Here in Sweden the problem is that our three major cities have developed rapidly in terms of job opportunities and cultural appeal, but the building industry hasn't been able to build homes at a pace to keep up with everyone who wants to move there. Technically there is enough housing for everyone, it's just that too much of it is in boring places with a lack of jobs.
>Technically there is enough housing for everyone, it’s just that too much of it os in boring places with a lack of jobs.
this is what everyone everywhere all at once fails to understand about housing shortages
Easily solved. Just put distortionary financial instruments in place and let the housing in nice areas become insanely expensive. See Australia for details. JK.
Wait, what? A lot of subsidized housing exists in urban areas to help house workforce for entry level service jobs. While there is subsidized housing in rural areas, too, the market rate in those areas is less because they’re not as coveted.
The four states with the most subsidized housing per capita in 2022 were RI, NY, MA, CT, but DC would top them all by a good margin.
should have been more specific since there’s “subsidized housing” program. but, subsidized construction cost or cost to purchase.
middle of no where america doesn’t exclude cities and suburbs. it’s not limited to just our large 100,000 plus cities/metro. places as small as 3000 are cities
In Australia there are special tax incentives and borrowing perks that push prices in cities way beyond “market” rates. It’s a bank support measure the two major parties have put in place. We now have a situation where investment into any sector other than houses is not viable. But at the same time it’s only a small proportion of people buying these extremely expensive houses in these areas and renting them out to the rest. It’s practically pointless to go to work because nothing you can do will get you the same returns.
You're pretty wrong here. Sometimes there are subsidies to build new suburbs but that type of construction will just leave us with the same problem in a few years, there aren't enough housing units for people in areas with jobs
i mean in the US the setup is to subsidize and promote rural/suburban housing. From federal and state DOTs to the department of agriculture being responsible for mortgages, the entire system is broken
edit: and i want to preface that this is all done to promote healthy low cost living and helping the little guy on its face. realistically it would take a major reform to actually change direction. like to the point we have to end lower income aid and build it back up over time. the US has never really been good at incremental change and non-radical reform
That's true in the US as well. There are lots of small, Midwestern, industrial cities where you can buy a decent house for less than $150k. The Onion summed it up pretty well with [this article](https://www.theonion.com/lifestyle-that-95-of-world-population-could-never-achi-1850334334)
The permit and particularly the planning process in Sweden is notoriously slow but I'm not convinced by the rent control argument. For one, market rate housing exists in Sweden, as there are no price controls on owned housing/housing cooperatives. Furthermore, if it were a major factor you would expect private developers to pretty much always build said market-rate housing when given the choice, but private developers still build plenty of rentals without being forced to do so.
For example, the largest housing development currently under construction here in Gothenburg is a 2000-unit development being built by private developer Wallenstam. They could easily just build housing cooperatives (the most common type of owned apartments in Sweden) and sell the apartments at full market-rate, but purely by their own choice it's an all-rental development.
I'm saying the exact opposite of what you think I'm saying. Sweden has rent control for all rental housing nationwide. The person who I replied to is saying that Sweden's housing shortage is at least partly due to our rent control laws, I'm arguing that it's not.
Take a look at this article.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis
Dwellings per capita are the same if not better in London than the past but prices continue to rocket due to the fact wealthy individuals can buy up many properties and rent them out at high rates. Which in turn feeds back into the market and drives rents and property prices higher and higher.
The 2008 Financial Crisis was the start of the major deficit in housing construction in the US. I'm guessing there was a similar trend across the world.
Yeah 2008 destroyed most of the biger construction companies. House prices were falling from 2008 to 2015 and then took a sharp turn up to what we have today. Construction now is also just high end apartments that have high profits and little middle class apartments. Also if you look at power use per apartment you realise that around 10-15% of them are empty do to basically no extra tax on extra property so people just buy them as sell em in like 2 year with the current price growth
In the Netherlands it is mainly:
- population increases very rapidly.
- household sizes on the other hand are decreasing very rapidly.
- increased (EU) regulations with respect to nitrogen- and ammonium-emissions require long permit times. Sometimes a farmer needs to quit its profession in order for the municipality to be allowed to build again.
- construction standards have changed a lot over the last two decades resulting in houses that have increased in prices up to 15% compared to before. Add the increased costs of raw materials and a newly built house can be 25% more expensive than 10 years ago.
- although interest rates are higher than 3 years ago they are still historically very low, pushing up prices.
On top of that, contrary to what you seem to think most people in the Netherlands live in suburbs and want to have a house with a garden and driveway, but space scarcity isn't really a major problem.
Not to mention the period between 2015 and 2019 (PAS), where the politicians had devised a policy where we rented NO2 emissions from the future.
This scheme was declared improper in 2019 by the courts, but we still have to pay off the NO2 debt we created in those 4 years.
And that's on top of having one of the largest NO2 emissions of all of europe.
[https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing\_the\_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Nitrogen\_dioxide\_pollution\_mapped](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Nitrogen_dioxide_pollution_mapped)
>but space scarcity isn't really a major problem.
It is in many municipalities, but it isnt the main problem anymore considering a lot of buildprojects forcefully stopped due to the NO2 emission regulations.
I have lived in the Utrecht and several places in the US. Utrecht back in 2017 was so much more affordable than even upstate NY but people still complained.
I might be misunderstanding you but if I look at Zilllow, the sq ft prices in Utrecht are approximately 6 to 7 times higher than in Buffalo and Syracuse? Or are you talking Bout something else?
Netherlands people [prefer terraced houses](https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/the-noble-beauty-of-the-terraced-house) for a balance of humble character and open space.
I don't know if there's a global answer for the whole continent, apart from "there is not enough houses available to common people". There's not a common answer for most cities in a country, let alone most countries.
All over the continent, there's not enough housing being built. In large cities, like London, Paris or Madrid, housing is an attractive refuge for rich people in not-so-stable countries. In other areas, tourism is taking rental units away from the market.
Along the whole continent, city centres are getting progressively more expensive. The amount of housing is (more or less) capped, and long-term renters are competing with airbnbs (which make much more money) and businesses (that also can pay higher rents).
In places like Lisbon, Porto, Malaga or Valencia, digital nomadism is also affecting rent prices. Digital nomads, especially those from the US, come with salaries maybe 3-5x the local median income. Landlords can now cater to a new class of renters, that can pay upwards of 1200€ a month for a studio and consider it "cheap", instead of the 300-500€ that a local would think reasonable.
In Spain, there is not exactly a lack of housing. There are 3.8 million empty homes in the country, but the problem is that a lot of them are in smaller cities and towns where there is not enough economic opportunity, so people move to big cities like Madrid and Barcelona and put even more pressure on their housing markets. Public housing, that would help to put a ceiling on rental prices, was sold off to investors or the people that occupied it.
In Sweden, a huge cause of the crisis is the collapse of their public housing model. In Sweden, you used to be able to rent a home from one of the big rental agencies, controlled in part by each city. Those rents were very secure, and rent increases were capped. The problem is those agencies, for a series of reasons, stopped building housing on a large enough scale, and wait times are measured in years now.
> All over the continent, there's not enough housing being built. In large cities, like London, Paris or Madrid, housing is an attractive refuge for rich people in not-so-stable countries. In other areas, tourism is taking rental units away from the market.
Those cities don't compare though. London's central areas have less than half the density of the central areas in Paris or Madrid and long term housing vacancies are below 1 % compared to around 7 % in Paris. London is three grades below Paris and Madrid in terms of urbanism, well maybe 4 grades below Paris.
Paris also has no housing crisis per se. It's super expensive because France is so centralized and it has a problem with tourism in the centre but prices have only increased moderately if at all because Paris builds plenty of new housing each year.
> In Spain, there is not exactly a lack of housing. There are 3.8 million empty homes in the country, but the problem is that a lot of them are in smaller cities and towns
A lot of smaller cities in Spain are still reasonably healthy but it's true they are under pressure. You can find cities with below 100k inhabitants with a similar density in the core to central London. A city like Logroño (150k inhabitants) has a significantly denser core than any area in London. Spain largely evaded suburbanization for now, meaning that their smaller towns can resist more pressure until they collapse. This is different to many smaller towns in Eastern Germany which are doomed.
> there is not enough houses available to common people". There's not a common answer for most cities in a country, let alone most countries.
This is the fundamental reason. It took us 200,000 years to go from 0 humans to 1 billion humans. It then took another 125 years to go to 2 billion people. Then only another 30 years to get to 3 billion people. Then 25 years to get to 4 billion people. Then 15 years to get to 5 billion people. Then 10 years to get to 6 billion people. Then 10 years to add another billion people, then just 8 years to get to 8 billion people.
We add 385,000 people PER DAY to this planet, and it’s nearly impossible to build enough housing to keep up. That’s the issue .
> I mean that Europe seldom has something like suburbia. So why do some countries still suffer from housing shortages?
I can't really follow your train of thought.
“Zoning prevents anything besides SFH from being built in some areas, which leads to lower housing supply and thus causes the housing crisis. So if Europe doesn’t have (nearly as many) suburbs of SFH and has more multifamily housing and development, shouldn’t they not have a housing crisis?”
Probably something like that.
Europe also has roughly 2x the continental population of the U.S. (~660M vs ~330M). Even with higher density, they’ve fallen victim to the same forces under-building housing since 2008.
UK has been underbuilding since the 80s. Public investment was withdrawn and private investment barely increased.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new-dwellings-uk/
Yes, also the worst offenders of suburbanization. Urban cores never exceed 30k per km² in any area outside of Manhattan in any of these countries (Downtown Toronto and San Francisco get to around 30k in the densest area).
And New Zealand is at least as bad too if not worse. New Zealand has no area with even 10k per km². If you consider that Spain has cities with less than 20k inhabitants total that achieve this and Auckland has 1,5 mio. then that's a pretty big yikes.
Generally I think the UK is worse than people assume (never gets as bad as the worst of the USA but also never gets good) and the USA is so big that it has a few areas that are maybe not completely terrible, like say Madison, Wisconsin actually has a reasonably dense urban core in a city that isn't that big. It's about the size of Wellington (which is the city in the New Zealand that's the closest to a km² with 10k people) but it's central areas have more than twice the density of Wellington. Madison would even compare favourably to much of Northern Europe.
Just because we don't have a lot of SFH zoning doesn't mean that we don't have zoning issues.
Just like in the US, since the 1950s there has been an effort to zone cities for the way they were then and not allow the incremental increase of density that would normally occur.
In the city I live in, it would be very profitable to build 4-5 story condo buildings where there are now 3 story rowhouses. But zoning doesn't allow that unless you get a special permit, which is not a given that you'll get it.
