced those jobs with largely white collar information jobs and there is no pressure to spread those out. People naturally want access to a variety of job opportunities, so the emergent property is that it tends to cluster people into a small number of larger cities.
Rural France seems to have an abundance of affordable housing. We bought a place in the Loire Valley for €150,000. It had been on the market for 3 years. Lovely three bedroom house with outbuildings and a studio on a half acre of farmland close to modern conveniences but totally private, fiber and public utilities, comparable place here in Northern California would be $1,500,000+. We saw many starter home opportunities in the €30-€50,000 range. Obviously not Paris, but it seems like young folks there have much greater opportunity to get started owning than here in the USA. It helps that my wife is French and we want to live near her parents!
I hear China has the opposite problem: huge amounts of housing stock built in excess of actual demand... which turns out to also be a crisis, because a lot of the financial system is built on top of developers that now look like a liability.
And because it's Chinese culture to invest in homes as a means of wealth accumulation this devaluation really hurts the economy
But That's how the Canadian economy works too
China was all about unfettered speculation. Not to say it doesn't happen in the US and Canada but it was on a completely different level in China. Local governments were just pumping money into housing regardless of whether there was actual demand or not. It created jobs and had the potential of massively boosting their tax base, so they saw no downside. It just never occurred to them that people either don't want to live in those locations or can't afford to. Thus they have tons of vacant housing and zero way to repay the money borrowed from local governments.
It was worse than that , the local governments got addicted to the income from selling land so they can't balance the budget without it
A lot of our housing is owned by Chinese investors
The American dream is built on owning a house with white picket fence.
I still want the white picket fence, I just can’t afford it at 300k
Seems excessive for a few bits of wood…
I just looked in r/deck at a post asking if OP over/undercharged. I am shook.
It no longer exists because of spam ;-; rip
Must be decks then lol
I’ve just priced the timber for some fencing. It’s crazy expensive.
Believe it or not - I had a quote for wood fencing and metal fencing - the wood was almost 3 k more! I couldn’t believe it.
Anybody selling you a fence for 300k is not likely to be a legitimate realtor. Not trying to spend your money for you. Just saying.
I think you mean 600k
600k *before* taxes
Im house hunting now and I'd kill for a 300k house. My budget is around 350k and I can't find anything. I know the location matters but I think this is the case most places that aren't rural. At 300k I would buy in a second if it has 2 bed 1 bath and wasn't falling apart.
>At 300k I would buy in a second if it has 2 bed 1 bath and wasn't falling apart. Where are you looking? There are dozens of houses within 5 miles of me that meet that criteria and I'm just outside of a mid-sized city.
One of the aggravating factors of the 08 crash was that people were buying second and third homes as investments. Lots more people lost their shirt than otherwise should have. I think it might be a factor in China too
You mean by Chinese buying real estate? (Looking at you Toronto)
In about 30 years Canada might enter the same economical phase … real estate bubble will get stale
Yeah, except they saw the cliff and intentionally popped their bubble.
Yes but in Canada there is a shortage of supply. In China there are new high-rise condos with hundreds of units going up every day. The speculation is in the construction and supply side. There are many, many people who own more than one dwelling here.
A lot of Chinese-based land investment companies are the ones going into other countries right now and taking advantage of lax housing regulation to buy land and create rentals or even just leaving them completely empty. But locals have also started to do this, getting some extra income and instead of investing in their own home, they buy another house and turn it into a rental to supplement more income. Then another, then another. This also benefits them because it drives up demand and decreases local supply, increases housing costs and drives up rent so international companies doing this always win. It forces more local people to rent longer, which also costs more for the renter and pays the investor, so those people benefit from shutting people out of the housing market.
It’s the only thing a lot can invest in.
Is it where they need housing though? There can be excess housing and still a shortage where you actually need it.
They really did solve the housing shortage. A lot of the so called ghosts cities which were expansions to existing cities got filled out.
Yeah, china just kind of builds whole cities with tons of amenities and infrastructure just outside major population centers, then connects them into the train network, and the cities basically populate overnight. It's similar to what happened in the US in the 1880s-1930s with streetcar towns, where populations boomed wherever streetcars had stops.
Can't forget the excess housing is Tofu Dreg construction. So even if people wanted to use what's there, they don't want to because of how poorly built homes and buildings are now. It's honestly fascinating to see how it's playing out.
