What we're witnessing isn't just an issue of localizing policy failure or even state policy failure but systemic failure. And we just need to look at China for how to do this correctly.

China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset. In the West, housing is largely a speculative asset where everyone from investor companies to individual homeowners become incentivized to make housing scarcer and more expensive at every level. China, on the other hand, makes it more expensive and more difficult to own second and third homes.

Now you might be tempted to object and point to things like the Evergrande bubble. And that's actually evidence of success not failure. Xi Jinping quietly changed China's policy, starting around 2014 to focus on living not investment, and Evergrande was essentially allowed to default because housing access is a priority over investors.

You really see this plays out with trains.

Chengdu has the 5th largest (by rail length) metro system in the world. It didn't exist before 2010. China standardized rolling stock so there's no time-consuming and expensive procurement process and there are economies of scale.

China has spent less than $1 trillion building ~50,000km of high speed rail. They initially bought high speed trains from Germany and Japan (IIRC) but now they make their own. To compare, the California HSR, if it ever happens, is estimated to cost in excess of $130B.

The point I'm getting to is that in the West every aspect and level of this is treated as a profit opportunity, which ultimately is a wealth transfer from the government to some company. Procurement, maintenance, track building, land acquisition, track maintenance, station building and so on. These are all state enterprises.

Back to housing, IMHO nothing will solve this problem so long as housing remains a speculative asset. There'll simply bee too much resistance to change.

> China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset.

Where and who did you get this idea from? Speculation in China makes speculation in the USA look like child’s play. Speculation is such a huge part of China’s housing economy that the government has to constantly fight against it, or for it when they fight too hard and the economy starts to teeter, and then fight hard against it again when normal people can’t compete in a market full if Wenzhou housewives. I mean, that even Wenzhou housewife is still a meme for property speculator should give you a clue. The government only ever tolerated speculation in the first place because it used housing as a jobs program for a huge under employed rural population.

Whatever the USA does to fix its problem, copying China’s problems isn’t going to help, and will actually make things worse.

HSR isn’t used for commuting in China like the Shinkansen is used for commuting in Japan. It just isn’t very viable to transit from an HSR station to your job, HSR stations aren’t very central even in tier one cities. Example: you work in Beijing chaoyang and want to live in cheaper hebei, let’s say right on the HSR line so let’s not count commute times on your home end. But just getting from Beijing South to…anywhere let alone chaoyang (and chaoyang is huge, let’s say the CBD just for kicks), is going to take an hour or two even with the subway in place.

What we need to copy from China is there ability to get projects done on time and on budget. But everything else…china has its own problems that it’s still working on.

Half right. I’d use Singapore or Vienna as the ideal housing model instead. China started off using housing as a financial instrument. People were pouring their life savings into 2nd and 3rd apartments because the stock market was unreliable & capital controls prevented investing abroad. Prices skyrocketed. Now the bubble has burst, and the state is desperately trying to pivot to the Singapore/Vienna model, where local governments buy and own unsold inventory. It’s not going so well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Vienna

Of course none of this matters to the US or to this thread. Half this country won’t even wear a simple mask to save their neighbors lives. Forget about coordinating public housing.

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