Re:Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses
by adventured on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @07:06PM
(#18556916)
> it means that the driving force behind increases in property value (population increases) will be curtailed
> There will be fewer humans each year making the total pressure on land values negative
Your premise about real-estate inherently contracting in value due to population contraction, is not correct. Nor is your premise about the driving force correct.
Double the US population and drop the total national income by 95%. See which is the greater driving force in real-estate values. You can see this in action right now just by looking at high population density countries that are poor. Bangladesh has extreme population density, their real-estate is not expensive compared to Canada (~1/400th the population density) or the US (~1/40th the population density).
You can increase the value of real-estate while contracting the population, by increasing the per capita income of each person enough to overcome the effect of the population decline. Germany's population has barely budged in 50 years, their real-estate has increased in value in that time as the economy has expanded in real terms with a climb in their per capita wealth and incomes.
Today nearly everything you've ever heard about healthy (ie non-war, famine, etc) population decline being a horrible outcome, is false. It may have been true in the past, it is no longer.
The ideal outcome is for populations to decline while productivity and income soars per capita, improving the standard of living of each person remaining and lightening the burden on earth's resources. The focus of all nations should be on aggressively increasing per capita output, not on fighting healthy population decline.
> There will be fewer humans each year making the total pressure on land values negative
Your premise about real-estate inherently contracting in value due to population contraction, is not correct. Nor is your premise about the driving force correct.
Double the US population and drop the total national income by 95%. See which is the greater driving force in real-estate values. You can see this in action right now just by looking at high population density countries that are poor. Bangladesh has extreme population density, their real-estate is not expensive compared to Canada (~1/400th the population density) or the US (~1/40th the population density).
You can increase the value of real-estate while contracting the population, by increasing the per capita income of each person enough to overcome the effect of the population decline. Germany's population has barely budged in 50 years, their real-estate has increased in value in that time as the economy has expanded in real terms with a climb in their per capita wealth and incomes.
Today nearly everything you've ever heard about healthy (ie non-war, famine, etc) population decline being a horrible outcome, is false. It may have been true in the past, it is no longer.
The ideal outcome is for populations to decline while productivity and income soars per capita, improving the standard of living of each person remaining and lightening the burden on earth's resources. The focus of all nations should be on aggressively increasing per capita output, not on fighting healthy population decline.