Lessons from ten nations about building affordable, low-carbon neighborhoods

https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-better-case-1-japan/

by jseliger • 5 years ago

66 57 5 years ago

ngngngng2• 5 years ago

I feel passionate about this issue. People should feel secure in their living situation. Young people becoming newly independent should feel confident that they can find an adequate living situation regardless of the salary they're able to command, and that is absolutely not the case in much of North America at the moment. At the same time, my dad has made quite a bit of money from savvy real estate investing, and I stand to inherit much of that. He also pushed me to invest in real estate and my properties have appreciated an unbelievable amount in the last few years.

I feel guilty having profited so much off of something I now perceive as somewhat immoral, but I also feel completely powerless. How can someone like me influence politics enough to steer this ship back towards affordable housing?

tjr225• 5 years ago

My parents in law are well off due to property investment.

It’s basically scalping but you’re scalping homes people could live in.

I had a chance to take on their business and was eager with dollar signs in my eyes but my wife couldn’t stomach the ethical implications so we didn’t. Maybe we will receive some inheritance; maybe we won’t but I’m proud of her resolve.

animal_spirits• 5 years ago

Research issues in your community and contact your local representatives about your ideas and opinions on it. Then, the more you understand about these issues, try to get involved in local organizations that provide housing for lower income residents. There's great work to be done! Don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves :)

musingsole• 5 years ago

I now perceive as somewhat immoral, but I also feel completely powerless

You already have and stand to inherit resources a good chunk of the country dreams of...and you feel powerless? You own those things. You control them. If you want something to be different, do something different.

How can someone like me influence politics enough to steer this ship back towards affordable housing?

Small steps. Do what you can with your resources. Your existence and how you live your life is the biggest political move an individual can make. The article is about expanding the scope of problems to solve them, but that logic is for institutions. As an individual, think individually. You defeat yourself by growing the problem scope into something requiring state action.

Specifically since you own and will own real estate: convert your properties into section 8 housing. It has a bad stigma and everyone worries about terrible renters, but I've had worse luck with non-section 8 tenants than friends have had with them.

ed25519FUUU• 5 years ago

Young people becoming newly independent should feel confident that they can find an adequate living situation regardless of the salary they're able to command, and that is absolutely not the case in much of North America at the moment.

Strong coastal city bias in your post. Most places outside major cities have very affordable housing, especially given today’s interest rates.

What you mean is that people should live wherever they want and others should foot the bill for them living in desirable areas.

ngngngng2• 5 years ago

The only places I've lived as an adult are rural Utah and rural Illinois. The affordability issue in Illinois is soaring property taxes pricing people out. Valuations in Utah are growing at an insane rate at the moment. I bought a duplex just a couple years ago for $270k. I could sell it today for just about double that.

https://www.sltrib.com/homeprices/

heavyset_go• 5 years ago

I feel guilty having profited so much off of something I now perceive as somewhat immoral, but I also feel completely powerless.

Well, no is forcing you to do it and it's your choice whether to continue or not.

How can someone like me influence politics enough to steer this ship back towards affordable housing?

There are national nonprofits that acquire, manage and develop property for affordable housing[1]:

Mercy Housing is one of the nation’s largest affordable housing organizations. We participate in the development, preservation, management and/or financing of affordable, program-enriched housing across the country. We acquire and renovate existing housing, as well as develop new affordable rental properties.

Here's who they help[2]. Perhaps you can donate or sell property to them.

[1] https://www.mercyhousing.org/

[2] https://www.mercyhousing.org/about/who-we-serve/

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Buy land. Develop cheap housing. Gain an understanding of the regulations driving up costs.

closeparen• 5 years ago

People should feel secure in their living situation.

Interestingly, this is common ground with NIMBYs. They just interpret the conditions surrounding their home as part of the living situation they need to secure.

andrewstuart2• 5 years ago

Housing should not be a financial instrument. There's nothing more to it than that.

Think about this: "every investment property requires a renter". It's the perfect embodiment of social/financial divide.

Radical idea, extremely unpalatable to many people: governments should ensure that anyone who wants to buy a house can buy a house by lending them the money. Consider Denmark doing exactly this: https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/denmark-...

I think it is a Russian saying "the fed do not understand the starving". i.e. anyone who owns a house has no empathy for those who don't.

But why the fuck should everyone not own a house who wants to? The disabled should be able to. Teachers should be able to. Firemen and policemen should be able to. Childcare workers should be able to. Instead, many people simply will never be able to own a house.

And the people who make the decisions - the politicians - are "the fed" - they all own at least one house often many.

Here in Australia the governments are all on a mission to make housing ever more expensive - fuck them.

