> Curiously, at the height of the housing crisis homes were about 5.5 times the median national income. In San Francisco right now (another place where supply looks limited by the water) homes there are 17.2 times the median national income.

You're comparing national home prices in Japan vs national income in Japan. Then you're comparing local prices in SF to national income in the USA. You're then comparing these comparisons to show SF is super inflated.

This makes no sense.

In 2016, it seems SF median household income was $96,677 [1] and that the median house price was $1.31 million [2]. Couldn't find more recent number for income.

That a 13.6 median price to income ratio. 2018 median house price is $1.61 million, so for wages to keep up the 2018 median income would need to be $118,382 to maintain the 13.6 ratio.

Edit: I agree with parent it probably still doesn't make sense to compare cities with nations. These numbers are just for your entertainment. I think median price-to-income ratio for Tokyo now is now about 4. I am sure in the bubble it was much higher. Though again apples to oranges, it seems that the peak bubble average price to average income ratio for Tokyo was 18 [3].

1. https://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisc...

2. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/5/17201888/san-francisco-median...

3. http://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/08/apartment-price-to-i...

SF median household income is vastly distorted by rent control and prop 13, which allow very many people to live there who otherwise would not be able to afford to live there. Therefore the above measure is not an apples-to-oranges comparison to the Japan data.

You also have to account the rise in population, which translates to higher demand. Not sure Japan had similar Demand/Supply to SF before bust.

The average annual gain in SF since 2010 came to 11,173 persons, and the median is 10,824. The overall population increase of 78,593 amounts to an estimated spike of more than 9.75 percent. For comparison, that’s a higher year-over-year increase than seven of the ten most populous counties in the country, including number-one ranked Los Angeles County (up 0.1 percent since 2016), Orange County (0.4 percent), and San Diego County (0.6 percent).

Breakdown of how the city has grown since the last full census in 2010, with SF’s official population of 805,770 at the time:

2011: +10,524 (816,294) 2012: +14,112 (830,406) 2013: +10,486 (841,270) 2014: +11,988 (853,258) 2015: +13,062 (866,320) 2016: +9,783 (876,103) 2017: +8,260 (884,363)

1. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/26/17165370/san-francisco-popul...

It was said at the time that the Imperial Palace was worth more than all the real estate in California.

https://amaral.northwestern.edu/blog/how-much-was-japanese-i...

They should have sold the Imperial Palace and bought California

It was probably impossible to find a buyer.

As I understand it, for a variety of reasons, the value of a home tends to fall much more rapidly over time in Japan compared to the US. This probably means that if you're going to get a loan to buy a house in Japan, it's probably going to be for a lot less (relatively) and/or for a shorter period of time than you could generally get in the US, which will put significant downward pressure on home prices (again, as compared to the US).

Put another way, the more people are spending razing and rebuilding on a given supply of land, the less they'll be able to spend on the land itself.

Why are you comparing regional prices to national income?

I'm an economics noob, but is `comparing regional prices to national income` in some way technically wrong or misleading in some way?