I think it’s their crazy common law system.
I hate that some of the graphs are unlabeled.
Looks like Germany and France share 6 lines
And there are at least five if not six pink lines. One ends near “W Europe” and two appear to be “Canada.”
The other way you could interpret this is that so many people want to live in these amazing countries that it’s outpacing home construction. I would like to see this compared to net migration and/or population growth.
In Canada that’s what it was. They seriously curtailed immigration with the new government, which is starting to lower home prices. It’s not sunshine and rainbows though, we needed those immigrants to plug the labour hole the boomers left. Coupled with the tariffs and market incertainty, Canada is in an unofficial recession already.
They seriously curtailed immigration with the new government
Carney only became PM in March. Where are you seeing statistics of a large decrease in net migration since then?
No interest in letting in more tradespeople to buff up the construction industry?
It’s not labor that’s the problem, it’s materials and transportation. I guess everyone just forgot about the fucking trade war
Apparently not. Personally I thought they should have tried to get more tradespeople, but here we are.
More tradespeople to build firetrap bungalow sprawls is how we get bankrupt munis like Detroit and not sustainable walkable subway utopias like Manhattan.
You really think that’s what’s happening?
How do people come up with such ridiculous drivel…
Yes, that’s definitely part of it. It’s not perfect, but if you think the English speaking world is a disaster you should try living in a developing country.
Nah. If we take the US as an example they have rampant NIMBYism, a suburbanism ideology that isn’t sustainable financially (or ecologically or socially, for that matter), and rather strict zoning, with the worst stemming from the city of Euclid, and thus being named “euclidean zoning”.
If you’re up for some videos, then StrongTowns, CityNerd and NotJustBikes all talk about this at length.
Yes between the low density and refusal to build transit, which go hand in hand, suburban car dependant planning has destroyed the livibility and affordability of many cities.
It’s the neoliberal fever dream that unregulated market mechanisms can build a better world. It’s the socioeconomic theory that unfettered psychopathy is a guiding light, and the high priests of this religion pray the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train. (Or that they died wealthy of old age before things ever got too bad for them.)
What’s going in with New Zealand and Canada?
It’s the reason I left New Zealand. It has become a very low trust society with a lot of competing political groups aligned on the basis of race, religion, economics, ethnicity, and political beliefs. With so many competing interests, there is very little appetite to propose and enforce broad national policies which benefit everyone. Instead, generations of Kiwis have come to believe (and rightly so) that owning a home is the only way to survive and thrive. They can’t rely on the assistance of the government. Given this, home owners (which comprise the majority of Kiwis), consistently vote for policies to keep their house prices high. This means onerous planning regulations, tax exemptions, and high immigration. Any party which deigns to upset the property speculation ponzi scheme is summarily ousted.
IMHO, the country is now in managed decline. Any serious investment goes straight into property. Entrepreneurial Kiwis leave. I was involved in several startups which had to seek funding from overseas. So they just leave. Usually to the U.S., where their investment culture and infrastructure encourages new ventures and R&D. Home owners have decided that they would rather have their children leave and watch the country burn than allow their house prices to decline. Message received. Something like a million Kiwis live in Australia now. That’s 18% of the entire country.
We love single family homes and local council is full of boomers who hate anything over 2 stories. Plus we’ve had a few instances of construction material shortages.
Idk about other cities but Auckland has started building a ton of midrises and high rises and prices are starting to drop.
Canada:
- Two big metros get all the love
- Not enough houses
- Builders build bungalow sprawl, poorly, but get more money for repairs; and rebuilds after fire torches 2-3 of them.
- Still not enough houses
- Now also not enough land
- Low supply vs high demand
Results: Shitty firetrap car-dependent bungalow sprawl at sky-high prices
Don’t talk to me about 7 floors of firetrap lowboy condo shit. 3 mins to get grandpa down the stairs from L7 to L1 after 3c leaves a candle lit is a joke.
