Housing affordability is qualitatively different between Europe and the US. When a European city is expensive, it's usually only the central part that's expensive. Prices drop steeply as you get to the suburbs and satellite towns. In the US, suburbs and satellite towns are more likely to remain expensive, as long as you are within a semi-reasonable commuting distance. I guess that's because the US city is more likely expensive due to the job market and the European city due to the desirability of the city itself.

I think you are close but slightly off. EU has historically better public transit and lower sprawl allowing more price points of housing while still a "reasonable" commute.

US cities are vastly larger by land size, because America is larger allowing it, added with fewer public transit options.

Look at Houston, massive sprawl and some of the cheapest housing in the country.

Yet it’s one of the worst at providing affordable housing per a study conducted by Rice University:

https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/report-houston-second-wors...

Not a very useful datapoint if you look at the chart https://nlihc.org/gap

Texas is only 2% behind CA and the total amount is exactly correlated with state population growth. Not a very insightful study.

At this point many high COL cities have sprawled out as much as is reasonably possible and then some.

People now commute from Stockton to San Francisco which is already a 2.5hr drive.

Now build express BART trains out there to make it more feasible for more people to commute, and build densely at the stops along the way.

Sad to think the obvious solutions can’t happen in the SF Bay Area due to its politics.

Or you could just upzone. The nine-county Bay Area is larger in size than the Keihanshin area containing Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe and has 12 million less people.

Yeah. Bay Area denizens also would be wise to note that if they hate towers so much, part of how Japan stays low rise with higher density is by having smaller roads and more transit. So you still should be building those trains (and downsizing those roads!)

The Bay Area already has a ton of rail transit, the local land use is just terrible. Single family homes by Muni, BART, CalTrain and VTA abound.

I am biased in that I live in Tokyo and am used to "a ton" meaning 150+ rail lines in this metropolis [1], constructed in a lattice that makes it hard to be very far from any train line within a large radius of the city center. What most Americans think is "a ton" is, in my view, closer to "bare minimum", but that's probably since I live in a city with an order of magnitude more transit than the most built out city in the USA.

I agree that the local land use is a total disaster, but even if they made it better, SF has a few skinny tendrils of transit which creates a few skinny corridors of transit-accessible area.

The constant excuse I kept hearing when I was living there was that there isn't enough space!! But that's only true if you won't do anything to increase the viable space to live in (and optimize the space that is present, through better land use). Even densifying the transit along these corridors, San Franciscans will still whine and complain about how there's no space, ignoring the obvious solution.

The answer to me is to do it both, yesterday. But I'm not a San Franciscan anymore and I understand that my values differ from theirs.

Aside, it's also worth mentioning that in Tokyo as well, single family homes near train stations abound. The difference is that they're smaller and denser, and mixed in with apartments. There aren't that many towers here! But the roads are mini-sized and they pack units tightly to better use land. If San Franciscans hate towers that cast shade, they have alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Greater_Tokyo

The transit part is key for Tokyo, everyone talks about how housing supply is robust, zoning is loose, density is high and unit sizes are small; but few talk about how having 130 rail lines with pervasive express service means that there’s an enormous amount of land within commute distance.

Set this charting tool to Density, plug in Tokyo with a number of other major world cities, you’ll see the effect in the data.

https://jnolan.shinyapps.io/Population_density/

Prices can drop quite steeply in suburbs in US as well. It's just that when the rent is that high in most desirable areas to begin with, it's still too expensive for many after that drop.

Just nitpicking here, but Milan (Lombardy) is the second most expensive region in Italy. The first ist South Tyrol: https://www.immobiliare.it/mercato-immobiliare/

Probably because income there is higher than in the province of Milan, and quality of life is better for some indicators.