There is also a related but separate aspect where environmental activists erected barriers to slow down any development. You still feel its effects today where CEQA is weaponized to slow down a small apartment housing.
The lower part of Manhattan would have had a highway through it but instead it'sa cultural epicenter
(https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/11/nyc-that-never-was-rob...)
In Boston they did the reverse of your example. They took a subway and moved it in to fill the void where a highway was supposed to go before it got cancelled. If they hadn’t cancelled the highway that subway would still be where it used to be. As an aside, the people who cancelled it really have a lot of blood on their hands because a bunch of major surface streets got developed into main thoroughfares as a result and we all know how good it is to have a highway speed road that isn’t grade separated from cross streets, pedestrians and cyclists…
People still die on construction projects all the time, on relatively uninteresting things even. eg, in 2019 four people died when a crane working above a Google office building in Seattle collapsed. It was local news for a few weeks, but I'm not sure it had any other effects, regulatory or otherwise.
There is a huge property bubble in China, so I'm not sure if that is good example for us to follow. Japan is a better model, where a declining population and weariness of a huge real estate bubble that popped in the late 80s has made investing property not very feasible.
It never made sense for me to buy property in China (which I was eligible to do after being there for 6 years), since rent prices were so cheap in comparison.
https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...
Cutting that population growth by 1/3rd (or more, really, considering children) sure would help that number, would it not? A huge, huge portion of our population growth is due to illegal immigration.
The spectacular thing about the housing crisis is that you don't even need any big government projects. It just needs to be legal for private actors to build housing. On most plots of land today it is not legal to build anything but a single-family home, so cities are no longer able to naturally densify over time (just like every single modern city did 100 years ago, so that they could become the cities they are today).
There are a fair few housing developments in the UK which provide the quantity and density needed, but eg don't have sufficient roads to support the increased traffic, causing gridlocks. Similar story for schools or shops.
Why is this? Because there's a strong inflow from all over the world and not enough building. Meanwhile prices are going up without regard to incomes, and it is incredibly hard to get even a viewing, let alone be offered an apartment. On top of that, most of the stock is old and not modernized at all.
Even for private owners, it is better to not build and let scarcity drive the price of their investments higher, than to take the risk of building and potentially see rents or prices fall.
We don't need big projects. If popular US cities like Seattle and San Francisco simply allowed people to build 5-story apartment buildings in all the space that's currently set aside for single-family detached homes, you'd see people building millions of small projects to easily meet the demand.
Nevermind issues like "can our sewage pipes handle it?".
The prices in Paris are fairly high, 1000€ for a 30m² flat. But that's the relatively small heart of "Paris intra muros", excluding the "banlieues" (suburbs) which are cheaper and 30 minutes to an hour with the Métro (or the RER). That doesn't sound more unaffordable than London, not on a tech salary and colleagues have told me co-habitation is not a thing here (whereas most of my friends and colleagues in London lived in shared flats, for example).
What makes Paris impossible to rent in, is the absolutely insane demand for housing that frees real estate agents to do whatever the fuck they please. I spent three weeks calling every day, multiple agencies, only to be told by each and every one of them that they wouldn't let to me because I am a salaried worker in a trial period ("salarié en periode d' essaie", a three-month trial period mandated by French law). Even with my company offering to be my guarantor (which means they would shoulder all the risk of rent arrears) they would not let to me. Not one. My contacts list is still full of numbers of "immobiliers" (real estate agencies), I know 80% of the agencies and I have masochistic fun pointing them out when I pass outside them with friends. Not one of them would let to me. Not. One!
That's without all the absolutely insane amount of documentation they require (three months of recent rent receipts, proof of having paid taxes in France in the last year, etc) which you won't have if you haven't already lived and worked in France for a while, and the complete bollocks demand of earning three times the rent in salary, and being able to afford two times the rent in advance (as a guarantee; we'll see if I get mine back). But I think that's all par for the course in big cities.