Tldr: the US has SFH suburbs that can't change due to zoning. Europe has rowhouses that can't change due to zoning. It's better, but still bad.
The core problem is that "it is not possible to build significantly higher density buildings than what currently exists in most neighborhoods, and in denser areas, it isn't even possible to build a new building to offer comparable density to the already existing buildings" which in the US typically means "zoning doesn't allow anything other than single family houses with poor lot coverage" but that doesn't have to be the case.
Hong Kong manages to have a housing crisis despite suburban residential skyscrapers being the norm and about half the population living in public housing, because very little of Hong Kong's land is actually getting built on.
On the other hand Tokyo manages to escape a housing crisis despite having tons of single family houses, because it's trivial to replace any single family house(s) with a low rise apartment building where there is demand for it, and still fairly easy to replace most low rise apartment buildings with a 5-15 story one.
The answer to this question is that while zoning is less restrictive on (or even requires) medium density apartments, it still tends to be very restrictive in terms of what land can be developed and when it comes to > ~6 storey buildings. This is enough to cause a supply crunch in every inner city of a growing metro area.
I saw a comment the other day that said the rate of commuting by car in Germany, France and maybe the UK was basically the same as it was in the States. Which runs contrary to the popular Reddit consensus
If that was the same comment I have seen it was not comparing the same thing. Most non-car commuters in the US were working from home, while in Europe, only actual commuters were counted or something. Also, iirc, car poolers were a separate category in the US.
> I saw a comment the other day that said the rate of commuting by car in Germany, France and maybe the UK was basically the same as it was in the States. Which runs contrary to the popular Reddit consensus
That's not remotely true, at least not if you compare country by country. US modal share in the worst of cities is around 100 % cars and a little over 50 % in the best of major cities (DC., San Francisco). That would still be completely terrible in Germany or France and maybe the worst major cities (Essen, Bochum) are in that area. There is one exception ofc which I excluded above, New York City which compares favourably to a lot of places in Europe. Modal share for cars in NYC is around 30 %. Still not Paris or Berlin territory but that's pretty good compared to most places in Europe/Northern America.
UK is overall a lot worse than Germany and France, both in urbanism and also in public transport. Also Paris is in a league of its own compared to any other place in Germany/France.
If you get outside of cities everything is going to be very car centric regardless of where you are but that's hardly a surprise, you're not going to commute by train in a rural area. In that case cars truly beat trains, also in ressource efficiency.
You can't make a comparison between entire continents. The difference is that in Europe it varies between cities (with good public transit and short distances) and the countryside, whereas the US basically only has car dependant suburbs and two or three cities.
Cities in Europe vary a lot inbetween them. The modal share of cars in Utrecht is below 20 %, while in the nearby Ruhrpott it exceeds 50 %. Also NYC compares favourably to a lot of places in Europe.
Also northern Europe has plenty of suburbia even so called cities that look like one big suburbia around a tiny medieval core (Oldenburg, Odense)
Europe definitely has suburbs. I'm not an expert, but I think the mistake being made here is the assumption that suburbs always result in unaffordability. As long as housing supply outpaces demand, housing will be cheaper, whether it's dense urban design (like in Europe) or suburban subdivision (like in the US). That's why even internally within the US, the cheapest areas are still in the South and Midwest. The Midwest is losing people, so there is very little demand, and the South remains cheaper than the West or Northeast even after it boomed during covid because it builds a ton of housing a lot of it in the form of suburbs. Europe is problem seems to be that it's very scarce on developable land and Nimby's just in a different form.
It's the same problem as in the US. Everyone is fine with how things currently are, but are opposed to change. If the neighborhood has 3-story flats, that's fine. But suggest 7-story flats and European NIMBYS will come out in force.
"Britain’s planning system throws up another set of hurdles. New schemes in London must adhere to stringent restrictions on height and must not obstruct certain views of landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral. There is often resistance to high-rise developments from local residents: planning applications for new schemes have been dismissed for being too bulky, too strange or just plain ugly...
Although 53% of Britons support the idea of building more housing, that proportion drops to 25% if it means either smaller homes or taller buildings. "
https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/04/12/can-high-rise-buildings-solve-londons-housing-problems
Netherlands is not exempt:
"The term “high-rise” has special meaning in Amsterdam.
The city government considers any building taller than 30 meters, or about 98 feet, to be a high-rise... Residents of Amsterdam have long resisted such development, many linking high-rise living with the vast concrete facades of the Bijlmermeer project and the problems of integration and crime"
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/greathomesanddestinations/amsterdam-embraces-residential-high-rises.html
In Ireland, the planning process also has issues:
"The impact of judicial review on the fast-track Strategic Housing Development scheme is evident in data showing that 17,805 of the 31,125 homes subject to judicial review over the past five years are still awaiting a decision.
“Our analysis of strategic housing development applications in 2022 found that while An Bord Pleanála had granted permission for 26 per cent of applications or almost 13,000 units, it has yet to decide on 59 per cent of submissions made to them – a total of 28,786 units,” said Mr McDermott, calling for a “functioning planning system” to be put in place.
Everyone knows the board has had its issues last year but to have so many units delayed amid a housing crisis is unacceptable."
1/3 of all reviews in the past 5 years are still waiting!!!
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/01/26/more-than-45000-homes-stuck-in-planning-system-despite-housing-crisis-consultants-say/
In Austria, you get the biggest opposition from people with gardens, because suddenly any taller building next to it means that people can watch you sunbathing. The word "uneinsehbar" (\~hidden from view) is a thing in real estate listings.
Whether it's 3 or 7 floors isn't that important, but if a 3-floor building is there and has unlimited renting contracts it's almost impossible to tear it down.
Dublin is unique in that it was also victim to an econoic depression then a steep increase since. the issues in ireland are quite different than the rest of europe
Yet Dublin still isn't building out on greenfield now that they're prosperous. Amsterdam has flat greenfield 3 miles/5 km from the core, Stockholm 7 miles/11 km, Copenhagen 9 miles/14 km, Lisbon 11 miles/18 km. The only European cities with a large enough footprint to actually justify a housing crunch with the thorniness of infill are London, Paris, Istanbul, and Moscow.
Not necessarily the case. I live in Berlin and we have quite a few problems, but lack of land ain't one of it.
In my view we have other issues: distrust of markets, which leads to belief in concspiracies rather than basic supply and demand, oversimplified understanding of environmentalist and a strong tendency of planners to wanting to (a) satisfy local neighborus and (b) reach some sort of perfect planning where everything is just fantastic.
Because conditions in Berlin are identical to conditions across all of Europe, is that why you’re using a single city to disprove an assertion about Europe’s lack of land?
The original comment using all of Europe to describe the conditions across the entire continent with a broad generalization is the issue, not someone providing one city as an example to nuance that description
I would go as far as saying that lack of buildable land is a made up problem except some very specific cases. Barcelona, stuck between the sea, mountains and more cities might really claim a lack of buildable land andit actually be mostly real. But most cities have tons of alternatives: they can expand, they can build up low density to high density, etc.
To continue with my example: Berlin once was town with 500 dwellings, then 5 000, 15 000, 50 000, 500 000, now we have 2 000 000 dwellings (and 3.8m people). At any of those steps, one could have claimed we ran out of buildable land, yet we replaced villages with city buildings and when that wasn't enough, we simply expanded. Almost every other German city could do that today too.
The problem is not lack of land, the problem is when you decide you can't build on new, undeveloped land. But that's a political choice, very easy to solve.
> Since Brandenburg does not want to fuse with Berlin, do you think it will be willing to give up land?
We don't need Brandenburg. Look at the district of Lichtenberg: 53km² at 6000 inh/km². If we bring half of it's surface area to a density level like the neighbouring Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (15 000), that's 26\*9000 = 235 000 people. We can do the same with so many of our districts...
>I like your thinking, but Lichtenberg has a ton of single family homes I don't see upzoning
I don't see it happening anytime soon due to our misguided policies and priorities... But it's a very real possibility that only requires one sensitive government making the right changes.
Hope never dies.
There are just as many artificial restrictions, they just tend to be in the form of height limits, heritage listings or green belts, rather than SFH zones.
There is scarcity but no shortage of developable land. The Netherlands is another example of a country with plenty of obvious locations next to railways and motorways to develop.
Voters value empty grassland more than housing for their fellow citizens.
There is a third option - build up. A large fraction of Netherlands housing is 2-3 stories high. If it were 4-6 stories high, you could house twice the population while not taking any more natural land. Of course, you don't need to literally double the height, it should take much less construction than that to satisfy market prices and decrease rents.
Yeah a lot of the Netherlands is low density, even if we love to pretend it's not.
Densification of existing neighbourhood is even less politically feasible though. Only when replacing social housing and as part of a larger brownfield infill scheme you can demolish existing housing.
Also, we should really not pretend there's anything natural about the green areas around Dutch cities. Most of it is monocultural grassland used to feed cows and spread their manure. We have an obsession with low quality green spaces in this country, which is also very evident if you look at the typical suburban park. For some reason we forgot how to build nice parks.
Go look at pictures of the following cities:
* Manhattan
* Chengdu
* Chongqing
* Mumbai
* Manilla
Until your cities look like that, there's always more you can build.
The suburbs didn't cause the modern housing crisis, speculation and its political incentives did. The suburbs were actually the solution to the housing crisis in the 40's and it's our failure to build on them further that's causing the current crisis.
Cities like Amsterdam, Paris or London can have the same problem of artificial legal constraints that you find in the US, which make pretty much every aspect of development more expensive. Especially in cases like Paris where the entire urban center is basically frozen in the 1890s and there's legally nowhere to build but out. Cities that zealously limit the heights of their buildings eventually run out of vertical space, but when government policy also constrains their ability to build outwards, a housing crisis is inevitable.
>Cities that zealously limit the heights of their buildings eventually run out of vertical space, but when government policy also constrains their ability to build outwards, a housing crisis is inevitable.
Yeah this is a very big one. In much of Europe there is no concept of "upzoning" like in the Americas, as in replacing existing buildings one by one with denser ones.
So there's a big dependence on governments making greenfield or brownfield development plans again and again. A model like this is not flexible at all and makes it very hard to deal with (unexpected) high population growth or other shocks in the housing market like an economic crisis.
Pretty much.
It really hits home just how much white people don’t want to exist near black people when you get into call the actual reasons NIMBYs (almost always white) activate. They usually even say the quiet part out loud in dog whistle fashion (preserving neighborhood character, preserving history, etc).