Also
Housing always has to go up, or the owner-voters revolt against whoever is in power. So all government policies favour housing appreciation, protect against depreciation, or simply avoid taking meaningful, proportionate and timely action that could cause prices to depreciate.
Even things like airbnb bans, getting rid of exclusionary zoning, etc. are too little, too late. Prices have already been inflated, and owner-occupiers are now holding things up because they can’t simply cash out, write off a loss and move their equity elsewhere because they need somewhere to live. Governments support those owner-occupiers (and often corporate landlords, for as long as they stay in the game) to ensure votes and campaign contributions continue.
We are sitting on a massive, fragile bubble that is getting harder and harder to prop up every year. With insurance issues, climate change, an aging population hoping/needing to cash out equity to fund their retirement, wages way behind inflation for millenials and Gen z, massive amounts of differed municipal infrastructure due to artificially low property tax, unemployment creeping up, etc. there are growing threats to the continued “housing always goes up” economy.
Almost all of that applies to NZ.
It’s the tendency to see the US as a paragon of modernity, and thus as the example to be followed, when more often than not US urban planning is the way it is due to structural racism, the hierarchy of whiteness/non-whiteness and the fact that a sizeable part of the population is descended from enslaved African trafficking victims and a significant proportion of the rest rationalise them as being outside of their circle of empathy (as if they weren’t, the question of guilt and reparations would come up).
So America gets white flight to defensible car-centric suburbs, motorways rammed through inner cities, no public healthcare, and public services such as transport and schooling being stigmatised in the way that begging is elsewhere. The UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada see this, think “this must be the future, we’d better hurry up so we don’t get left behind!” and dismantle their tramways privatise their water and healthcare systems, and build more American-style suburbs so people can live like they’re in their favourite US sitcom, and not grey-capped factory workers from Red Vienna or somewhere.
White flight can’t explain why suburbs suck today compared to the ones from 70 years ago (when racism and white flight was arguably much more common). Car-centric planning was driven by auto makers and overzealous urban planners obsessed with the idea of highly specialized single-purpose zoning (think SimCity / Factorio nerd) rather than livable, walkable communities. The most desirable and expensive places to live in Toronto are illegal to build because of these boneheaded zoning laws.
Sure it does. Suburban planning has ALWAYS been a shitty type of plan, but it takes scale to make it obvious to even the dumbest of fools. After all, a tiny suburb near some local stores is just a walkable town with more asphalt/cement.
No, a ton LESS asphalt and cement because it’s got narrow, 1-way streets (think less than half the width of a standard suburb 2-way street), no driveways and narrow sidewalks. It also has mixed housing (some single family, some duplex, some multiplex) and sometimes even has houses placed behind the ones near the street, with a shared walkway allowing access to the back.
The problem of suburbia is that it’s very low density, isolated from the rest of the city (so you have to drive just to get groceries), far from public transit, and unsafe for children to walk to school. Streetcar suburbs have none of these issues. They’re:
- high density because houses sit on narrow lots much closer together and very close to the sidewalk, with only a tiny front yard for gardening or planting trees
- much smaller and embedded within the fabric of the city, with a straight grid of alternating 1 way streets that have cars parked on them, heavily discouraging through traffic while keeping houses very close to small businesses
- close to public transit (just walk a few mins to the end of the street and catch a streetcar or go down the steps to the subway platform)
- have small bars, cafes, restaurants, shops, and grocery stores within a few minutes walk for anyone to get groceries or relax without needing a car
- much safer for children due to the slow, narrow, 1-way streets and the total absence of driveways (which are very dangerous to small children who aren’t cautious enough around cars backing out)
- also much safer due to the closeness of front doors to the sidewalk. Bad actors can’t grab kids without being seen or make a quick getaway due to the slowness of the street
I only spoke about what would’ve made their ineffective designs less obvious until you have enough suburban sprawl that even the dummies would agree it’s less efficient. Nowhere would I ever claim suburbia is identical to a properly designed walkable town.