In the end I was only able to find an apartment because an estate agent who's friends with my boss did me a favor. And even he wouldn't talk to me until I barged into his office. So I got 15 m² with a 3m² bathroom with no sink (there's a 5lt washing machine in its place) and a "kitchen corner" that's barely enough to make breakfast cereals, all for the price of 720€.
For the record, I'm an EU citizen and I have a doctorate in a tech subject. My French colleagues have shared similar rental horror stories. I have no idea how people manage who are worse off financially, or come from outside the EU.
tl;dr: no, you don't want the housing situation in your city to be like that in Paris.
Having read all of this, I have no doubt that the experience you're relating is true, nonetheless, it makes me wonder how Paris's immigration boom is happening. When I was last there, most of the people I spoke to didn't have Parisian accents, and were mostly recent immigrants. There is no way all of these people outrank someone with a doctorate in a tech field, statistically speaking. I'm curious what other factors are at play here.
Because a lot of immigrants who come to Paris (and any other big metro areas like London, Berlin, New York, etc.) have no standards regarding housing and don't care about these issues. They're just happy to be in a big rich city with economic opportunities (legal and otherwise) so they can make some money and send to their families back home, regardless if they live in slum like conditions.
Btw, if you're thinking of "other factors" like something dodgy about my personality, there aren't any. If there was something about me so dodgy that nobody wanted to rent to me, it would affect my ability to be employed, first. And yet I got an offer from the first startup to which I applied in Paris, so it can't be that.
Perhaps the recent immigrants you spoke with were comfortable with less ... formal? ways of renting? For example, searching for "why so hard to rent in Paris foreigner" on duckduckgo, I find this account of similar difficulties as mine:
https://howtobecomeparisian.com/2020/04/13/the-struggle-of-f...
<< I arrived in Paris thinking it would be easy to find a place to live, and the end result ended up being years of dodgy landlords, questionable agencies, and a string of short-term leases which made me feel like I always had to be ready to pack up at a moment’s notice. >>
I'm guessing there are many people living in similar precarious accommodation. I didn't want that, so I guess I played on hard mode to begin with. But the point is that the hard mode is hard, and I'm not playing some game, I'm just trying to rent a place to stay and work in a European capital. It shouldn't be hard.
Basically, laws now mandate every flat to have good thermal isolation, otherwise you can't rent them. Which means approx 30% of the housing in Paris will be banned from the renting market in the next 3 years. It started this very year.
PS: and because we're french, the diagnostic for "energy performance" of a housing is full of boggus formula which overestimate the consumption of your flat by a factor of 3 ( at least).
Sorry, but what stopped the landlords/building managers from insulating the apartments in due time? I'm assuming there was a notice period given and the insulation mandate didn't spontaneously come out of nowhere.
Could it be that most landlords are just greedy rentseekers who want to have their cake and eat it too?
- in 2019 a law was passed, scheduled for being in effect starting 2023
- in 2020 they changed the way the evaluation was performed. Instead or relying on energy bills, they decided to create a formula with a tons of parameters.
- in 2021 they realized the shity formula was overestimating consumption waayyy too much, making a lot more housing improper for renting than expected (people saw their mark going from « C » to « F » or even « G »). They adjusted it.
- in 2022, the new formula is still bogus, but nothing changed
As an example, i live in the best insulated appartment i’ve ever lived in Paris (lived there for 40 years). It’s rated G (the worst), simply because it’s on the top floor.
And here we are, in 2023, with the first batch of housing being unauthorized for rental.
We now even have a word for the country they’re turning france into : Absurdistan.
I like the French. It's true there's mad amounts of process and bureaucracy everywhere and as usual, none of it works. I don't think it's really worse than in other places, c'est seulement que les Français aiment grogner plus que les autres. C'est Français ca, grogner :)
Btw, je parle bien Français alors je me demande si sa serait pas encore pire si je cherchais un appart en Anglais. Aie.
That's the big downside of heavy tenant protections - it goes so far, landlords take protective measures like torturing you with requirements.