I also can't see a single reason why overseas buyers should be allowed to buy real estate unless they are citizens or permanent residents.

I'm hoping one day governments will be voted out because people can't buy a house.

Housing...... should be for people and should be the basis of an equitable society in which everyone gets to own where they live.

Instead, all that counts here in Australia anyway, is .... money money money money.

mhh__• 5 years ago

In a certain way housing isn't a financial thing when it should be i.e. I look at my estate agent that I piss money into, they do absolutely nothing and are generally totally incompetent because they don't need to be.

I believe in private property as a right, fundamentally so, but it's just ridiculous at the moment - especially if you consider that voting systems are usually biased towards those of us who are older, richer, and often suburban or rural - this massively skews the incentives for politicians.

seibelj• 5 years ago

Money flows to good investments. If it flows internationally it’s because investors without citizenship trust your country’s rule of law in respect to non-citizens. Violating that to seize foreigners’ assets, or force them to sell at a discount, works once but ultimately leaves the country worse off IMO.

I hope some smaller countries start experimenting with true socialist policies. We need a Venezuela every few years to remind us why it’s such a terrible idea.

epistasis5• 5 years ago

A lot of what makes US real estate a "good investment" is that powerful interests protect their investment by reducing to allow more productive use of a scarce resource.

This is explicitly cited in the private equity SEC filings that buy single family homes and rent them out: the PE forms know that rents will continue to rise because existing homeowners control the political process that would prevent that rise: allowing more housing.

This is classic economic rentierism that harms everyone that is not profiting from the artificial scarcity.

saddlerustle• 5 years ago

Houses and rent are expensive because there's not enough houses in the places people want houses. You're not paying for the house, you're paying for someone else not to live there. Governments further subsidising homeownership will only make them more expensive.

andrewstuart2• 5 years ago

There's enough houses.

There just shouldn't be people owning more than 2.

pdonis7• 5 years ago

there's not enough houses in the places people want houses

I think a possible solution to a lot of that problem is one that, by a tragic irony, we have COVID-19 to thank for making mainstream: remote work. If people's housing locations weren't tightly coupled to their job locations, there would be a lot more freedom for people to choose a place to live and places to live would be forced to compete on a more level playing field.

pdonis7• 5 years ago

governments should ensure that anyone who wants to buy a house can buy a house by lending them the money.

We already have that in the US. And it helped to crash the economy back in 2008.

(Yes, technically the government just prints the money and on paper it's private financial institutions doing the lending. Same difference.)

Daho0n• 5 years ago

If you look at Denmark's way (GP's example) then it is nothing like the loans you mention. The government decides how the loans are put together and buyers can pick between them. None of them are like the ones from the crash.

darkteflon• 5 years ago

Fellow Australian, agree 100%. I’ve watched housing policy transform the fabric of Australian life over my lifetime, in ways that are unequivocally bad.

Ericson23148• 5 years ago

Everyone should have housing in a decent location, but making this about ownership is silly. Land is a finite public good. Period. Denser buildings that no-one should entirely own are usually better.

Taking a step back, flows are good, stocks are bad, unless there is a "real" capital investment at stake. Ownership, a single payment (ignoring morages) for indefinite rights, is a very weird financial instrument (note the contrast between "forever" and "single" transfer). It's funny fiction that just complicates the math.

Rents, a flow, are actually good. The problem is not rents but rentierism, i.e. when rents flow to owners (to stock) regardless of productive investment. The solution is to move away from equity to debt base financing: The constructors of the home are paid a fixed profit (fixed interest) and nothing more (bounded stock), buildings are coops (no ownership distinct from residency) and rents continuously replenish the maintainence pool after the construction debt is paid (flows all the way down!).

Again, speculation on finite land post construction investment recoupment is a cancer that has no place in the public sphere.

People who like "actually existing capitalism" are being severely uncreative with the math.

chriselles• 5 years ago

Things got so bad in Japan during their property bubble that it led to such bad ideas as 100 year multi generational mortgages:

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990...

pavlov• 5 years ago

100-year mortgages are common in Sweden. A few years ago the government even had to pass a law to limit mortgage terms to 105 years, because banks had started selling 140-year loans.

It’s sort of a halfway house between renting and owning. As long as property values go up, both buyers and banks seem reasonably happy with the arrangement. Apparently the Swedish rental market is quite broken which led to this model, but I don’t know the details.

mc32• 5 years ago

I also don't think top down land use regulation/zoning is appropriate. That's best left to localities with the exception of large projects (state and federal).