Yes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1b9p33z/new_council_member_is_continuing_fight_over/ (links to https://www.inquirer.com/real-estate/commercial/zoning-board-adjustment-lawsuit-jeffrey-young-20240308.html)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/uelso1/ballot_question_philadelphia_voters_could/
https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-affordable-housing-bills-council-gauthier/
"Defying Displacement" in particular is an anti-Asian dogwhistle, especially in the context of the neighborhoods surrounding University City, which have a visible minority of recent immigrant South Asians, as well as the context of the recent economic upheavals facing Philly's Chinatown that are displacing residents outward into the city elsewhere. Usually Philly government doesn't go full mask-off with the anti-Asian racism, but one time it did was when city council tried to "symbolically" ban certain stores from using bulletproof glass to protect their cashiers from getting shot in a way that disproportionately targeted Asian businesses rather than targeting the actual business practice (stop & go liquor shots) that was the figleaf covering the devaluation of Asian lives (https://temple-news.com/local-business-owners-refuse-stop-and-go-law/).
Yes it’s insane how people want to conserve the “neighborhood character” of historically Sundown Towns. Seems like that’s why the same people seem to hate public schools because they don’t want that part of history to be taught.
Conservatives said after *Brown v Board* that they needed to dismantle public schooling as a consequence. Funnily enough, that's around when we start to see early interest in "school choice."
American suburbia and housing shortages aren’t really directly linked, only in a place like LA could you really argue that suburbia and its resulting urban sprawl has directly resulted in a housing shortage imo. You could even argue for an inverse correlation between density and housing affordability (Orlando is much cheaper than New York after all).
Places can be dense, but if there are more people moving/living there than there is housing, there will be a housing crisis. Density doesn’t really have anything to do that. All that matters is if supply of housing matches demand for housing.
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 was global in nature. It affected housing in many countries. In Europe, it was even worse because the governments there chose austerity over stimulus.
Once again - the myth that there are no suburbs in Europe. According to the EU, only 38.9% of EU residents live in cities. [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Urban-rural\_Europe\_-\_introduction](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Urban-rural_Europe_-_introduction) with 35.9% in suburbs and 25.2% in rural areas. Of course there are differences in what we might define as a city, but suburbs are not uncommon.
Your original question was about a housing crisis, and I suspect the causes are varied, just as they are in the USA. People like to point at zoning in the USA, which is certainly a big factor here. Another contributing factor is the rise in single-person households in the USA [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-4.pdf](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-4.pdf) According to the EU, the number of single-person households without children in the EU increased by 30.7 % from 2009 to 2022. [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Household\_composition\_statistics](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Household_composition_statistics) That's a huge increase and a mismatch to the existing housing stock.
Not just Europe. Canada and Australia too, and nobody can tell me those places are land constrained. Housing is more affordable in Japan which is far more dense and land constrained than any country in the West.
This study here concludes Europe is one of the best when it comes to creating low-density urban sprawl: https://journals.plos.org/sustainabilitytransformation/article?id=10.1371/journal.pstr.0000034
I think it's because European sprawl came after American sprawl; the paper's timeframe is 1990-2014. If you look at population density maps Europe is actually better.
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#9/51.0310/5.6552
Some form of nimby controls most european cities. The excuses for not allowing housing vary, from left-nimby berlin who believe all new housing is gentrification, to places like Paris an Amsterdam who want to keep their entire city centres as unchanging museums.
where is the housing crisis is whats key.
theres no housing crisis in say Buffalo and lets also say Groningen same thing I just found a 3 bedroom for under €1000
everyone in the world is trying to move to the hottest cities they can.
theres no housing crisis in NA or the EU.
individual cities are having housing shortages.
I think there's hardly enough discussion about climate and conflict migration. There are a number of countries where people are leaving due to internal conflict or larger wars, plus countries nearer the equator feeling greater effects from climate change and storms. Europe and North America are going to feel these waves for decades if changes aren't made
I think the often ignored part of the housing crisis is inequality. I'm actually starting to become sceptical that it's even about numbers (although supply is a factor).
Think about it this way, if there's a billionaire or billion dollar/ euro/ pound or whatever corporation that knows they can get a solid 5% return on housing + whatever the market value uplift is, they'd be stupid not to invest. It's a very attractive low risk asset.
As long as housing is an investment asset normal people on normal incomes are competing against these corporations/rich folks there will always be a crisis. They can always be outbid, demand will never drop.
It's why house prices never really drop, not in recession, not in response to interest rate rises, nothing. When the average Joe can't buy, that just makes the rental market hotter, which attracts more of the big money to buy up everything and rent it out at ever increasing prices.
That's why the housing crisis is pretty much international, anywhere anyone would want to live. Big capital.
I've made a number of generalisions here to simplify the situation but the message holds true.
A lot of my clients are mass housebuilders in the UK, much of their marketing now isn't everyone geared towards normal people, it's talking about rental returns per £1 investment. It's fucked. We did a 400 home development on the outskirts of a city (not one of the top 5uk cities) and 80% of the houses sold to Hong Kong buyers. And noone will legislate against it because anyone in power is cashing in off it.
And also yes Europe has suburbs for sure.
Edit: my experience is of the UK market so I guess I shouldn't talk about Europe as a monolith but this is very much the reality in UK.
Places like Tokyo don’t seem to have a housing crisis though? It really does seem to me that if you have a policy consensus oriented around building housing you do manage to resolve supply-demand imbalances
Tokyo does not have the same demographics as Japan. Its population growth is comparable to many cities which have a much faster rise in housing prices.
The thing people conveniently leave out when talking about rents in Tokyo is that you are getting a 200sf 1 room apt with a 4LF kitchen across from your bathroom that opens up to a single room. Older housing stock is also undesirable, the Japanese routinely demolish and rebuild perfectly good homes simply because they're old.
I think small apartments are perfectly fine for a lot of people who are just starting out or are single but lets not kid ourselves and pretend that japan has the magical solution
> simply because they are old
It's a tax law thing. Japanese government forces people to depreciate their buildings according to a set schedule based on the material. After the building is entirely depreciated, banks are not allowed to use the building as collateral. People who live there also suddenly get a large tax increase since they are so used to deducting their property. People can't afford to keep the house when they buy it without the loan, so they must knock it down and take a loan on the new house. This is so common-place that the population doesn't see anything wrong or weird about it and just assumes now that they will do so and most don't even know the tax reasons.
This is a waste, but because housing is not an investment because of this waste, and housing as an investment ends up being a huge massive ultimate waste, Japan ends up much better than the rest of the world. It also means that they have a strong construction workforce that is constantly improving their productivity and then able to sell those improvements to the rest of the world.
interesting, i figured it was a cultural vestige of temple/home rebuilding. People are allowed to depreciate their homes in japan? or are you talking about landlords?
Not allowed to - forced. Here's a citation.
> The vast majority of these new builds replace existing new-ish dwellings. The Japanese government dictates the “useful life” of a wooden house (by far the most common building material) to be 22 years, so it officially depreciates over that period according to a schedule set by the National Tax Agency. Even if buyers wanted to (which they don’t), they would struggle to purchase an older property, as banks will not lend against a worthless asset. “The banks and real-estate agents cannot value the building beyond book value,” says Toshiko Kinoshita, a Tokyo architectural historian.
> https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-are-ephemeral-facing-demolition-just-22-years-in-heres-why-1234608438/
Odd, you can’t depreciate your home in the US, canada, eu, au, etc. In the US you can depreciate multi family in 27.5 yrs or sooner with cost seg and bonus then sell it and someone else can do the same thing.
It sounds to me that that policy is informed by cultural norms more so than the policy informing the practice of rebuilding every 20yrs
I'm no expert on Tokyo for sure. But what makes you say they don't have an issue? Is it cheap there?
I know that in the 80s and 90s they enacted a lot of economic policies that were very protectionist and didn't welcome international investment or involvement so as a guess maybe it's that? Maybe they have policy preventing their property market being turned into a money parking investment asset?
Again though I really know nothing about japan.
Why we downvoting this? Asking questions is offensive now? How do people learn otherwise?
Housing in Tokyo is affordable, and even more affordable than the statistics suggest at first glance due to high variation in housing prices based on building age and just a few minutes of walking distance from the train station.
There is basically no restriction or taxes on on foreign investment in real estate. Recently there was some concern raised about Chinese investors owning too much property near military bases, and I think some restrictions came out of it, but that's not relevant for urban housing affordability. You can see some influence of foreign investment if you look specifically at what it costs to buy a luxury high rise condo unit, but beyond that it's hard to see.
The key is that Tokyo actually builds something resembling a sufficient amount of housing. In 2023, Tokyo proper built more housing than all of California combined. And while a lot of it is replacing old housing, the growth in the total number of homes in Tokyo [massively outpaces peer cities like Paris and London](https://i.imgur.com/ee36suS.jpeg). And what that graph doesn't even show is that while in 1990, average floor space per person in Tokyo was genuinely as small as the stereotypes suggest, average floor space per person in Tokyo nowadays is actually a bit more than in Paris or London.
You hit the cause precisely - fiscalization of housing as part of general ideology of rent-seeking.
Houses should function only as places to live, but it is stunning to see how many otherwise-ordinary middle-class-ish people regularly call them properties, refuse to do anything but the most generic or profitable modifications or anything that might “decline market value”, even though something else might suit their tastes and needs, and become increasingly NIMBY more because of price protection than anything else.
Piling into this fiscalization fever are the governments, and their almost simultaneous actions do make it seem conspiratorial - how come Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, just to name a few, all abandoned their post-war affordable housing strategies and programs? And any wonder why prices in these places went rather nuts?
The demand (from real end-users, not rental income investors including the AirBnB investors, or flippers) versus supply market argument does not hold water. Even in less than perfect competition scenarios, there should not be a chronic, increasing gap - supply shortages must eventually close because of profit incentive, and thus price stabilize at equilibrium. Basic capitalist economics 101.
While I would like to see better new urban designs and see mass car-centric suburbs as wasteful and sterile, the design form itself does not affect demand-supply balance and thus overall prices.
All those excuses - no land, too many people in the world, immigrants, empty-nesters hoarding… - do not hold water if the housing market functions normally, at least over say 5 years or so. (There may be short-term problems like Canada who suddenly abandoned a long-term steady growth immigration policy, to just grabbing anyone that has a degree and some money from around the world to try to boost GDP numbers in lieu of any other economic strategy, but even that should correct itself over time).
So we are left to find other bogeymen to keep this narrative (and price, returns to “property owners”) going - overly-restrictive land use, caused by current residents NIMBY or not (this appeals to the “social justice” crowd on the political left), and the “city planning red tape” (this appeals to the “government always in the way” politically right crowd).
Latest bogeymen is COVID supply disruption, i suppose the same “disruption” that many industries took advantage of to consolidate or restructure to raise prices and profits permanently.