Sure, there is a 'shortage' of housing - but all desirable, popular international tier 1 cities have this, so the word shortage is a bit of a misnomer. Although, Tokyo has something interesting to say about that, seeing that they are dealing with it better. That said my point above about purchase prices remains: you want to buy in Paris, you pay Manhattan prices with France wages. Good luck if you're not already a foreigner (partial topic of the news we're responding to) or very rich.
International rich like to buy and warehouse apartments in Paris for occasional use.
I was given that explanation by at least one letting agent, but I don't believe it because I was turned down repeatedly even though I told all the agents that my employer offered to be my guarantor. That means they would have to pay rent if I didn't.
In fact, my employer is currently my guarantor, for the apartment I finally rented. My boss had to sign a contract that in the event that I stay in the house without paying rent the company will pay the rent for one year. I'm pretty sure that also includes any costs for repairs if required. That should pretty much take care of all the risk there could possibly be in renting to me. And yet, nobody would rent to me.
So the risk is not the problem. The letting agent who gave me the apartment I'm renting commented that it's just too much hassle letting to someone like me, who doesn't have all their documentation in their "dossier de locateur". It really looks like the only reason nobody wanted to let to me was that they don't give a shit whether I find a house or not and they have plenty of takers. As the French say, ils ce foutent de ma geule.
Berlin would like to step up as a challenger for that title.
Unless all you care about is tech start-ups and wild parties with drugs and cheap beer, the housing market there and general poor state makes it a bad place to live if you're used to high quality of life cities, like Vienna for example.
I'd like to live in a place where finding housing that isn't overpriced and poorly maintained, isn't a full time job in of itself where you spend dozens of hours and compete with hundreds of people hunger games style. Since I'm not a student anymore, the party scene doesn't make up for that huge hassle.
I hear this a lot, and this may still have been the case 4 years ago or so, but I feel this is mostly coming from people who found housing in Berlin before Covid and aren't experiencing the current market.
If it doesn’t it’ll quickly get overwhelmed by people trying to get around in cars.
I live in Barcelona that's mostly 5 or so levels and I haven't driven a car in 4 years and I love it.
On that theory, New York should have insanely cheap apartments due to lack of demand.
New York already has had high density for a century+, but has not been adding apartments at a rate that would match population growth (and income growth) for decades.
In the Bay example, presumably if the new apartments were a one off, prices would initially come down, but would then start to rise again as more people move in and add to demand.
The solution would be to continuously add sufficient new apartments to match population growth (which could be done by liberally allowing builders to build more density to meet demand).
Which is roughly "new units decrease price if there's excess demand". Which is the classic microeconomics theory of how the price point shifts due as the increased supply sets a new equilibrium.
some pretty graphs:
https://mobile.twitter.com/georgiststeve/status/159813526427...
I feel bad for those who are stuck without adequate or inexpensive housing in the meantime, but in the aggregate it may be wise to not overbuild now.
The problem in a place like the US is mostly the distribution of jobs. There are places with abundant housing that also lack for jobs.
Housing sure is cheap in Korea, China, and Hong Kong!
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/28/south-koreans-st...
Just to clarify, that was sarcasm for everyone who thought your statement was serious and didn't open your link.
China has the political will for big projects. China also gets them done, and done fast. Yet China also has a housing problem, much greater than the West.
In China's case, the government deliberately creates a shortage of supply by restricting the usage of land. They also printed money directly into the housing market in 2015 when the housing bubble looked likely to burst. It is not a lack of ability to control housing prices. Instead, they have the ability and does control housing prices, by controlling them upwards.
The practical effect has been the establishment of very complex supply chain management systems in all levels of government.
The outcome has been a dramatic increase in the cost(monetary and bureaucratic) of doing business for government.
Basically government poisoned the well itself and has still yet to really deal with the consequences.
Now things have gone too far, what was once local activism has been taken over by established wealth interests, and development is paralyzed.
Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.
I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such.
In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it.
Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.