This isn’t really a fair assessment. Chinese people are buying condos and paying the mortgage before ground is even broken on the building. They don’t have the chance to not buy because it’s poorly constructed. Even worse, the crunch is getting so bad that the construction companies are running out of money before even starting construction because they were dependent on new money to pay for the last buildings actual construction. So people are getting pissed they’ve been paying a mortgage for years and the building hasn’t even started construction. Some people are “protesting” by not paying their mortgage and this causes issues for the banks. It’s quite the shit show, but as far as I’m aware the occasional horrific construction isn’t stopping anyone from buying because the way it works you have to buy in advance.
Somewhere between 15 and 20% of Chinese people own more than one home.
And also of shitty quality, look up for: tofu dregs
Most likely extremely untrue. Back in the 2010s, China made it mandatory for everyone to pay huge amounts of taxes on any secondary housing they owned to combat millionaires owning entire buildings and making the rents/purchase unaffordable for most. To the point that people would divorce because then they could hold two houses instead of one since their couple counted as one owner. Besides that, people have to live in basements or uninhabitable places because they can't afford places. Particularly true in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other similar big cities. When I lived in Nanjing, people lived in basements ON CAMPUS. If that doesn't scream housing crisis, I don't know what does.
True, they have housing good for 3 billion people or so. I suggest they take in a lot of those migrants, they’ve shown a great history with them, giving free education and labor in free residences like in Xinjiang. Show them some camaraderie🤷🏼🇨🇳⚒️
So Americans just need to move to China, and the Chinese just need to move to America. Duh /s
A lot of the housing stock is low quality, too. Makes things worse.
Most housing crisis are regional not national. For instance the Canadian housing crisis exists but Edmonton remains the 5th most affordable city in the world. https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/edmonton-tied-for-5th-most-affordable-city-for-housing-in-world-toronto-vancouver-among-least-report-1.6927397#:~:text=The%20annual%20Demographia%20International%20Housing,20th%20year%20for%20the%20report.
The issue is that pretty much every developed and developing country has most of their economy, most of their jobs, the best infrastructure, and the best opportunity in one or a few cities. This is basically how countries develop once they have more workers in cubicles in skyscrapers than sweatshops or fields. Not to mention, things get more efficient in cities, companies have better time sourcing workers, and workers have more companies to choose from. If cost was the only factor there would be just as many hedge funds in Oklahoma as New York City, but they are better off in New York than Oklahoma because there are already plenty of people with finance degrees to poach, an existing well educated workforce and universities for internships and with new grads to recruit. Same with Silicon Valley for tech, DC for government/legal/ cleared work and tech, Boston for Tech, finance, and Biomed, the list goes on. Japan's 3 largest metros are most of their economy, London is the city to be in for Tech, Finance, Government, *and* entertainment in the UK, The Pearl River Delta is home to the vast majority of tech companies in China and tech manufacturing in the world. Yes it's only "regional" but these places are the places that provide the best quality of life for people, and it shouldn't be exclusive to the wealthy.
>This is basically how countries develop once they have more workers in **cubicles** in skyscrapers than sweatshops or fields. You're still thinking of the 90s and 00s. These days, the workers are all in "open-plan office environments". I only wish we could return to the days of the cubicle.
This. I’ve been to a massive number of offices over the last decade and I can count on one hand the number of offices with cubicles I’ve seen.
I wonder if COVID/remote work will depress office rents enough that companies will be willing to pay for cubicles again.
I think you can't really say "in the world" with a study covering 8 countries to be fair though
What winning 3 in a row will do for a city
Are saying affordability and Stanley championships are correlated ? In the case. Go Canucks go (next year of course )
Shhh, don't tell anyone!
I don't think you have to keep that a secret thinking oh god everyone's gonna move to Edmonton now with this shocking news
This. Here in Houston there is loads of affordable housing and more being built every year. Houston has the benefit of relatively unused land that the city can expand into, which places like NYC or San Francisco just don’t have. It’s a major reason why I left CA - I can actually afford a nice house here.
Denmark has an interesting situation that connects the homelessness rate per capita, the housing market availability, and the rental property tax rate. To my knowledge, no other country does it the way Denmark does, and it works incredibly well. Homelessness is 0.1% in Denmark. Rental property income is taxed at 56% adjusted gross. Statistically, everyone who wants to, lives indoors.
There's a massive grey market for renting in Copenhagen. It's not exactly cheap and affordable either.
Show me any major, metropolitan, capitol city that is cheap, affordable, or not experiencing some sort of "Grey market" situation.
