Exactly. It’s been papered over with smaller housing groups (individuals) but at some point things just become empty and abandoned.

I fear reinforced concrete disease and sea level rise will make housing disappear at a faster rate than people for the next 100-200 years. Conventional reinforced concrete is not like traditional stone buildings that may last centuries. The rebar inside rusts on timescales about ~100 years, and many buildings built over the XX century will be in bad shape and very hard to recover by the end of this century.

Not if you look at internal and external migration. Housing has gone up in the big cities of countries with declining demographics because the places where demographics are declining are villages and small towns because everyone is moving to the big cities with jobs and universities which see virtually unlimited demand irregardless of local demographics.

Look at Germany, Italy, Balkans, etc. all have declining demographics ranging from slight to severe yet housing in their cities has gone up from slight to severe. Like everything in real estate, it's all about the location location location, so everything is localized not extrapolated to the whole country it's why demographics can be steeply declining but prices steeply going up in cities.

Unless you want to live in desolate villages with no infrastructure or jobs, urban housing prices isn't tracking demographics.

Edit: to downvoters, check the numbers please

I'm seeing moderate housing price increases at best in Germany and Italy, and that's generally going to happen because of inflation in general. I don't see the evidence that declining demographics are directly causing housing in cities there to get more expensive.

Like another reply said, it's more likely that general movement from rural to urban is what's causing that, and that if their population growth was higher, those cities would've just gotten even more expensive than they're getting now.

Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-pri... Italy: https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/

Japan is probably a good example for your rural to urban migration example. Anecdotally I hear that the big cities like Tokyo are becoming more expensive (as everyone moves there) while smaller cities (<500,000 people) and rural areas are becoming cheaper, but I don't have a reference or data on hand for it.

Sure, the current market is down right now due a but due to interest rates hike and the economy being shit, but check the period from 2010 to 2022 please. It went up up up despite a stagnant population.

Everybody would be moving to the big citiea regardless. It would just be even less affordable.