From faster approvals to hiring more workers, governments need to step up: experts
Peter Armstrong · CBC News
I honestly don’t know where you’re getting your information from. Homes in Tokyo are famously very affordable, and units are bigger than in comparable cities like New York or Paris. This is very well known in the urban planning community, so it goes to show you’re new at this topic and making things up.
Montreal has had a growing population for years. The Francophonie is huge and Montreal is a popular destination. Your anti-French bigotry is showing. Last time they had a speculation bubble in the early 2000s, they quickly built more affordable medium density supply and the bubble receded.
That article you linked is just straight up wrong, it says Tokyo grew by over a million people in the last 10 years. 2013 population was 37.116m and 2023 is 37.194m, that’s a growth of only 78,000 people over a decade, and equates to a growth rate of 0.2% over 10 years, or 0.02% per year. It peaked in 2018 and has been declining since. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/21671/tokyo/population
Yet prices still went up around 20% over the last 5 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QJPN628BIS
They say it’s affordable, but they also forget that affordable doesn’t mean “cheaper” it means “cheaper as a percentage of income” The average income in New York is almost twice that of Tokyo. https://versus.com/en/new-york-vs-tokyo/avg-salary
I’m hardly new to this topic, I’ve lived in Japan multiple times. Every time I see an article about affordability in Tokyo it’s written by someone who has never actually lived in 120 square feet. I’ve slept on a 1 inch thick mattress that I had to put away to use my apartment during the day, have you?
Urban planners are not who we should be looking to. They’re given direction by politicians, they don’t get to set the policies that would optimize for affordable housing.
Affordable housing doesn’t exist for one simple reason, there are too many owners who benefit from using their housing as an investment. 65% of all residential properties are owned by the family living in them. Until we remove the ability to make money off simply living in a house, they will never be affordable. Convincing voters of that is going to take another few decades at the very least.
Talking to someone like you, who is “doing their own research” is infuriating and pointless. It is impossible to convince someone who just rejects mainstream research and misinterprets information “on their own”.
Your personal research on this topic is wrong. House prices shot up everywhere in the world due to the pandemic, but less in Tokyo than elsewhere. Population went down in cities everywhere in the world due to the pandemic and WFH, so acting like this is some trend of decreasing population in Tokyo is just deeply ignorant. New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, all had a decrease in population due to the pandemic.
affordable doesn’t mean “cheaper” it means “cheaper as a percentage of income”
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That is precisely how Tokyo is more affordable than Canada. Housing prices are WAY less than half of New York. It’s truly remarkable that you think New York is more affordable than Tokyo!
I also lived in Japan and speak the language fluently, and I met a lot of people like you who barely spoke the language and came back home acting like experts. Here is a $1.18 million USD home in Meguro city. It is over 2300 square feet! Garage, terrace, three large bedrooms, and way more nearby amenities than most Canadian cities. Also, this is freaking Tokyo! Comparing it to Hamilton is ridiculous. And yet, it’s still more affordable!
Affordable housing doesn’t exist for one simple reason, there are too many owners who benefit from using their housing as an investment.
And not ever because there is not enough housing?? After WW2, Canada built tons of new homes for returning vets. Are you saying housing would have been JUST AS affordable if we didn’t? That’s such a ridiculous idea, I don’t know how someone could believe it. Yes, make it hard to treat housing as an investment, but we also need people like you to stop obstructing supply.
Mainstream research has led us to the situation we’re in. The politicians don’t want to discuss the actual fix because it will get them voted out of office. Passing a policy that drops housing prices by 50% wouldn’t even be enough to make major cities affordable here in Canada, it needs to be somewhere in the 70-80% range.
Population went down in cities everywhere? You’re calling me out for doing my own research, but you’re just straight up lying now. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20404/vancouver/population#:~:text=The current metro area population,a 0.97%25 increase from 2020. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/population#:~:text=The current metro area population,a 0.03%25 decline from 2020. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20402/toronto/population#:~:text=The current metro area population,a 0.94%25 increase from 2020.
That listing you posted, there’s so many things wrong with what you that I don’t think you have ever lived there let alone speak the language. First, It’s nowhere near 2300 square feet of house. Those bedrooms are reasonable, but I wouldn’t call them large (8jo, 140ish square feet for two of them and 235ish square feet for the big one), That entire upper floor is maybe 800 square feet in total, and the downstairs is smaller because half of it is a garage. It’s probably a 1400-1500 square foot home. Second, It’s 40 years old. That may not seem like a lot in North America, but that’s nearing the end of it’s life in Japan given their construction. Third, it’s 14 minutes from a train station, but not a JR rail station. The Toyoko line is a private line, and that station gets nothing but local service. It’s a 30-40 minute ride to anywhere in central Tokyo. It has a garage for a reason, because a car is essentially required for that family.
We have enough housing in Canada, there are just under 17 million units for 40 million people. Given that people live together and have children regularly, that means there’s no problems.
The issue is an investment problem, how much money would you spend if you knew that no matter what you put in, you’d always get more back? That’s what housing has been for the last 30 years… Until we remove the profit from housing investment (but leave the profit for construction, renovation, etc) we will never fix the problem. Building more housing doesn’t make the land under it any cheaper, and the land cost is the problem.