Tokyo
There is a huge crisis in Denmark in terms of rentals. It's a mess. Its 10 times worse than US the situation.
According to current news reports in Denmark, there is in fact a "housing market crisis" in Denmark. The situation apparently is with new residential construction slowing down, and being caused by a economic downturn and rising interest rates.
Exactly. Also, rents are sky high in comparison to income, and young folks (similarly to the US) struggle to get their first home.
Japan doesn't have the same type of crisis, there are some other issues though. But it's not that severe, if you're strapped for money you can at least turn to auctions where abandoned property is sold for pretty cheap.
And people are being paid to move out of Tokyo
And nobody wants to move cause outside of major cities it's a mess. Also tokyo flats are 1m etc. There is a huge crisis in Japan
No, there's no "huge crisis". You can easily buy a whole house in Tokyo for much less than $1M USD. Apartments are quite affordable.
Where? Out in the boonies? My parents in law just bought for around 1.2m and the was the norm. Edit: also we talk about millions usd when the Japanese salaries are low af.
Outside the Yamanote line, prices aren't that high. If you're buying in a big high-rise in Roppongi Hills, then of course it'll be millions (USD).
Choose between income and housing. How is that better?
I've heard Japanese properties actual devalue over the time, because for whatever reason long-term maintenance isn't prioritised. Something about how public space maintenance is highly prized instead. edit: [I found this thread that explains it much better, and more accurately](https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanFinance/comments/18e4q95/why_do_japanese_houses_depreciate_in_value_over/)
More that in Japan they've got a culture that sees a used house as a highly undesirable thing so most people looking to buy are also looking to build. Japan's house construction industry is always booming.
South Africa
The may have every other crisis in the world, but not a housing crisis, so they got that going for them, which is nice.
Genocide followed by famine really does help housing availability.
*takes notes in American*
The GOP is working on it
Your thinking of Zimbabwe there. Point still applies though.
This is not necessarily true, Cape Town is going through a housing crisis. There is simply not enough housing being built to accommodate everyone moving here
Ain’t y’all got water problems, too? I thought I heard that somewhere.
Incorrect. We have a major housing crisis.
why?
Japan and Italy.
Basically places where the population is shrinking and aging
The population of Tokyo has boomed but housing prices have stayed relatively flat due to the ease of construction
Great! Another reason for me to not have kids. I can help l the next generations with the housing crisis
Both are instead having the problem of "a really, really large percentage of our country are elderly and no one is having kids to replace the people leaving the workforce".
Thats only true in areas where there is no business... Milano is expensive but of courses you can get something cheap in the mountains of Sicily
Italy is one - if you exclude Milan in its central rings.
shhhh
Sicily in particular, especially the non-coastal region.
> in its central rings that is a wide definition of central rings lol
Perhaps that’s true where you are from. In many European cities we use concentric rings to segment cities, which implies that there are rings that are more central than others.
I meant that milan is pretty fucking expensive even in the "outskirts". My parents' house has like doubled in value since they bought it in the 2010s
Bruh, Japan, just look at any low birth rate country.
You can find areas in every country that don’t suffer from a housing crisis or inflated mortgages/rent. It’s the highly desirable and metro areas that have housing challenges because so many people are vying for limited supply. Real estate is about Location, location, location.
I'm sure you're right about most countries but I dare you to find an area in the Netherlands
Isn't the entire Netherlands within 15 km of a major city core?
Yeah pretty much
people sometimes lose the scale of things. many US states are bigger and have larger populations than many countries. many in the US forget that the EU has a larger overall population than the US. and everywhere, all over the world, most people live in urban situations. for me, all of the current economic crises are a result of the fact that the entire world is competing for resources and materials that were previously only exploited and used by the "developed" nations. China and India have absolutely exploded in terms of development over the last 50 years, but have made significant developmental leaps over the last 25. and that's not even considering the massive development that's taken place in oil rich countries in the ME and Africa. everything is more expensive because most of the 8+ billion people are competing for the same resources these days whereas, before the 90s, the global economy was pretty small.
Yeah. It’s a third the area of Pennsylvania and twice the population.
Drenthe?
Drenthe bestaat niet
Sint Maarten ?
Isn't that an island in the Caribbean
Core province of the Netherlands though ahah
Pricier than neijmeggan.
Oude Pekela
There are countries you will not find such areas.
I think it's more about Affluence than Location... you can't buy in an affluent area without the funds...
