Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

I have plenty of hobbies thank you very much, I just don't find taking up a bunch of space for stuff I do occasionally to be a good tradeoff compared to living somewhere dense and walkable. Honestly, most of the things you listed sound like exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about - how much time did you actually spend last month doing woodworking, skiing, hockey, and piano? How often were your guest rooms occupied? How many of the seasonal clothes you store actually see the light of day again?

There are definitely downsides to having to cycle to a nearby music practice room or workshop space (I happen to live next to the community farm), or putting guests in the hotel round the corner rather than hosting them myself. But there are also upsides to doing these things as part of an actual community rather than in isolation (half the fun of making music is the social side, and at least some of the fun of cycling too). And plenty of other hobbies (team sports, theatre, ...) outright require living somewhere with enough other people around to make them doable.

Obviously the ideal would be to have a huge amount of personal living space and also a huge range of neighbours and facilities within walking/cycling distance. But given the inherent contradiction in that, I'm very glad to choose density (and while those who want the suburban lifestyle are welcome to pursue it in their own spaces, they shouldn't feel entitled to impose car traffic on the city; you can pay for your road use, pay for your parking, give way to pedestrians, follow speed limits, and carry strict liability for any injuries).

Does Tokyo have much affordable housing ?

It's a very special situation on its own, but buying a house will usually get you into the 30+ years mortgage plans, and old buildings are earthquake hazards so I wouldn't call them high quality. Rents haven't much fallen even as inflation grew, and cheap places like Leopalaces are a hell to live in. All in all it looks to me to be a hard to live town if you're not in a decently good paying job.

I see.

I am a part of the young demographic you're talking about, so I have experienced the (compared to my parent's time) inflated prices first hand. I only own one investment property (in a large city) so far and it's mostly debt.

If you scroll down a little bit you'll see that in another comment I have written that I think the high prices of today are caused mostly by the influx of young people into cities. It is for the most part simply a case of having too many people wanting to live in a limited geographic area. In particular, they want amenities and jobs which tend to be concentrated in big cities.

The only way out is to either build more (with much higher density) increasing the capacity of existing cities or to revitalize small towns as hubs for remote workers with all the amenities they want. As it stands right now, even with remote work on the rise, myself included (I have a fully remote job yet I choose to live in an expensive city), not too many people my age would want to live in a small town their parents or grandparents may have happily lived their whole lives in.

The reason I believe that is the case is that rents are expensive too. Speculation may affect property prices, but it does not lead to increased rent prices. That is barring a few extremes where people buy housing for investment and don't rent it out or live there, which fortunately doesn't seem to be too common -- just take a walk outside in the evening and you'll get a good idea of how many houses/apartments are lived in. In general property tax is designed to prevent this.

Bad policies like rent control may lead to inflated rents (cheap rents for original residents only mean much higher rents for everyone else), but you do see high rents even in cities without such bad policies.

As a landlord, I charge market rent. I'm happy to lower it if I have trouble finding a tenant, as even an absurdly low amount is much better for me than having the property be empty -- I have a mortgage to pay. So far I haven't had to. In fact, the current tenant offered to pay me more rent than what I had originally listed the property for in exchange for me making some minor improvements to the property! I was more than happy to oblige.

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There's one more factor making the situation look worse than it is -- low interest rates. People often calculate how many average annual salaries it takes to buy a place and compare that with the past, but I believe that is not the right metric to look at.

The right metric to look at should be yearly interest as a percentage of one's annual salary. In theory, if the interest rate is cut in half (i.e. from 2% to 1%) you'd expect home prices to effectively double since one can pay the same amount of interest to own a place twice as expensive.

This doesn't quite happen in reality, because when home prices rise, even when accompanied by lower interest rates, a mortgage usually requires a down payment which does scale linearly with the house price along with the principal you are required to pay every month.

You'd be right to point out that this does disproportionately affect younger and less wealthy people, since the more wealth you have, the less you have to rely on traditional mortgages -- you could borrow against your stock portfolio for example, and only pay interest, in which case the interest rate being cut in half indeed does let you own twice as much house with the same cash flow. Of course, you do need to be prepared to weather the storm that may come should the interest rate start rising again, which is precisely why it would be too risky for banks to let the average Joe do something like that -> hence a down payment and monthly principal repayment is required for most mortgages.

I'm not sure what's the best way of solving this. Ideally, your average young person should be able to buy twice the house when the interest rate is halved, but they do need to be shielded from the risk of the interest rate suddenly going up somehow. The government stepping in as a guarantor would likely lead to moral hazard deforming the market which I'm not a fan of. I'm of the opinion that interest rates are mostly determined by the broader market and large secular trends like demographics and technological advancement, as opposed to central bankers, so I don't think this can be solved by attempting to manipulate the interest rate either.

Overall I think the first problem of housing scarcity which is reflected in rent prices is a much bigger issue and solving that would help lessen the effects of the second one.

It would have taken a little over an hour to walk home and I would have had walking/biking paths and sidewalks most of the way. Close to where I live I would have had to walk on the side of the road but it was very low traffic

Is that why real estate in dense, walkable cities/neighborhoods is the most expensive in the country?

No one is saying get rid of suburbs. They’ll always be in the US. But when 95%+ of zoning laws make it so suburban sprawl is the _only_ thing that can get built, then you’re taking a choice away from the people who want to live in cities.