Why should Tokyo set zoning for Kagoshima?

kova12• 5 years ago

I loathe when people are trying to represent the tiny Japanese crawlspaces as "better housing". I'm keeping my american one thank you very much

bane• 5 years ago

Some really great videos on middle and lower-class housing in Japan

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ave4FiC2k8I&ab_channel=LifeW...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A&ab_channel=LifeW...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBPyN3LE65g&t=1s&ab_channel=...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNo06G3BeQ&ab_channel=LifeW...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM49O5CxlAk&ab_channel=LifeW...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNo06G3BeQ&ab_channel=LifeW...

there are several other extremely informative videos about housing in Japan on this channel. all are worth watching no matter your interest in Japan.

Causality1• 5 years ago

Is it possible to achieve Japan's housing statistical success without adopting its misery as well? Everything is cramped and poorly insulated. I don't know more than a handful of people who spent time living there but all of them said the accommodations were a definite low point of the experience.

bushbaba• 5 years ago

Isn’t the entire us housing issue due to federal backed mortgages?

If the feds said only 1 mortgage per household. And no federal mortgages for rentals, period. Then remove 1031b exchanges. The housing market would tank.

vex• 5 years ago

Not my experience. Standard japanese apartments are cheaply constructed, cramped and often unheated. Definitely a lower standard of living.

freeopinion2• 5 years ago

I'm a firm believer that the most effective government is the closest government. This article takes the exact opposite stance.

Imagine that to get a pothole repaired you had two choices: 1. petition town hall 5 miles from the pothole; 2. petition the state house 400 miles from the pothole. Which seems more practical?

Ask people in eastern Oregon how confident they are in western Oregon's understanding of their needs. Ask people in southern Utah if they think politicians in northern Utah understand their issues. Ask anybody in Arizona outside of Phoenix whether Phoenix exists on the same planet as they do.

In Sanbonmatsu, Nara prefecture it makes sense to require all trees to be cleared away from all buildings. In Yokohama, Kanagawa a rooftop park would be awesome.

But there are parts of Sanbonmatsu where firebreaks aren't necessary. Why on earth should local officials have to ask somebody 500 km away for permission on that zoning? Are locals too stupid? Are people in Tokyo just that much brighter?

In the U.S. this is very often used for political coersion. Collect taxes from all the far-flung peasants, then give them back money to hire school teachers only if certain conditions are met. Attach strings to all the federal money that came from local pockets to begin with. Need a new fire station? Don't look locally; get your senator to put in a little earmark for you to fund that from Washington, D.C. Just as long as your state agrees not to ban oil fracking.

I want my graft and corruption to be local. Local corruption is always less expensive. It's not practical to demand national-scale bribes.

Ericson23148• 5 years ago

This is a common sentiment, but the evidence is with this article. Large scare ubanism and density are public goods, ando nnes that benefit more than the immediate area especially counting the fact that people can and do move. The alternative rather than fostering a cooperation of governance just fosters narrow self-interests and coordination failure.

In the US, things like first past the post (FPTP) and the electoral college hamstring governance at all scales, but especially larger ones. And this culture of mediocrity kneecaps our imagination. Have a good proportional representation, and you'll quickly realize that there is more diversity of politics within than between today's constituencies.

In simple terms, rather than bribe the Joe Manchins, we should make it cheap for everyone to move to the prosperous cities, and turn the depopulated hinterland into parks / tourism and agriculture.

freeopinion2• 5 years ago

You have reinforced my belief that distant government is poor government.

I have lived in some very big cities and enjoyed it. But I prefer the depopulated hinterland. I don't want "city slickers" with your contempt of rural areas making the rules for "agricultural" areas. Locals should make the rules.

Surely you wouldn't want us hicks defining your city's ordinances. Tractors might always have the right-of-way and people should be mindful of neighbors when slaughtering pigs.

You seem to make some utilitarian argument that massive cities are the best for everyone's greater good. A lot of people outside those cities point to the last twelve months as contra evidence. I think it could be a fun conversation to have when well researched. But I really lean towards letting locals govern local. (Note: leaning. I see arguments on both sides.)

Ericson23148• 5 years ago

This and https://www.sightline.org/2021/02/25/the-contradiction-at-th... are very nicely written!

I've been reading a lot about public transportation lately, and these fit in very nicely.

blintz• 5 years ago

Does anyone ever read articles like this and start to think that perhaps someday, not too far from now, we will view housing as a simple right? In the same way that basic heath care is a right in most countries that can afford to provide it, maybe housing will eventually be thought of similarly. If our government is willing to spend money to keep me safe through police or healthy through health care, why isn’t basic shelter in the same category?

Lessons from ten nations about building affordable, low-carbon neighborhoods

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