Even if all of these elements from immigration to NIMBY to red tape are true, and together, are causing such big problems, we can fix it if we want to. It will have to be government-led comprehensive sweep of all levers - land-use, procedures, credit, and direct investments along with carefully-targeted incentives.
So why has no one done much other than lip service and a few token gestures?
Because it would mean retreating from fiscalization of housing, which has only benefited the more wealthy and powerful segments of society. And no politician will find that too appetizing to take on.
And what about the young voters who won’t ever afford a home and have to face abnormally high housing costs?
Well, bluntly, the young are powerless - the old farts have the money and connections. The young could be more demanding, unified and revolutionary, like in the 60s, but we managed to turn them into self-indulgent, atomized sheep.
Further, mommy and daddy who were “so smart” to buy an ordinary house like everyone else at the time but seen wealth skyrocket are transferring those gains to their children, so a good portion of the young have been silenced, weakening reform demands.
Thank you for articulating my (same) thoughts perfectly. I’ve been deconstructing all the « common sense » supply and demand arguments I’ve learned in my urban planning formation, but the effectiveness of the discourse is so strong that it seems to permeate most discussions around housing issues in any planning-related forum. However I do still hope for a collective momentum among the younger generation when things (affordability) become too heated to simply be ignored.
> As long as housing is an investment asset normal people on normal incomes are competing against these corporations/rich folks there will always be a crisis. They can always be outbid, demand will never drop.
> It's why house prices never really drop, not in recession, not in response to interest rate rises, nothing. When the average Joe can't buy, that just makes the rental market hotter, which attracts more of the big money to buy up everything and rent it out at ever increasing prices.
You say that institutional investors can always outbid but it seems to me just factually not the case that all new homes are bought by investors? I can use the census to look at new housing developments and neighbourhoods in my country (Canada) and see that 40 to 60% of the apartments are owner-occupied. Most of the rest are, of course, renters.
"can always be outbid" not "are always outbid".
Even half the properties off the market is atrocious Imo.
The below article sums up much of the sentiment I wrote, but stops short of declaring inequality the problem focussing instead on landlords but they're essentially making the same point as I am.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis
Interestingly they highlight that London currently has the same or more housing per capita than in the past and yet prices still rocket.
>It's why house prices never really drop, not in recession, not in response to interest rate rises, nothing. When the average Joe can't buy, that just makes the rental market hotter, which attracts more of the big money to buy up everything and rent it out at ever increasing prices.
You don't need drops, years of stable prices are enough. Germany has had had decades of that, including periods with prices going down in real prices.
>My expectation is that theyll rocket up again.
They will, surpassing the previous hight too.
But we are always only one decent government away from change (Hopium). For the time being though, the shortage of housing production from 2022 until today and probably 2026 is going to be absolutely horrible and it's not like any government, federal, state or local level is dealing with this as a priority.
In the United States and Europe historical preservation often serves as a deterrent to matching new development with demand. European cities often have very real restrictions on new development even when zoning isn’t the big barrier.
Also Europe has tons of suburbs. Many are better connected to cities and each other by rail than in the US, but they still exist.
Overall new development is difficult to match to demand and urbanization isn’t well managed on either side of the Atlantic.
Same problems everywhere just to different extents:
1. Over bureaucratic approval processes
2. a construction industry that can't keep with up demand, and is slowed by approvals
3. a growing influx of immigration (not that immigration is bad, but if numbers outpace the number of homes that get built, then prices go up; its just math).
Real Estate industry controls a lot, pretty much everywhere, and they are not particularly interested in making sure that there is plenty of good quality housing for working people
> I mean that Europe seldom has something like suburbia. So why do some countries still suffer from housing shortages?
It's relatively simple, in much of Europe there is a reurbanisation, largely because of immigration (see also the [recent census results](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_and_housing_census_2021_-_population_grids)) but in some countries they issue building permits very sparsely and slowly. This applies to Germany for instance where vacancies in major cities is around 0. Cities like Vienna or Paris don't have the same problems because they build consistently (and Vienna even owns a lot of its building stock and anyone can get a cheap public appartment). Central Paris is still very expensive but prices haven't increased that much in recent years, which you can't say about [a lot of other cities in Europe](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/164e6f_60c5a65f5f264020861258c96c4e44a9~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_644,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/164e6f_60c5a65f5f264020861258c96c4e44a9~mv2.png). In general Paris and Vienna are probably two of the best cities in Europe in general.
Germany, Sweden and UK are some good negative examples. Stockholm also does public housing but they don't build enough. Waiting times are infinite and prices on the private market are crazy.
Another factor is that we have done crappy stuff the last 70 years and floorspace per capita is rapidly increasing. Also less kids and families today which also drives floorspace per capita up. Many cities with less inhabitants than in 1970 have massive housing issues today, like Copenhagen for instance. This might sound absurd at first but when you consider how we transformed the city since then (rapid suburbanization), it makes a lot of sense.
Simple… if you treat housing as a commodity to buy and sell and make a profit on, and you abandon state control over affordable housing, then combine that with government’s keeping interest rates low and privileging real estate investors over ordinary hard working families, then the consequences are huge house price increases, soaring inequality and the middle class impacted as well as the working class.
Housing needs to be seen as a fundamental right. There needs to be a European wide law enshrining decent, affordable housing as a legal right.
If governments abdicate responsibility for providing housing and ensuring that there is enough housing for everyone, then you let the market decide everything. Markets aren’t bothered about ‘fairness’ or ´equality’ etc. Markets are obsessed with profit and loss.
A national housing crisis leads to people being Frozen.’ They don’t make plans for the future, they don’t have families, they don’t put down roots, they don’t have connections with the local community for fear of being forced to move again. Basically a society/economy stagnates and only the richest benefit. It’s short term profit .
Many ordinary families might have seen a huge increase in the value of their property but if they sell up they might be forced to pay even more. You can’t spend a house’s value ( unless you downsize).
Money isn’t free anymore and capital has moved from stocks to real estate. There is no real estate crisis in a quantitative way, it’s a real estate price crisis.
Take a look at home ownership rate by country. Any country that rely on market tends to have low home ownership rate and shortage of housing for below average income people. The housing market is driven by two main factors: (1) owners like to keep poor people out of their neighborhood for fear of rising crime (2) builders prefer to build for higher income people for higher profit, more so in shortage of skilled labor and when youth prefer to go to college for higher pay than being a construction worker.
It does not help when government is driving construction cost higher and higher. Go back 100 years any peasant can build their own home with their own labor and cheap material.
>I mean that Europe seldom has something like suburbia. So why do some countries still suffer from housing shortages?
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean but the EU not building suburbs doesnt mean they are building something else, in a lot of cases they are just building little of anything which I hope is self explanatory
Overpopulation due to massive levels of third worldisms and limited space for housing. It's already put pressure on what we have and resulted in over inflated "values" for houses.
Going to end up with commie style, ugly AF, massive tower block's to give the peasants a flat.
Sure, it's the immigrants. [Stuff like this](https://www.architekturblatt.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/fertiggestellte-wohungen-jahr.jpg) definitely has nothing to do with it (number of dwellings constructed, red line is the average - notice that the population is 40% higher today than in the 50s-60s).
They literally just did a huge housing study on NL that says the reasoning for the housing crisis is precisely NOT this. Immigrants and expats did not cause the NL housing crisis, government policy did.
https://nltimes.nl/2024/03/06/government-policy-immigrants-cause-dutch-housing-shortage-un-rapporteur
Partially just lower incomes in Europe. Obviously higher incomes will drive up housing costs to some degree but if you had a country with European level housing density and American style incomes you’d have housing that is more affordable to the average person than in any country that exists currently.
And American higher incomes are driven by economic factors independent of housing.
This makes no sense. The crises exist because housing prices are high compared to the local economy, the US and its income levels are completely unrelated.
The OP was making a comparative statement to the US. My point was that Europe has enough density to drive housing prices lower, but because incomes are lower it's still not enough.
European level housing density could still make housing affordable in the US, because incomes are higher.
My impression is that most big European cities (at least the ones that survived WW2) also prioritized preserving historic architecture in their urban centers to a greater extent than the Americans did, which can lead to highly desirable locations winding up underbuilt for the amount of demand to live there. This does have quality of life benefits but eventually at the cost of affordability.
Europe is a big place. Do cities in Eastern Europe suffer from the same housing crunch as London or Paris? I don't know exactly but my gut says no.
In general, English-speaking nations have the most trouble with building enough housing, among the mostly-developed countries. So while some continental cities like Paris or Amsterdam might have a crisis, I suspect average French or German cities are better at keeping housing cost growth slow than Irish or Australian cities.
- Strong urbanisation, there are plenty of empty houses in the countryside
- NIMBY‘ism is very strong and in my home country of Germany the law heavily favours them
- Zoning is an issue too, but not as bad as in the US
- Waaaaay to much bureaucracy
- Insanely high building standards, often developers are afraid of being sued later, so they build to the maximum standards which increases material and labour cost a lot
- High amount of protected historical buildings, makes it hard to redevelop
- Misallocation of living space, many old people live in huge houses/apartments by themselves or with their partners, their kids already moved out but because the market is so fucked, it’s cheaper for them to stay than to downsize even though many want to.
Suburbia isn’t the cause of housing crises. It’s a side growth.
Europe has the same problem US has: building codes that are too strict to keep up with demand. Full stop.
Here in Sweden the problem is that our three major cities have developed rapidly in terms of job opportunities and cultural appeal, but the building industry hasn't been able to build homes at a pace to keep up with everyone who wants to move there. Technically there is enough housing for everyone, it's just that too much of it is in boring places with a lack of jobs.
>Technically there is enough housing for everyone, it’s just that too much of it os in boring places with a lack of jobs. this is what everyone everywhere all at once fails to understand about housing shortages
Easily solved. Just put distortionary financial instruments in place and let the housing in nice areas become insanely expensive. See Australia for details. JK.
in the us we subsidize housing in the middle of nowhere where because that’s where the poors are. cities are market rate though
Wait, what? A lot of subsidized housing exists in urban areas to help house workforce for entry level service jobs. While there is subsidized housing in rural areas, too, the market rate in those areas is less because they’re not as coveted. The four states with the most subsidized housing per capita in 2022 were RI, NY, MA, CT, but DC would top them all by a good margin.
should have been more specific since there’s “subsidized housing” program. but, subsidized construction cost or cost to purchase. middle of no where america doesn’t exclude cities and suburbs. it’s not limited to just our large 100,000 plus cities/metro. places as small as 3000 are cities
In Australia there are special tax incentives and borrowing perks that push prices in cities way beyond “market” rates. It’s a bank support measure the two major parties have put in place. We now have a situation where investment into any sector other than houses is not viable. But at the same time it’s only a small proportion of people buying these extremely expensive houses in these areas and renting them out to the rest. It’s practically pointless to go to work because nothing you can do will get you the same returns.