It’s an artifact from the Cold War. The Soviets put money into the military and so did America but the Soviets added bodies and machines with their spending. America’s military used the money to fund far out ideas.
But that also gave America the impression that far out thinking was the norm. The extra lengths Americans went to embrace their dreams meant things cost more but it was okay because they lived in an era of abundance. But that time has passed and the cost of that older lifestyle is no longer sustainable. We’re witnessing the shrinking of Anglosphere prosperity as it mirrors America. When each country hits bottom they will be forced to adopt more cost effective urban planning with transit to suit folks who don’t own cars. It’s just a matter of time.
It’s worse than us simply becoming poorer. It’s that these places - sprawling low density suburbs - where never financially sustainable to begin with. They never brought in enough tax revenue to remotely cover the expense of maintaining all their infrastructure. There’s just too few people per square mile to pay for it all at the property tax rates people can afford. We’ve only kept things going this long through a few mechanisms:
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Letting older suburban infrastructure decay to well past its replacement state.
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Relying on growth to prop things up. (Build new neighborhoods and require developers to repave streets and replace/upgrade utility infrastructure in an area.)
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Relying on ever higher levels of debt.
It isn’t financially sustainable. It was never financially sustainable. As long as a town can keep growing, they can keep the Ponzi scheme going for a time. But eventually you hit a wall on that and the whole house of cards collapses.
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That and a frontier-era individualism, now pressed into the service of standing against socialism. If you live in a single-family home and only get around in your private car, other people don’t look like comrades or fellow citizens so much as traffic and competition. As cars cost money, they’re also a good emblem of material success.
And, of course, those uncomfortable with seeing those people as their fellow citizens no longer need to share subway carriages or tenement corridors with them.
I would say it predates the Cold War. The industrial revolution started in England, and then the US ran with it. The UK built the first ship with a steam engine, the US built the first ship to sail across the Atlantic under steam power, and that’s basically been the pattern for the last 200 years. Humphrey Davy describes electromagnetism, Edison and Tesla build industrial scale power grids. England gave us Alan Turing, and in America you get IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Apple and Google.
While “the anglosphere” as this thread terms it has been inventing everything from antibiotics to thermonuclear weapons to the T-shirt, what have the rest of you been up to?
If it weren’t for “The anglosphere” the rest of you would still be dying of smallpox by candle light.
What’s up with this graph, it’s nice that they went back in time from 1995 too but since they’re stacked from there you can’t know which lines belong to which individual country. Remains interesting to see that two distinct blocks formed over time. I guess Brits will feel some extra bregret watching this.
Canada and NZ LEFT the EU?
Honestly Brexit is the least of these problems and all this shit will happen to you too. Angloids just tend to be ahead of the curve. “It can’t happen here” is how it happens in the Netherlands, trust me your fancy bike infrastructure and picturesque villages while great, isn’t safe from this either. It’s only a matter of time before memetic virility jumps language lines.
You’re obviously not in the loop, major housing crisis going on already. But because it across the board it doesn’t necessarily translate to extreme housing prices (although they’ve been getting steeper for years now).
I’m pretty aware of the housing prices, what the fuck does that have to do with anything? You were talking about “bregret” which sounds like a dig at Brexit? The housing crisis has zero to do with that - and absolutely everything to do with the natural result of Neoliberalism.
I’m pretty aware of the housing prices, what the fuck does that have to do with anything?
The graph is literally about housing prices
You were talking about “bregret” which sounds like a dig at Brexit? The housing crisis has zero to do with that - and absolutely everything to do with the natural result of Neoliberalism.
Brexit is also a result of neoliberalism, I mentioned it because if remain had won (= the tories wouldn’t be in power the years after the vote), their housing prices would be less like NZ and Canada and more like the European average. That would still be a problem, I’m not implying everything would be fine for UK if they didn’t vote for brexit just like I’m not implying everything is fine in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe.
Archive link of source article from Financial Times:
What’s the unlabeled red line?