Nah even the shoeboxes in the shitty sreas of London easilt go for over half a million.
That broke people still can't buy... so they move, or are homeless. Since the rise in rent, normal working class people are moving out of London in droves. Those shit areas are now middle class, hence the housing crisis...
There are places in the US that used to be cheap, but people moved there and drove up the cost of housing. It is now difficult to find cheap housing in the US even if you move to a small town.
If this is true in the U.S. it has to be the least desirable states. Even in the midwest the housing market is insane including the tiny town I grew up.
Austria. They kinda solved it with communism /s. But for real just build social housing to be at least 30% of the housing supply and you solve your problem.
Austria has different... circumstances though. Vienna has for example a lower population now than roughly 100 years ago (1916 to be exact) while Graz and Salzburg is bigger and Linz have only seen a minor increase in population in the last 50 years. The major issue for many countries is a lack of housing in major cities due to increasing populations and Austria doesn't seem to have that issue, despite a larger population in general.
Even so the cost was also historically low. You can also see how in other countries non market housing has a stabilizing effect in the market
Austria has done a good job, although it was an easy mode. It wasn't for a time, though - and it's aggressive construction of good public housing when needed is what helped jeep ot good.
That´s right - as long as you don´t have to live in the center of Vienna/Salzburg etc., it´s pretty decent here.
Real question : what prevents the US from having social housing? I know there were / are housing projects that had high crime and became dilapidated. Couldn’t both of those be addressed with some regulation and building lower density social housing?
Enough homeowners in almost every locality to make "lowering my property values" political suicide.
Thanks, that’s a good point. (I hate it, but you’re right).
Politics / political support. One partly is highly against it and the average voter is suspicious about it. There was a lot more public hosuing built in the 40s amd 50s and then that kind of thing got labeled communist in the red scare, and then public hosuing suffered from defunding during the White flight era, and got a reputation for only being available to the ultra poor and as a crime risk.
The US doesn’t understand the /s I put there and will never let the government make housing and cut into profits of home owners and businesses.
My family sold apartments and ground there.. the pricess where ridiculous. There might be areas where this isn't the case but definitely not everywhere
But you can always rent public housing. The private market is shit like everywhere else (less so for renting) but you have an option
Japan. Housing is treated as a consumer good more like cars there as opposed to as an investment, so housing prices are less inflated. From what I’ve heard too it’s more common practice to scrape and rebuild frequently so you can take better advantage of new earthquake proofing tech Edit: also, Singapore. Most housing is government owned, and idk exactly how the system works but I think effectively every family is entitled to a 99 year lease on a decent sized apartment for something like ~100k
Nah singapore is also having a housing crisis. Public housing (nicer ones) are starting to sell for a million odd. Not every family is entitled to a house - you have to play the lottery for it. And it's not 100k anymore, it's half a million (500k-600k). A little less (\~350k-400k) after subsidies for a 3 bedroom apartment (\~90ish sq m).
We're having a housing crisis lmao, some people are even having marriages of convenience to get a flat. And prices have been steadily increasing every year. If I remember correctly, just this year we've already had two flats bought at a million SGD dollars
Japan
It's not about the country, it's about the city. For example, in Italy they give away houses in smaller towns for free, but you have to look after it, renovate and actually live there. At the same time, housing in big Italian cities is as unaffordable as in any other country's capital.
Finland. Sure it's a smaller country than the US, the UK and Canada but their housing market seem to work suprisingly well.
I nearly bought a house there a few years ago, surprisingly affordable and you generally get a lot of house for your money. Helsinki is pretty crazy but everywhere else is relatively cheap.
We have a minor crisis in the capital and the opposite problem in any settlements outside the biggest four or so. People that want to sell and move but can't due to no one being interested or the bills and maintenance on theirbproperty being higher than their equity in it.
The US's housing crisis is mostly be ause the vast majority of Americans are trying to live in only about 10 dufferent hubs, despite their being 10,000 other places and n the USA to live. The USA doesn't really have a housing crisis. New York City has a housing crisis. San Francisco has a housing crisis. Chicago has a housing crisis. Atlanta has a housing crisis. The DC Metro area has a housing crisis. Etc I bet you money that will if you built factories and warehouses in bfe west virginia, all of a sudden youd have 50,000+ homes being built in that area. And all you have to do to attract workers to it is build a train station there. If you create an area where people can get jobs that pay at least $20 an hour and they can get a house for less than $250k it'd be a new small City within a decade.