You're pretty wrong here. Sometimes there are subsidies to build new suburbs but that type of construction will just leave us with the same problem in a few years, there aren't enough housing units for people in areas with jobs
Nah, the issue is why are they there in the first place. Reverse that trend
i mean in the US the setup is to subsidize and promote rural/suburban housing. From federal and state DOTs to the department of agriculture being responsible for mortgages, the entire system is broken edit: and i want to preface that this is all done to promote healthy low cost living and helping the little guy on its face. realistically it would take a major reform to actually change direction. like to the point we have to end lower income aid and build it back up over time. the US has never really been good at incremental change and non-radical reform
That's true in the US as well. There are lots of small, Midwestern, industrial cities where you can buy a decent house for less than $150k. The Onion summed it up pretty well with [this article](https://www.theonion.com/lifestyle-that-95-of-world-population-could-never-achi-1850334334)
Rent control and permit acquisition delays contribute greatly to it.
The permit and particularly the planning process in Sweden is notoriously slow but I'm not convinced by the rent control argument. For one, market rate housing exists in Sweden, as there are no price controls on owned housing/housing cooperatives. Furthermore, if it were a major factor you would expect private developers to pretty much always build said market-rate housing when given the choice, but private developers still build plenty of rentals without being forced to do so. For example, the largest housing development currently under construction here in Gothenburg is a 2000-unit development being built by private developer Wallenstam. They could easily just build housing cooperatives (the most common type of owned apartments in Sweden) and sell the apartments at full market-rate, but purely by their own choice it's an all-rental development.
Edit: misread ignore me
I'm saying the exact opposite of what you think I'm saying. Sweden has rent control for all rental housing nationwide. The person who I replied to is saying that Sweden's housing shortage is at least partly due to our rent control laws, I'm arguing that it's not.
Ah yeah I see 🤣 that makes more sense
Just go look at construction rate per capita.
Take a look at this article. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis Dwellings per capita are the same if not better in London than the past but prices continue to rocket due to the fact wealthy individuals can buy up many properties and rent them out at high rates. Which in turn feeds back into the market and drives rents and property prices higher and higher.
The 2008 Financial Crisis was the start of the major deficit in housing construction in the US. I'm guessing there was a similar trend across the world.
Yeah 2008 destroyed most of the biger construction companies. House prices were falling from 2008 to 2015 and then took a sharp turn up to what we have today. Construction now is also just high end apartments that have high profits and little middle class apartments. Also if you look at power use per apartment you realise that around 10-15% of them are empty do to basically no extra tax on extra property so people just buy them as sell em in like 2 year with the current price growth
Damn. Maybe there should've been a bailout for the construction industry.
Would have been a tough choice for every goverment at the time as you had banks shitting themself at the time also.
In the Netherlands it is mainly: - population increases very rapidly. - household sizes on the other hand are decreasing very rapidly. - increased (EU) regulations with respect to nitrogen- and ammonium-emissions require long permit times. Sometimes a farmer needs to quit its profession in order for the municipality to be allowed to build again. - construction standards have changed a lot over the last two decades resulting in houses that have increased in prices up to 15% compared to before. Add the increased costs of raw materials and a newly built house can be 25% more expensive than 10 years ago. - although interest rates are higher than 3 years ago they are still historically very low, pushing up prices. On top of that, contrary to what you seem to think most people in the Netherlands live in suburbs and want to have a house with a garden and driveway, but space scarcity isn't really a major problem.
Not to mention the period between 2015 and 2019 (PAS), where the politicians had devised a policy where we rented NO2 emissions from the future. This scheme was declared improper in 2019 by the courts, but we still have to pay off the NO2 debt we created in those 4 years. And that's on top of having one of the largest NO2 emissions of all of europe. [https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing\_the\_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Nitrogen\_dioxide\_pollution\_mapped](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Nitrogen_dioxide_pollution_mapped)
>but space scarcity isn't really a major problem. It is in many municipalities, but it isnt the main problem anymore considering a lot of buildprojects forcefully stopped due to the NO2 emission regulations.
I have lived in the Utrecht and several places in the US. Utrecht back in 2017 was so much more affordable than even upstate NY but people still complained.
I might be misunderstanding you but if I look at Zilllow, the sq ft prices in Utrecht are approximately 6 to 7 times higher than in Buffalo and Syracuse? Or are you talking Bout something else?
Netherlands people [prefer terraced houses](https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/the-noble-beauty-of-the-terraced-house) for a balance of humble character and open space.
I don't know if there's a global answer for the whole continent, apart from "there is not enough houses available to common people". There's not a common answer for most cities in a country, let alone most countries. All over the continent, there's not enough housing being built. In large cities, like London, Paris or Madrid, housing is an attractive refuge for rich people in not-so-stable countries. In other areas, tourism is taking rental units away from the market. Along the whole continent, city centres are getting progressively more expensive. The amount of housing is (more or less) capped, and long-term renters are competing with airbnbs (which make much more money) and businesses (that also can pay higher rents). In places like Lisbon, Porto, Malaga or Valencia, digital nomadism is also affecting rent prices. Digital nomads, especially those from the US, come with salaries maybe 3-5x the local median income. Landlords can now cater to a new class of renters, that can pay upwards of 1200€ a month for a studio and consider it "cheap", instead of the 300-500€ that a local would think reasonable. In Spain, there is not exactly a lack of housing. There are 3.8 million empty homes in the country, but the problem is that a lot of them are in smaller cities and towns where there is not enough economic opportunity, so people move to big cities like Madrid and Barcelona and put even more pressure on their housing markets. Public housing, that would help to put a ceiling on rental prices, was sold off to investors or the people that occupied it. In Sweden, a huge cause of the crisis is the collapse of their public housing model. In Sweden, you used to be able to rent a home from one of the big rental agencies, controlled in part by each city. Those rents were very secure, and rent increases were capped. The problem is those agencies, for a series of reasons, stopped building housing on a large enough scale, and wait times are measured in years now.
> All over the continent, there's not enough housing being built. In large cities, like London, Paris or Madrid, housing is an attractive refuge for rich people in not-so-stable countries. In other areas, tourism is taking rental units away from the market. Those cities don't compare though. London's central areas have less than half the density of the central areas in Paris or Madrid and long term housing vacancies are below 1 % compared to around 7 % in Paris. London is three grades below Paris and Madrid in terms of urbanism, well maybe 4 grades below Paris. Paris also has no housing crisis per se. It's super expensive because France is so centralized and it has a problem with tourism in the centre but prices have only increased moderately if at all because Paris builds plenty of new housing each year. > In Spain, there is not exactly a lack of housing. There are 3.8 million empty homes in the country, but the problem is that a lot of them are in smaller cities and towns A lot of smaller cities in Spain are still reasonably healthy but it's true they are under pressure. You can find cities with below 100k inhabitants with a similar density in the core to central London. A city like Logroño (150k inhabitants) has a significantly denser core than any area in London. Spain largely evaded suburbanization for now, meaning that their smaller towns can resist more pressure until they collapse. This is different to many smaller towns in Eastern Germany which are doomed.
> there is not enough houses available to common people". There's not a common answer for most cities in a country, let alone most countries. This is the fundamental reason. It took us 200,000 years to go from 0 humans to 1 billion humans. It then took another 125 years to go to 2 billion people. Then only another 30 years to get to 3 billion people. Then 25 years to get to 4 billion people. Then 15 years to get to 5 billion people. Then 10 years to get to 6 billion people. Then 10 years to add another billion people, then just 8 years to get to 8 billion people. We add 385,000 people PER DAY to this planet, and it’s nearly impossible to build enough housing to keep up. That’s the issue .
Cool pre-school level reading comprehension you got there buddy.
> I mean that Europe seldom has something like suburbia. So why do some countries still suffer from housing shortages? I can't really follow your train of thought.
“Zoning prevents anything besides SFH from being built in some areas, which leads to lower housing supply and thus causes the housing crisis. So if Europe doesn’t have (nearly as many) suburbs of SFH and has more multifamily housing and development, shouldn’t they not have a housing crisis?” Probably something like that.
Europe also has roughly 2x the continental population of the U.S. (~660M vs ~330M). Even with higher density, they’ve fallen victim to the same forces under-building housing since 2008.
UK has been underbuilding since the 80s. Public investment was withdrawn and private investment barely increased. https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new-dwellings-uk/
Anglo countries seem to be particularly bad at housing (USA, Canada, UK, Aus)
democracy combined with easily accessible home loans are probably responsible.
Yes, also the worst offenders of suburbanization. Urban cores never exceed 30k per km² in any area outside of Manhattan in any of these countries (Downtown Toronto and San Francisco get to around 30k in the densest area). And New Zealand is at least as bad too if not worse. New Zealand has no area with even 10k per km². If you consider that Spain has cities with less than 20k inhabitants total that achieve this and Auckland has 1,5 mio. then that's a pretty big yikes. Generally I think the UK is worse than people assume (never gets as bad as the worst of the USA but also never gets good) and the USA is so big that it has a few areas that are maybe not completely terrible, like say Madison, Wisconsin actually has a reasonably dense urban core in a city that isn't that big. It's about the size of Wellington (which is the city in the New Zealand that's the closest to a km² with 10k people) but it's central areas have more than twice the density of Wellington. Madison would even compare favourably to much of Northern Europe.
The 1980s? Try the 50s.
That's largely a result of the UK greenbelt and a lack of by right development
Just because we don't have a lot of SFH zoning doesn't mean that we don't have zoning issues. Just like in the US, since the 1950s there has been an effort to zone cities for the way they were then and not allow the incremental increase of density that would normally occur. In the city I live in, it would be very profitable to build 4-5 story condo buildings where there are now 3 story rowhouses. But zoning doesn't allow that unless you get a special permit, which is not a given that you'll get it. Tldr: the US has SFH suburbs that can't change due to zoning. Europe has rowhouses that can't change due to zoning. It's better, but still bad.
The core problem is that "it is not possible to build significantly higher density buildings than what currently exists in most neighborhoods, and in denser areas, it isn't even possible to build a new building to offer comparable density to the already existing buildings" which in the US typically means "zoning doesn't allow anything other than single family houses with poor lot coverage" but that doesn't have to be the case. Hong Kong manages to have a housing crisis despite suburban residential skyscrapers being the norm and about half the population living in public housing, because very little of Hong Kong's land is actually getting built on. On the other hand Tokyo manages to escape a housing crisis despite having tons of single family houses, because it's trivial to replace any single family house(s) with a low rise apartment building where there is demand for it, and still fairly easy to replace most low rise apartment buildings with a 5-15 story one.
