Hong Kong has all sorts of crazy building restrictions and is a different story
Taxes, Transportation and food costs are cheap, but property is not.
Almost any other Asian city from Bangkok to Ha Noi has room to expand. In fact speaking of Bangkok buying a condo there is widely considered a bad investment because there is so much supply.
Not to mention, it's about the only extant example of a benevolent dictatorship.
I hear Shanghai is much worse, but never lived there before.
It seems more likely that costs are higher in cities because there are valuable opportunities for skilled people who demand high salaries, simultaneously encouraging dense living to maximize access and increasing cost of living through the Baumol effect. High prices causing density, not the other way around.
I think we are starting a conversation about gentrification: Rich white-collar/coat workers move into an area creating demand for service work. There is some price competition for their service work labor, raising wages, but typically housing costs are too high for these workers, so they leave (lowering supply, pushing up wages).
So it's a feedback loop, but one which is prevented by keeping supply enough to meet demand, because then lower paid workers aren't priced out and cost of living doesn't increase.
Increasing building and increasing density are different things. Singapore and Hong Kong are dense because they have a very limited geographic area to build in. You can’t point to their density and conclude that adding housing doesn’t help lower housing costs. They would be even more expensive if they weren’t so dense.
Rent prices are 72.9% lower in Tokyo compared to New York [1].
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Housing more people in a concentrated area creates more demand for services, which creates more demand for housing which jacks up prices. Packing 1,000 people into an apartment build creates extremely high demand for plumbing, house cleaning etc, services, which jack up housing prices. But if cities were low-density with commerce centers decenteralized across many neighbhorhoods or towns, you don't create location demand hotspots (e.g. cities) that jack up prices.
Property taxes and interest rates are a forcing function to keep unoccupied properties in check, as long as the appreciation doesn't dramatically exceed the risks of being a LL. For Tier 1-3 markets in the USA, you can't cash flow properties as rent is drastically lags property ownership costs.