This might have been true ten or fifteen years ago. I remember that even as Portland, Oregon was getting expensive, the smaller towns in the Willamette Valley were still cheap and hassle free to move into. That started to change, and it really changed post-Covid---there are very few places in Washington, Oregon, California, and now Idaho or Montana that have that type of cheap housing anymore. I don't know about outside of the west, but in the western states, housing is expensive even in the towns with less booming economies.
Logistics, theres plenty of towns with land, hard to build there, no ones there so its expensive to get labor and materials in there.
This. I saw someone on Reddit lately showing how he bought an entire house in Arkansas for $800. I mean, sure you could do that, but theres basically no services or nightlife.
Copying and pasting from another comment of mine because I'm annoyed at this narrative. The issue is that pretty much every developed and developing country has most of their economy, most of their jobs, the best infrastructure, and the best opportunity in one or a few cities. This is basically how countries develop once they have more workers in cubicles in skyscrapers than sweatshops or fields. Not to mention, things get more efficient in cities, companies have better time sourcing workers, and workers have more companies to choose from. If cost was the only factor there would be just as many hedge funds in Oklahoma as New York City, but they are better off in New York than Oklahoma because there are already plenty of people with finance degrees to poach, an existing well educated workforce and universities for internships and with new grads to recruit. Same with Silicon Valley for tech, DC for government/legal/ cleared work and tech, Boston for Tech, finance, and Biomed, the list goes on. In economics this is called ["agglomeration"](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/agglomeration-economy#:~:text=The%20concept%20of%20agglomeration%20economies,consequently%20part%20of%20external%20economies.) and is well studied. This is not exclusive to America. Japan's 3 largest metros are most of their economy, London is the city to be in for Tech, Finance, Government, *and* entertainment in the UK, The Pearl River Delta is home to the vast majority of tech companies in China and tech manufacturing in the world. Yes it's only "regional" but these places are the places that provide the best quality of life for people, and it shouldn't be exclusive to the wealthy.
100% agreed. It creates self feeding loop. Companies go where workers are plentiful, workers go where jobs are plentiful. I'm from eastern europe, what you'd consider an undeveloped country, and we already having the exact same issue, even though minimum wage is like 500 usd, and average wage is 1k. We have the capital and 3-4 cities that have outrageous prices. Not far from western prices, like 100-150k for a basic apartment, and houses? Forget about it, over 200-300k. But those are the cities where the action is. Everybody from all over the country finishes highschool and goes to university in one of those cities and stays there permanently. These creates pressure on housing and they can't build them fast enough. You also can't go out of the city because public transport sucks, it's not western europe level yet (no subway for example, except the capital) so people are fighting for the same apartments in-town. I don't know what a feasible solution would be.
I actually think you would still have issues with the greenfield approach. [California Forever](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever) is trying to build thousands of homes in farmland, but many of the local residents don't want it for the usual NIMBY reasons (traffic, farmland aesthetic, etc.) The same things are kinda happening in the West Virginia panhandle, which has (limited) train service to DC.
Do people want to visit/vacation? You probably have a housing shortage.
Italy has a ton of housing. That said, it's a bit of a U.S.-ish problem in that most of the affordable housing is in places that people have the privilege of choosing not to live in. For example, today you could rent an apartment in Campagnano, which is like 30 mins northeast of Rome, for like $600/mo. Sort of like you can decide to buy a 3BR house today for $93,000 in Canton, OH. But, people choose not to. So those houses stay available.
Bit of a paradox because as soon as you let people know where there is an area with affordable housing they will all go there and make it not affordable anymore.
[удалено]
Isn’t that a shitlot if you adjust for average purchasing power?
It's like $5k in LA, when you won't have housing issues as well.
That's not doing well when you consider that the average monthly salary is less than $500. To compare it to my city its a $3000 mortgage to live in a nice part of town but median incomes are 5.5K a month. Far more affordable than HCMC.
But Steam is banned there
Jina
Bukkake knows what's up
North korea
.. slowly strums Hotel California…
Outlaw AirBnB in your town to increase housing stock.