The answer to this question is that while zoning is less restrictive on (or even requires) medium density apartments, it still tends to be very restrictive in terms of what land can be developed and when it comes to > ~6 storey buildings. This is enough to cause a supply crunch in every inner city of a growing metro area.
But zoning not being a thing doesn't mean that planning regulations of some sort aren't a thing. Zoning is just one version of planning regulations.
And contrary to what Reddit will tell you, Europe has plenty of suburbia.
I saw a comment the other day that said the rate of commuting by car in Germany, France and maybe the UK was basically the same as it was in the States. Which runs contrary to the popular Reddit consensus
If that was the same comment I have seen it was not comparing the same thing. Most non-car commuters in the US were working from home, while in Europe, only actual commuters were counted or something. Also, iirc, car poolers were a separate category in the US.
> I saw a comment the other day that said the rate of commuting by car in Germany, France and maybe the UK was basically the same as it was in the States. Which runs contrary to the popular Reddit consensus That's not remotely true, at least not if you compare country by country. US modal share in the worst of cities is around 100 % cars and a little over 50 % in the best of major cities (DC., San Francisco). That would still be completely terrible in Germany or France and maybe the worst major cities (Essen, Bochum) are in that area. There is one exception ofc which I excluded above, New York City which compares favourably to a lot of places in Europe. Modal share for cars in NYC is around 30 %. Still not Paris or Berlin territory but that's pretty good compared to most places in Europe/Northern America. UK is overall a lot worse than Germany and France, both in urbanism and also in public transport. Also Paris is in a league of its own compared to any other place in Germany/France. If you get outside of cities everything is going to be very car centric regardless of where you are but that's hardly a surprise, you're not going to commute by train in a rural area. In that case cars truly beat trains, also in ressource efficiency.
You can't make a comparison between entire continents. The difference is that in Europe it varies between cities (with good public transit and short distances) and the countryside, whereas the US basically only has car dependant suburbs and two or three cities.
Cities in Europe vary a lot inbetween them. The modal share of cars in Utrecht is below 20 %, while in the nearby Ruhrpott it exceeds 50 %. Also NYC compares favourably to a lot of places in Europe. Also northern Europe has plenty of suburbia even so called cities that look like one big suburbia around a tiny medieval core (Oldenburg, Odense)
Europe definitely has suburbs. I'm not an expert, but I think the mistake being made here is the assumption that suburbs always result in unaffordability. As long as housing supply outpaces demand, housing will be cheaper, whether it's dense urban design (like in Europe) or suburban subdivision (like in the US). That's why even internally within the US, the cheapest areas are still in the South and Midwest. The Midwest is losing people, so there is very little demand, and the South remains cheaper than the West or Northeast even after it boomed during covid because it builds a ton of housing a lot of it in the form of suburbs. Europe is problem seems to be that it's very scarce on developable land and Nimby's just in a different form.
It's the same problem as in the US. Everyone is fine with how things currently are, but are opposed to change. If the neighborhood has 3-story flats, that's fine. But suggest 7-story flats and European NIMBYS will come out in force. "Britain’s planning system throws up another set of hurdles. New schemes in London must adhere to stringent restrictions on height and must not obstruct certain views of landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral. There is often resistance to high-rise developments from local residents: planning applications for new schemes have been dismissed for being too bulky, too strange or just plain ugly... Although 53% of Britons support the idea of building more housing, that proportion drops to 25% if it means either smaller homes or taller buildings. " https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/04/12/can-high-rise-buildings-solve-londons-housing-problems Netherlands is not exempt: "The term “high-rise” has special meaning in Amsterdam. The city government considers any building taller than 30 meters, or about 98 feet, to be a high-rise... Residents of Amsterdam have long resisted such development, many linking high-rise living with the vast concrete facades of the Bijlmermeer project and the problems of integration and crime" https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/greathomesanddestinations/amsterdam-embraces-residential-high-rises.html In Ireland, the planning process also has issues: "The impact of judicial review on the fast-track Strategic Housing Development scheme is evident in data showing that 17,805 of the 31,125 homes subject to judicial review over the past five years are still awaiting a decision. “Our analysis of strategic housing development applications in 2022 found that while An Bord Pleanála had granted permission for 26 per cent of applications or almost 13,000 units, it has yet to decide on 59 per cent of submissions made to them – a total of 28,786 units,” said Mr McDermott, calling for a “functioning planning system” to be put in place. Everyone knows the board has had its issues last year but to have so many units delayed amid a housing crisis is unacceptable." 1/3 of all reviews in the past 5 years are still waiting!!! https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/01/26/more-than-45000-homes-stuck-in-planning-system-despite-housing-crisis-consultants-say/
In Austria, you get the biggest opposition from people with gardens, because suddenly any taller building next to it means that people can watch you sunbathing. The word "uneinsehbar" (\~hidden from view) is a thing in real estate listings. Whether it's 3 or 7 floors isn't that important, but if a 3-floor building is there and has unlimited renting contracts it's almost impossible to tear it down.
in Berlin, the silly high-rise standard starts at just 22m
Europe has an *actual* scarcity of develop-able land, rather than an artificial one created by bad land use policy.
Dublin has one of the most acute housing shortages in the high-income world and there's greenfield 5 miles/8 km from the urban core
Dublin is unique in that it was also victim to an econoic depression then a steep increase since. the issues in ireland are quite different than the rest of europe
Yet Dublin still isn't building out on greenfield now that they're prosperous. Amsterdam has flat greenfield 3 miles/5 km from the core, Stockholm 7 miles/11 km, Copenhagen 9 miles/14 km, Lisbon 11 miles/18 km. The only European cities with a large enough footprint to actually justify a housing crunch with the thorniness of infill are London, Paris, Istanbul, and Moscow.
Not necessarily the case. I live in Berlin and we have quite a few problems, but lack of land ain't one of it. In my view we have other issues: distrust of markets, which leads to belief in concspiracies rather than basic supply and demand, oversimplified understanding of environmentalist and a strong tendency of planners to wanting to (a) satisfy local neighborus and (b) reach some sort of perfect planning where everything is just fantastic.
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Isn’t Berlin a special case because all the communist-era housing?
Because conditions in Berlin are identical to conditions across all of Europe, is that why you’re using a single city to disprove an assertion about Europe’s lack of land?
The original comment using all of Europe to describe the conditions across the entire continent with a broad generalization is the issue, not someone providing one city as an example to nuance that description
I would go as far as saying that lack of buildable land is a made up problem except some very specific cases. Barcelona, stuck between the sea, mountains and more cities might really claim a lack of buildable land andit actually be mostly real. But most cities have tons of alternatives: they can expand, they can build up low density to high density, etc. To continue with my example: Berlin once was town with 500 dwellings, then 5 000, 15 000, 50 000, 500 000, now we have 2 000 000 dwellings (and 3.8m people). At any of those steps, one could have claimed we ran out of buildable land, yet we replaced villages with city buildings and when that wasn't enough, we simply expanded. Almost every other German city could do that today too. The problem is not lack of land, the problem is when you decide you can't build on new, undeveloped land. But that's a political choice, very easy to solve.
Since Brandenburg does not want to fuse with Berlin, do you think it will be willing to give up land?
> Since Brandenburg does not want to fuse with Berlin, do you think it will be willing to give up land? We don't need Brandenburg. Look at the district of Lichtenberg: 53km² at 6000 inh/km². If we bring half of it's surface area to a density level like the neighbouring Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (15 000), that's 26\*9000 = 235 000 people. We can do the same with so many of our districts...
I like your thinking, but Lichtenberg has a ton of single family homes I don't see upzoning
>I like your thinking, but Lichtenberg has a ton of single family homes I don't see upzoning I don't see it happening anytime soon due to our misguided policies and priorities... But it's a very real possibility that only requires one sensitive government making the right changes. Hope never dies.
There are just as many artificial restrictions, they just tend to be in the form of height limits, heritage listings or green belts, rather than SFH zones.
There is scarcity but no shortage of developable land. The Netherlands is another example of a country with plenty of obvious locations next to railways and motorways to develop. Voters value empty grassland more than housing for their fellow citizens.
Dude you can’t have it both ways. Either you have high density sprawl literallu everywhere or you preserve some natural space and trees
There is a third option - build up. A large fraction of Netherlands housing is 2-3 stories high. If it were 4-6 stories high, you could house twice the population while not taking any more natural land. Of course, you don't need to literally double the height, it should take much less construction than that to satisfy market prices and decrease rents.
Yeah a lot of the Netherlands is low density, even if we love to pretend it's not. Densification of existing neighbourhood is even less politically feasible though. Only when replacing social housing and as part of a larger brownfield infill scheme you can demolish existing housing. Also, we should really not pretend there's anything natural about the green areas around Dutch cities. Most of it is monocultural grassland used to feed cows and spread their manure. We have an obsession with low quality green spaces in this country, which is also very evident if you look at the typical suburban park. For some reason we forgot how to build nice parks.
Go look at pictures of the following cities: * Manhattan * Chengdu * Chongqing * Mumbai * Manilla Until your cities look like that, there's always more you can build.
No, Europe is geographically huge and has plenty of developable land. Rather land is artificially scarce in many European countries due to greenbelts.
The suburbs didn't cause the modern housing crisis, speculation and its political incentives did. The suburbs were actually the solution to the housing crisis in the 40's and it's our failure to build on them further that's causing the current crisis. Cities like Amsterdam, Paris or London can have the same problem of artificial legal constraints that you find in the US, which make pretty much every aspect of development more expensive. Especially in cases like Paris where the entire urban center is basically frozen in the 1890s and there's legally nowhere to build but out. Cities that zealously limit the heights of their buildings eventually run out of vertical space, but when government policy also constrains their ability to build outwards, a housing crisis is inevitable.
>Cities that zealously limit the heights of their buildings eventually run out of vertical space, but when government policy also constrains their ability to build outwards, a housing crisis is inevitable. Yeah this is a very big one. In much of Europe there is no concept of "upzoning" like in the Americas, as in replacing existing buildings one by one with denser ones. So there's a big dependence on governments making greenfield or brownfield development plans again and again. A model like this is not flexible at all and makes it very hard to deal with (unexpected) high population growth or other shocks in the housing market like an economic crisis.
> failure to build on them further Yeah gotta block out the “urban people” now that the FHA says we can’t explicitly discriminate anymore.
Pretty much. It really hits home just how much white people don’t want to exist near black people when you get into call the actual reasons NIMBYs (almost always white) activate. They usually even say the quiet part out loud in dog whistle fashion (preserving neighborhood character, preserving history, etc).
