Comment by bugglebeetle 4 days ago
> Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?
2 is pretty infamous unless something big happened recently (a lot of big things in JP happened recently, so I could have legitmately missed something).
1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
It's just an obvious nonsense. Housing cost is dependent variable of local economic activities. People gather and property prices soar. Taiwan is jam packed so land prices would be higher relative to GDP per capita.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices.
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.