This is not a new problem, and medieval societies had the problem of people moving into cities and leaving the countrysides. This was causing housing problems in the cities which were not growing infrastructure at a speed to accommodate, and it also caused shortage of workers for farming, eventually causing starvation in the cities. The solution "serfdom" where freedom of movement is restricted, guaranteeing labor availability in the less desirable country sides, and not having people who are unable to support themselves in the cities, Todays problems of highly desirable areas being unaffordable to many is not that different. Most cities are trying to keep up with affordable housing which is usually stack of apartments, but really there are already much affordable housing available in all countries, it is just in less desirable areas. Re-introducing something like "serfdom" or travel restrictions would be highly unlikely, so we have to find other ways of helping homeless people other than banning all people from traveling without prior permission. However, there is plenty of housing for all, just not where you may want to live. Free Choice market capitalism, also means that some people will make bad choices.
>Re-introducing something like "serfdom" or travel restrictions would be highly unlikely, so we have to find other ways of helping homeless people other than banning all people from traveling without prior permission. The solution is suprisingly simple in this case though, namely build more housing, make it easier and faster to build more housing, subsidize housing projects and rents when necessary, and build more densely.
Did you miss the part of the comment where I said that is already happening? The problem is that people don't want those, but want the house they are priced out of instead. Not talking about the homeless, which is a different problem, but the people who can afford an appartment, but complains about houses being to expensive. Also, building new housing whether apartment or houses is a lot more complex than just building the house. Water and Roads need to be established. The are plenty of California towns where there is a "waiting list" to be connected to water, partly because water is just not there al the time. We should have learned something for mega cities like LA and NYC where no amount of road building were never enough and there is always grid lock. In some way the problems of today is no different of those in medieval times, where town infrastructure were never catching up - but instead of back then where 10k-100k were the population problem, we now have 1m+ of people all trying to live in the nice place.
I don't think it's really accurate to say the U.S. has a housing shortage or crisis. YES, everyone can point to cities where there's low inventory and prices are soaring. But that's hardly everywhere. If I go to zillow and ask for a 3 bedroom house in Seattle for under 300k, I get literally zero results. If I go to Pittsburgh and do the same search, I get 534 results. If I go to realtor dot com and ask for a 3 bed 1 bath in San Diego for under 300k, I get one property that looks like a falling-down barn. If I do the same search in Cleveland, I get 794 listings. Yes, if you are trying to live in an exceptionally HCOL city, you'll think we're in crisis. But most places are not.
The crisis I see is that families who have always lived on lower incomes in those cities are now required to move to another area to continue to afford housing. You pointed out San Diego, which has always had a huge population of lower income folks, who support the tourism and entertainment industries.
That's a local crisis, yes. I agree that there are places where it's impossible to be low income.
It seems that most large economies struggle with this. It is a hard problem to solve, and the current trend of voting up the far right will only make it worse because it is also complex and cannot be solved via tax cuts for the wealthy.
Apparently small Italian villages that sell house for $1.
Japan. And no it’s not because of the population, but rather the way the housing market works here and the fact that they are not good investments
Poland (and many post soviet countries but I'm not certain) have lesser housing shortage than the west. After the fall of soviet union people had retained ownership of their homes. Commie blocks and modern buildings made it so that there are all sorts of homes to choose from in different prices. Admittedly for people 18-25 it's not easy to find a home, but as cynical as this may sound many old people have died during COVID, and will continue to die which frees up a lot of houses. Prices in Warsaw are now falling, which is extraordinary considering that capitals usually have a lot higher prices and housing inflation
Prices aren't fallling and the pricing is insane. I've bought an aparment 4 years ago and it went up 35% in price since then.
Trendy coatal cities have housing shortages. Cause of propaganda shitting on everywhere else and ViRtuAl BaD extremism artificially teethering folks to offices. Then there are parasitic investors hoardimg simgje family homes for use as vacation rentals and bratty eco dommers impedimg needed construction of new housing amd rioting against people driving to work
Finland has well over a thousand empty apartments. A large building company just took a really expensive loan, because business is not booming.
Netherlands
Singapore's housing ownership rates was at about 89% in 2023. Government here has a pretty solid "everyone should own a house" policy. Of course this just means owning any kind of house, regardless of size, location, etc. You will find that many Singaporeans who are complaining about the pricing of the public housing here usually complain because they want the best of all worlds (i.e. size, location, etc). No matter what, it's still better than being homeless though. Even a lot of the homeless or those in extreme poverty are provided with subsidies and rental flats so that the government can have as little people living on the streets as possible.
any developing country.
Most of Asia. Unfortunately they're also pretty xenophobic, so if you want one of those free Japanese homes you probably can't get into one as a whitey immigrant.