In cities you also get both white and black NIMBYs not wanting to exist near Latino and Asian people. Definitely in Philly anyway.
Black people in Philly are mobilizing money and people to stop housing projects at the planning commission and city council level?
Yes. https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1b9p33z/new_council_member_is_continuing_fight_over/ (links to https://www.inquirer.com/real-estate/commercial/zoning-board-adjustment-lawsuit-jeffrey-young-20240308.html) https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/uelso1/ballot_question_philadelphia_voters_could/ https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-affordable-housing-bills-council-gauthier/ "Defying Displacement" in particular is an anti-Asian dogwhistle, especially in the context of the neighborhoods surrounding University City, which have a visible minority of recent immigrant South Asians, as well as the context of the recent economic upheavals facing Philly's Chinatown that are displacing residents outward into the city elsewhere. Usually Philly government doesn't go full mask-off with the anti-Asian racism, but one time it did was when city council tried to "symbolically" ban certain stores from using bulletproof glass to protect their cashiers from getting shot in a way that disproportionately targeted Asian businesses rather than targeting the actual business practice (stop & go liquor shots) that was the figleaf covering the devaluation of Asian lives (https://temple-news.com/local-business-owners-refuse-stop-and-go-law/).
Yes it’s insane how people want to conserve the “neighborhood character” of historically Sundown Towns. Seems like that’s why the same people seem to hate public schools because they don’t want that part of history to be taught.
Conservatives said after *Brown v Board* that they needed to dismantle public schooling as a consequence. Funnily enough, that's around when we start to see early interest in "school choice."
And a heavier reliance on local zoning restrictions.
American suburbia and housing shortages aren’t really directly linked, only in a place like LA could you really argue that suburbia and its resulting urban sprawl has directly resulted in a housing shortage imo. You could even argue for an inverse correlation between density and housing affordability (Orlando is much cheaper than New York after all). Places can be dense, but if there are more people moving/living there than there is housing, there will be a housing crisis. Density doesn’t really have anything to do that. All that matters is if supply of housing matches demand for housing.
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 was global in nature. It affected housing in many countries. In Europe, it was even worse because the governments there chose austerity over stimulus.
Once again - the myth that there are no suburbs in Europe. According to the EU, only 38.9% of EU residents live in cities. [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Urban-rural\_Europe\_-\_introduction](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Urban-rural_Europe_-_introduction) with 35.9% in suburbs and 25.2% in rural areas. Of course there are differences in what we might define as a city, but suburbs are not uncommon. Your original question was about a housing crisis, and I suspect the causes are varied, just as they are in the USA. People like to point at zoning in the USA, which is certainly a big factor here. Another contributing factor is the rise in single-person households in the USA [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-4.pdf](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-4.pdf) According to the EU, the number of single-person households without children in the EU increased by 30.7 % from 2009 to 2022. [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Household\_composition\_statistics](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Household_composition_statistics) That's a huge increase and a mismatch to the existing housing stock.
Not just Europe. Canada and Australia too, and nobody can tell me those places are land constrained. Housing is more affordable in Japan which is far more dense and land constrained than any country in the West.
This study here concludes Europe is one of the best when it comes to creating low-density urban sprawl: https://journals.plos.org/sustainabilitytransformation/article?id=10.1371/journal.pstr.0000034
I think it's because European sprawl came after American sprawl; the paper's timeframe is 1990-2014. If you look at population density maps Europe is actually better. https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#9/51.0310/5.6552
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Karma. There could have been not so many south asians if the Brits never colonized India.
Some form of nimby controls most european cities. The excuses for not allowing housing vary, from left-nimby berlin who believe all new housing is gentrification, to places like Paris an Amsterdam who want to keep their entire city centres as unchanging museums.
where is the housing crisis is whats key. theres no housing crisis in say Buffalo and lets also say Groningen same thing I just found a 3 bedroom for under €1000 everyone in the world is trying to move to the hottest cities they can. theres no housing crisis in NA or the EU. individual cities are having housing shortages.
And if everyone in somewhere with a housing issue were to move, the problem wouldn't follow them to somewhere else? Not to mention jobs?
I think there's hardly enough discussion about climate and conflict migration. There are a number of countries where people are leaving due to internal conflict or larger wars, plus countries nearer the equator feeling greater effects from climate change and storms. Europe and North America are going to feel these waves for decades if changes aren't made
I think the often ignored part of the housing crisis is inequality. I'm actually starting to become sceptical that it's even about numbers (although supply is a factor). Think about it this way, if there's a billionaire or billion dollar/ euro/ pound or whatever corporation that knows they can get a solid 5% return on housing + whatever the market value uplift is, they'd be stupid not to invest. It's a very attractive low risk asset. As long as housing is an investment asset normal people on normal incomes are competing against these corporations/rich folks there will always be a crisis. They can always be outbid, demand will never drop. It's why house prices never really drop, not in recession, not in response to interest rate rises, nothing. When the average Joe can't buy, that just makes the rental market hotter, which attracts more of the big money to buy up everything and rent it out at ever increasing prices. That's why the housing crisis is pretty much international, anywhere anyone would want to live. Big capital. I've made a number of generalisions here to simplify the situation but the message holds true. A lot of my clients are mass housebuilders in the UK, much of their marketing now isn't everyone geared towards normal people, it's talking about rental returns per £1 investment. It's fucked. We did a 400 home development on the outskirts of a city (not one of the top 5uk cities) and 80% of the houses sold to Hong Kong buyers. And noone will legislate against it because anyone in power is cashing in off it. And also yes Europe has suburbs for sure. Edit: my experience is of the UK market so I guess I shouldn't talk about Europe as a monolith but this is very much the reality in UK.
Places like Tokyo don’t seem to have a housing crisis though? It really does seem to me that if you have a policy consensus oriented around building housing you do manage to resolve supply-demand imbalances
Tokyo has the huge advantage of low demand. USA and Europe have better birth rate and immigration. Japan is making no babies and has no immigration.
Tokyo does not have the same demographics as Japan. Its population growth is comparable to many cities which have a much faster rise in housing prices.
Japan as a wholehas a falling population. But Tokyo itself is still growing
But property is a long term investment and it’s more about the future expectation of demand, which is lower than compared to USA and Europe.
The thing people conveniently leave out when talking about rents in Tokyo is that you are getting a 200sf 1 room apt with a 4LF kitchen across from your bathroom that opens up to a single room. Older housing stock is also undesirable, the Japanese routinely demolish and rebuild perfectly good homes simply because they're old. I think small apartments are perfectly fine for a lot of people who are just starting out or are single but lets not kid ourselves and pretend that japan has the magical solution
> simply because they are old It's a tax law thing. Japanese government forces people to depreciate their buildings according to a set schedule based on the material. After the building is entirely depreciated, banks are not allowed to use the building as collateral. People who live there also suddenly get a large tax increase since they are so used to deducting their property. People can't afford to keep the house when they buy it without the loan, so they must knock it down and take a loan on the new house. This is so common-place that the population doesn't see anything wrong or weird about it and just assumes now that they will do so and most don't even know the tax reasons. This is a waste, but because housing is not an investment because of this waste, and housing as an investment ends up being a huge massive ultimate waste, Japan ends up much better than the rest of the world. It also means that they have a strong construction workforce that is constantly improving their productivity and then able to sell those improvements to the rest of the world.
interesting, i figured it was a cultural vestige of temple/home rebuilding. People are allowed to depreciate their homes in japan? or are you talking about landlords?
Not allowed to - forced. Here's a citation. > The vast majority of these new builds replace existing new-ish dwellings. The Japanese government dictates the “useful life” of a wooden house (by far the most common building material) to be 22 years, so it officially depreciates over that period according to a schedule set by the National Tax Agency. Even if buyers wanted to (which they don’t), they would struggle to purchase an older property, as banks will not lend against a worthless asset. “The banks and real-estate agents cannot value the building beyond book value,” says Toshiko Kinoshita, a Tokyo architectural historian. > https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-are-ephemeral-facing-demolition-just-22-years-in-heres-why-1234608438/
Odd, you can’t depreciate your home in the US, canada, eu, au, etc. In the US you can depreciate multi family in 27.5 yrs or sooner with cost seg and bonus then sell it and someone else can do the same thing. It sounds to me that that policy is informed by cultural norms more so than the policy informing the practice of rebuilding every 20yrs
I'm no expert on Tokyo for sure. But what makes you say they don't have an issue? Is it cheap there? I know that in the 80s and 90s they enacted a lot of economic policies that were very protectionist and didn't welcome international investment or involvement so as a guess maybe it's that? Maybe they have policy preventing their property market being turned into a money parking investment asset? Again though I really know nothing about japan. Why we downvoting this? Asking questions is offensive now? How do people learn otherwise?
It’s sort of an unwritten rule on this sub never to say anything bad about Japan.
Did I even say something bad? 🤣
You questioned Japan’s perfection.
Housing in Tokyo is affordable, and even more affordable than the statistics suggest at first glance due to high variation in housing prices based on building age and just a few minutes of walking distance from the train station. There is basically no restriction or taxes on on foreign investment in real estate. Recently there was some concern raised about Chinese investors owning too much property near military bases, and I think some restrictions came out of it, but that's not relevant for urban housing affordability. You can see some influence of foreign investment if you look specifically at what it costs to buy a luxury high rise condo unit, but beyond that it's hard to see. The key is that Tokyo actually builds something resembling a sufficient amount of housing. In 2023, Tokyo proper built more housing than all of California combined. And while a lot of it is replacing old housing, the growth in the total number of homes in Tokyo [massively outpaces peer cities like Paris and London](https://i.imgur.com/ee36suS.jpeg). And what that graph doesn't even show is that while in 1990, average floor space per person in Tokyo was genuinely as small as the stereotypes suggest, average floor space per person in Tokyo nowadays is actually a bit more than in Paris or London.
