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Japan wrestles with its views on ‘outside people’ amid population crisis
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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See, this sounds kind of nice coming from a country where housing is almost impossible to get for love or money.
There is definitely a positive to not treating a home as an appreciating asset that's for sure.. but the point of my rant is that it can go too far and you end up with a different type of housing crisis where there are plenty of cheap homes to go around, but nobody wants them.
The proper way to calm the housing crisis in the west is to heavily disincentivise the mass acquisition of property as an investment, through strong taxation and fees that increase with every property purchased and funnel that money to first home buyers, new construction, and overhauling zoning laws. hell, you could go as far as to put a hard cap on how many separate properties any person or entity can own for the next 10 years.. force that market to cool by squeezing the top.
An average 4 bedroom family home in the suburbs should never be 20-30x the average salary, that's ridiculous. the market needs to crash in order to recover to a state where a normal person can pay off a mortgage at an affordable rate in 15 to 20 years, not 30 or even 50 as we are seeing in some areas. property should still be an appreciating asset, but not one that is able to be hoarded en masse.
The whole ideology of nimbyism has to die too, protecting your investment at the detriment of the greater good holds us all back. that's another thing that is mostly non-existant in japan, there is no investment to protect in a lot of cases, so there is no backlash when the government or council want to change something nearby or build a block of cheap apartments nearby. If you vote for your local government and they say they will build a train station here, and a subsidised housing block there, you cant complain, it is for the greater good.
The problem with an appreciating asset is, that it will have to become less and less affordable to average people, because otherwise it can only maintain its value , keeping up with inflation. We must reach a state, where the value of the houses or the property itself stops increasing over time. That is always a result of relative scarcity. And it will backfire tremendously, when the boomers start dying off. The value has to be in the fact, that you dont pay rent and also can decide freely, how to change and do things around the house.
we're approaching the endgame of of the housing as appreciating asset scam, since it's now so far out of reach that newly born people cannot purchase anything at all. this will lead to a slump in demand for housing from anyone but rich investors, who in turn will need to find a way to make their inflated assets turn a profit and fail, since illegal hotels (AirBNB) are being cracked down on and rents that support the asset price cannot be paid by end users either. this will lead to popular desire for policy changes away from the housing as appreciating asset scam since it no longer works either to provide housing or wealth.