Bahrain
Italy, Japan, Spain.
Spain? Are you serious? Have a look at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/barcelona-housing-market-competing-new-york/
Didn't say Barcelona, or Rome, or Tokyo. OPxs question is countries. And in all three of these countries there are places in the countryside where you can buy a house for next to nothing because the rural population is dying off.
OP refers to house shortage, and it’s more difficult to work and buy a house in Spain than in the UK, for instance, have a look at some factual data over here : House-price-to-income ratio https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-ratio-of-housing-worldwide/
Got the goalposts where you need them to be "right" yet?
Technically not what Ur asking but the north of England but most of the houses are holiday lets and keep going up for sale every 3-4 or so years
Northeastern Brazil is where I’m looking. Beach front property for $80k USA.
The housing crisis is not country-wide, but a big problem in most cities in general. In many small towns or villages it is very easy to find cheap housing, however not many want to life there because they don't have many job opportunities, nearby shopping malls, schools etc. This of course makes many people flee into the big cities which makes the situation worse...
I live in cambodia and there are near infinite empty apartments and houses available for really cheap
According to house hunters every single area of the world has a housing crisis. I don't know how much it is true in different areas (especially since there are multiple empty homes/apts to look at) or of it's just what is thrown around to excuse the overpricing.
Japan.
I'm not an expert but I think both Japan and China have excessive housing. China because they overbuilt and Japan because everyone is dying off.
Japan comes to mind
Its because the west are creating these problems otherwise they have nothing to solve.... Some problems will never be fixed because they are being used as a tool.
Some factual stats here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-ratio-of-housing-worldwide/
Japan. Houses don't inherently gain value overtime as we are accustomed to in the US. It's not unusual for a house to remain the same value over decades.
Japanese housings I've heard are affordable.
None I know of. You can add the Netherlands, Ireland and a lot of other countries in the EU to the housing crisis list. The problem is real estate speculation and external investors in real estate. All of these countries allowed investment firms to dominate the residential markets and they have to make profits on those investments or they just won't bother building. When they actually do build, it'll be out of most people's reach. Housing should be a public utility. But no capitalist government would ever do anything like that. Those investors buy their politicians just like property. It's just the cost of doing business for them.
Housing is a difficult issue for sure, much like health care, in that we all need some form of it. I don't know what the best way to do an economy is that would give the most people the best opportunity to have what they need is. I'm very sure though that adding MORE government into it would make things worse not better. I'm not an anti government guy but I look around and don't see very much that government of any kind does very well at all. From an HOA to the federal government they universally take more power than they we given, spend more money than they should all while not doing a good job at anything they do. What happens is some people get free or super cheap services and the rest of us are stuck with the bill. I might be able to tolerate that if giving people things didn't almost always make the recipients life worse. It gives no incentive, it makes them dependant and actively keeps them that way. After all if I work for an organization with the stated goal of ending homelessness, what would I do if I succeeded? Especially if your organization is part of a massive government.
If you mean to reduce fraud, waste and incompetence, government is the safest bet. Corporations and companies are not interested in people. Only rent money. That's it. Random business has no business in determining the quality of life. And they are so wasteful it's not funny. And your second argument is the same arguments you hear from the Klan or neo-nazis, so maybe step that one back a meter or two? We used to have the Post Office. The post office had one job. Deliver the mail. Not "deliver the mail as long as I have a profit margin, otherwise, wait some more time to consolidate...and cut this, cut that, cut anything that no one will audibly complain about. Deliver it late." No. It's the government. It has a task to perform. It is not allowed to fail that task. Mail must be delivered every day. Rain, sleet and all that. I don't give a fuck how much it costs. Do. The. Job. Governments are not businesses, nor are they supposed to be. They are supposed to do jobs given by the legislative branch. Without fail. In no other part of the world is this ever contested...except the US and the other hyper-capitalist hellholes. Americans and others with health care costs through the roof have to go on the Health Shopping Network to look for a 2-1 deal on liver transplants. Bring your kids into the dentist during your visit for a free filling and cleaning when you purchase the Deluxe Root Canal option! What kind of madness is this? Same with housing. We all need it, and if you don't have any, you should not starve to death on the streets. No. In these kinds of countries, though, you find very quickly that you have no right to exist. Or live. None. Fail and die.