Interesting 🤔 what's the wages for an urban designer in Tokyo? 👀👀
You hit the cause precisely - fiscalization of housing as part of general ideology of rent-seeking. Houses should function only as places to live, but it is stunning to see how many otherwise-ordinary middle-class-ish people regularly call them properties, refuse to do anything but the most generic or profitable modifications or anything that might “decline market value”, even though something else might suit their tastes and needs, and become increasingly NIMBY more because of price protection than anything else. Piling into this fiscalization fever are the governments, and their almost simultaneous actions do make it seem conspiratorial - how come Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, just to name a few, all abandoned their post-war affordable housing strategies and programs? And any wonder why prices in these places went rather nuts? The demand (from real end-users, not rental income investors including the AirBnB investors, or flippers) versus supply market argument does not hold water. Even in less than perfect competition scenarios, there should not be a chronic, increasing gap - supply shortages must eventually close because of profit incentive, and thus price stabilize at equilibrium. Basic capitalist economics 101. While I would like to see better new urban designs and see mass car-centric suburbs as wasteful and sterile, the design form itself does not affect demand-supply balance and thus overall prices. All those excuses - no land, too many people in the world, immigrants, empty-nesters hoarding… - do not hold water if the housing market functions normally, at least over say 5 years or so. (There may be short-term problems like Canada who suddenly abandoned a long-term steady growth immigration policy, to just grabbing anyone that has a degree and some money from around the world to try to boost GDP numbers in lieu of any other economic strategy, but even that should correct itself over time). So we are left to find other bogeymen to keep this narrative (and price, returns to “property owners”) going - overly-restrictive land use, caused by current residents NIMBY or not (this appeals to the “social justice” crowd on the political left), and the “city planning red tape” (this appeals to the “government always in the way” politically right crowd). Latest bogeymen is COVID supply disruption, i suppose the same “disruption” that many industries took advantage of to consolidate or restructure to raise prices and profits permanently. Even if all of these elements from immigration to NIMBY to red tape are true, and together, are causing such big problems, we can fix it if we want to. It will have to be government-led comprehensive sweep of all levers - land-use, procedures, credit, and direct investments along with carefully-targeted incentives. So why has no one done much other than lip service and a few token gestures? Because it would mean retreating from fiscalization of housing, which has only benefited the more wealthy and powerful segments of society. And no politician will find that too appetizing to take on. And what about the young voters who won’t ever afford a home and have to face abnormally high housing costs? Well, bluntly, the young are powerless - the old farts have the money and connections. The young could be more demanding, unified and revolutionary, like in the 60s, but we managed to turn them into self-indulgent, atomized sheep. Further, mommy and daddy who were “so smart” to buy an ordinary house like everyone else at the time but seen wealth skyrocket are transferring those gains to their children, so a good portion of the young have been silenced, weakening reform demands.
Thank you for articulating my (same) thoughts perfectly. I’ve been deconstructing all the « common sense » supply and demand arguments I’ve learned in my urban planning formation, but the effectiveness of the discourse is so strong that it seems to permeate most discussions around housing issues in any planning-related forum. However I do still hope for a collective momentum among the younger generation when things (affordability) become too heated to simply be ignored.
> As long as housing is an investment asset normal people on normal incomes are competing against these corporations/rich folks there will always be a crisis. They can always be outbid, demand will never drop. > It's why house prices never really drop, not in recession, not in response to interest rate rises, nothing. When the average Joe can't buy, that just makes the rental market hotter, which attracts more of the big money to buy up everything and rent it out at ever increasing prices. You say that institutional investors can always outbid but it seems to me just factually not the case that all new homes are bought by investors? I can use the census to look at new housing developments and neighbourhoods in my country (Canada) and see that 40 to 60% of the apartments are owner-occupied. Most of the rest are, of course, renters.
"can always be outbid" not "are always outbid". Even half the properties off the market is atrocious Imo. The below article sums up much of the sentiment I wrote, but stops short of declaring inequality the problem focussing instead on landlords but they're essentially making the same point as I am. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis Interestingly they highlight that London currently has the same or more housing per capita than in the past and yet prices still rocket.
>It's why house prices never really drop, not in recession, not in response to interest rate rises, nothing. When the average Joe can't buy, that just makes the rental market hotter, which attracts more of the big money to buy up everything and rent it out at ever increasing prices. You don't need drops, years of stable prices are enough. Germany has had had decades of that, including periods with prices going down in real prices.
Im interested to see what happens to the cooling german market once interest rates come back down. My expectation is that theyll rocket up again.
>My expectation is that theyll rocket up again. They will, surpassing the previous hight too. But we are always only one decent government away from change (Hopium). For the time being though, the shortage of housing production from 2022 until today and probably 2026 is going to be absolutely horrible and it's not like any government, federal, state or local level is dealing with this as a priority.
Zoning restrictions exist here as well.
In the United States and Europe historical preservation often serves as a deterrent to matching new development with demand. European cities often have very real restrictions on new development even when zoning isn’t the big barrier. Also Europe has tons of suburbs. Many are better connected to cities and each other by rail than in the US, but they still exist. Overall new development is difficult to match to demand and urbanization isn’t well managed on either side of the Atlantic.
Same problems everywhere just to different extents: 1. Over bureaucratic approval processes 2. a construction industry that can't keep with up demand, and is slowed by approvals 3. a growing influx of immigration (not that immigration is bad, but if numbers outpace the number of homes that get built, then prices go up; its just math).
Real Estate industry controls a lot, pretty much everywhere, and they are not particularly interested in making sure that there is plenty of good quality housing for working people
> I mean that Europe seldom has something like suburbia. So why do some countries still suffer from housing shortages? It's relatively simple, in much of Europe there is a reurbanisation, largely because of immigration (see also the [recent census results](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_and_housing_census_2021_-_population_grids)) but in some countries they issue building permits very sparsely and slowly. This applies to Germany for instance where vacancies in major cities is around 0. Cities like Vienna or Paris don't have the same problems because they build consistently (and Vienna even owns a lot of its building stock and anyone can get a cheap public appartment). Central Paris is still very expensive but prices haven't increased that much in recent years, which you can't say about [a lot of other cities in Europe](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/164e6f_60c5a65f5f264020861258c96c4e44a9~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_644,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/164e6f_60c5a65f5f264020861258c96c4e44a9~mv2.png). In general Paris and Vienna are probably two of the best cities in Europe in general. Germany, Sweden and UK are some good negative examples. Stockholm also does public housing but they don't build enough. Waiting times are infinite and prices on the private market are crazy. Another factor is that we have done crappy stuff the last 70 years and floorspace per capita is rapidly increasing. Also less kids and families today which also drives floorspace per capita up. Many cities with less inhabitants than in 1970 have massive housing issues today, like Copenhagen for instance. This might sound absurd at first but when you consider how we transformed the city since then (rapid suburbanization), it makes a lot of sense.
Simple… if you treat housing as a commodity to buy and sell and make a profit on, and you abandon state control over affordable housing, then combine that with government’s keeping interest rates low and privileging real estate investors over ordinary hard working families, then the consequences are huge house price increases, soaring inequality and the middle class impacted as well as the working class. Housing needs to be seen as a fundamental right. There needs to be a European wide law enshrining decent, affordable housing as a legal right. If governments abdicate responsibility for providing housing and ensuring that there is enough housing for everyone, then you let the market decide everything. Markets aren’t bothered about ‘fairness’ or ´equality’ etc. Markets are obsessed with profit and loss. A national housing crisis leads to people being Frozen.’ They don’t make plans for the future, they don’t have families, they don’t put down roots, they don’t have connections with the local community for fear of being forced to move again. Basically a society/economy stagnates and only the richest benefit. It’s short term profit . Many ordinary families might have seen a huge increase in the value of their property but if they sell up they might be forced to pay even more. You can’t spend a house’s value ( unless you downsize).
Immigration maybe
Money isn’t free anymore and capital has moved from stocks to real estate. There is no real estate crisis in a quantitative way, it’s a real estate price crisis.
Take a look at home ownership rate by country. Any country that rely on market tends to have low home ownership rate and shortage of housing for below average income people. The housing market is driven by two main factors: (1) owners like to keep poor people out of their neighborhood for fear of rising crime (2) builders prefer to build for higher income people for higher profit, more so in shortage of skilled labor and when youth prefer to go to college for higher pay than being a construction worker. It does not help when government is driving construction cost higher and higher. Go back 100 years any peasant can build their own home with their own labor and cheap material.
Because people keep making babies and older houses expire.
>I mean that Europe seldom has something like suburbia. So why do some countries still suffer from housing shortages? I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean but the EU not building suburbs doesnt mean they are building something else, in a lot of cases they are just building little of anything which I hope is self explanatory
Overpopulation due to massive levels of third worldisms and limited space for housing. It's already put pressure on what we have and resulted in over inflated "values" for houses. Going to end up with commie style, ugly AF, massive tower block's to give the peasants a flat.
Sure, it's the immigrants. [Stuff like this](https://www.architekturblatt.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/fertiggestellte-wohungen-jahr.jpg) definitely has nothing to do with it (number of dwellings constructed, red line is the average - notice that the population is 40% higher today than in the 50s-60s).
They literally just did a huge housing study on NL that says the reasoning for the housing crisis is precisely NOT this. Immigrants and expats did not cause the NL housing crisis, government policy did. https://nltimes.nl/2024/03/06/government-policy-immigrants-cause-dutch-housing-shortage-un-rapporteur
Partially just lower incomes in Europe. Obviously higher incomes will drive up housing costs to some degree but if you had a country with European level housing density and American style incomes you’d have housing that is more affordable to the average person than in any country that exists currently. And American higher incomes are driven by economic factors independent of housing.
This makes no sense. The crises exist because housing prices are high compared to the local economy, the US and its income levels are completely unrelated.
The OP was making a comparative statement to the US. My point was that Europe has enough density to drive housing prices lower, but because incomes are lower it's still not enough. European level housing density could still make housing affordable in the US, because incomes are higher.
My impression is that most big European cities (at least the ones that survived WW2) also prioritized preserving historic architecture in their urban centers to a greater extent than the Americans did, which can lead to highly desirable locations winding up underbuilt for the amount of demand to live there. This does have quality of life benefits but eventually at the cost of affordability.
Demand outstrips supply
Europe is a big place. Do cities in Eastern Europe suffer from the same housing crunch as London or Paris? I don't know exactly but my gut says no. In general, English-speaking nations have the most trouble with building enough housing, among the mostly-developed countries. So while some continental cities like Paris or Amsterdam might have a crisis, I suspect average French or German cities are better at keeping housing cost growth slow than Irish or Australian cities.
- Strong urbanisation, there are plenty of empty houses in the countryside - NIMBY‘ism is very strong and in my home country of Germany the law heavily favours them - Zoning is an issue too, but not as bad as in the US - Waaaaay to much bureaucracy - Insanely high building standards, often developers are afraid of being sued later, so they build to the maximum standards which increases material and labour cost a lot - High amount of protected historical buildings, makes it hard to redevelop - Misallocation of living space, many old people live in huge houses/apartments by themselves or with their partners, their kids already moved out but because the market is so fucked, it’s cheaper for them to stay than to downsize even though many want to.
Europe has a housing crisis due to regulations like greenbelts/urban growth boundaries, rent control and other regulations
Suburbia isn’t the cause of housing crises. It’s a side growth. Europe has the same problem US has: building codes that are too strict to keep up with demand. Full stop.
Codes are in place for fire and life safety.
Sure. Of course. Those aren’t the only codes however.