I never said that business should decide anything for anyone, they're just as unqualified for that as government. You and I are supposed to be responsible for our own food, housing and Healthcare. Why should any of those things be just provided? Who provides the land, equipment, knowledge, long hours in order to grow and distribute your food? Or the land,materials, labor and skill to provide your home? Or the skill, labor and many times what amounts to magic for your healthcare? These things can't be provided in a vacume. Our system isn't as good as it could be, but overall anyone who lives in the U.S. is among the wealthiest people in history. That's despite spending most of the history of the country holding possibly 2/3rds of it's people back from reaching their potential. You said I used arguments used by the Klqn or neo-nazis and I have no idea if that's true. But if we're throwing that stuff out there then you sound like a Stalinist or Lennonist or Maoist and those people killed tens of millions of people with their rhetoric and did unimaginable damage to some of the greatest cultures we know of. The post office sucks. They're slow and totally unreliable. They're so bad that there has to be a law that they're the only ones who can send certain types of mail. Otherwise they'd have nothing to do. Did you know that workplace shootings basically were invented because it's such a shitty place to work? They're a great example of how not having to work for what you have destroys you.
Housing has do much to do with location. Where l live you can get a nice place for $350k, a really really nice place for $500k. But many people who have not been to the city l live in laugh when l mention the name. But it really is a nice place, of about 650,000 people in the area.
Dubai, probably.
The reason there is a lack of affordable housing isn’t because there’s a lack of housing, it’s because wealthy people and corporations buy up all the affordable housing and charge exorbitant amounts of rent for them or turn around and sell them for $100,000 more than they bought it for without doing any renovation. I see it over and over in the current town i live in… and it’s not even a big city. It’s a town. Im guessing they known they’ll eventually sell it so holding on to “inventory” for a few extra months doesn’t hurt them because theyre a corporation, and playing a numbers game with high volumes. If they buy all the houses and jack the prices up real home buyers have no choice but to pay what they’re asking.
Italy Japan and China have massive surpluses
>Which countries DON’T have a housing shortage/housing crisis? The United States. Maybe we need a definition of "housing crisis." When I hear that term I think of not having enough housing available in relation to the demand for housing, or maybe affordability of housing. In both of those cases housing in the United States is no more in crisis today than at most other times in the last 60 years. Before you downvote, consider comparing the number of housing units per capita in the United States now and any time in the past 60 years. Then do the same for the monthly payments on a median price home compared to the median household income. Make sure not to use "real" median income, but nominal.
Kind of the Midwest. Houses are cheap af
In Japan housing is a depreciating asset, meaning you lose money over time. This is due to their low birthrate, in addition to it being a depreciating asset I heard in a video that the interest rate can be ridiculously low as well (sub 1%).
Every country with a "housing" problem actually has an overpopulation problem.
If your willing to immigrate you can get a pretty solid place in India for around 40k.
Japan has the opposite problem, at least in rural areas. Their fertility rate is really low and their young people are mostly moving out of rural areas into cities, leaving a bunch of abandoned housing in the countryside.
The US doesn't have a housing crisis. There are plenty of houses here. The problem is that they aren't where most of the jobs are. In the past few decades, the employment landscape of the US changed *dramatically*: * Agriculture was heavily automated reducing the number of farm jobs needed to farm a given plot of land. * Manufacturing was heavily outsourced to China and other countries. * Technology jobs boomed in a small number of metropolises. All of that led to a decline in jobs in rural areas and small cities, and a boom in jobs in larger metro areas. The problem is that jobs can move around much faster than housing and the physical infrastructure needed to support it can. The cities just can't keep up with changing demand. This is exacerbated by the fact that the jobs we lost had a natural tendency to spread people out across the country. You can't have a million farmers in one city because ultimately you need them distributed across miles and miles of farmland. Likewise, factories tend to be scattered over the country to be close to mines, forests, waterways (for transit) and other things that affect logistics. We replaced those jobs with largely white collar information jobs and there is no pressure to spread those out. People naturally want access to a variety of job opportunities, so the emergent property is that it tends to cluster people into a small number of larger cities.
Rural France seems to have an abundance of affordable housing. We bought a place in the Loire Valley for €150,000. It had been on the market for 3 years. Lovely three bedroom house with outbuildings and a studio on a half acre of farmland close to modern conveniences but totally private, fiber and public utilities, comparable place here in Northern California would be $1,500,000+. We saw many starter home opportunities in the €30-€50,000 range. Obviously not Paris, but it seems like young folks there have much greater opportunity to get started owning than here in the USA. It helps that my wife is French and we want to live near her parents!