1. yes you might get a house at this price but it's either 1-2 hours out of the city center (which is fine, just saying Tokyo is large.) Or alternatively it's in bad neighborhoods.
(bad is relative if you are from the US)
there are nice ones in the list. I am just saying that this is the eastern country side of Tokyo (check the map) when the title probably makes everyone think something different.
Not sure what's wrong with that? That looks pretty amazing actually. I live in a unit that looks similar to that near downtown Chicago. My unit is north facing, and even so, there's more than enough sunlight.
The title says "house" for a "family", and the pictured structure is not normally what people think when they hear that, being significantly smaller than even a typical townhouse. In particular, a "house" suggests something larger than a small apartment.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with an apartment or microhouse, but it makes the quoted rent less impressive.
I live in a pretty well to do family oriented neighborhood in central Tokyo, and this is a very common design. Although I’m not sure about mortgages, but rents definitely ain’t just $850. But as the parent post said, it’s all about location. Prices nosedive once you leave the center of Tokyo or are off the main train lines.
It’s not so much the exact number as the approximate order of magnitude.
For anyone living in one of the equivalent world cities (say, NyC, London, Shanghai, Paris, San Fran- you may quibble with me in the exact list but you know what I mean) these prices aren’t even remotely plausible.
(The one possible exception might be Berlin but that info could be dated)
This is the sort of thing that markets solve really well. If you want a dwelling unit with those properties, pay for it. If they're less important to you than cost, don't. If one is $300,000 and the other $600,000, it's very reasonable to choose affordability and go to a park.
From my observational experience, and limited study on the issue, markets don't seem to be solving this optimally, at least in Melbourne, Australia.
Overall, the market for apartments seems to be supply constrained. The main factors:
1. Government approval is required to build large apartment buildings. In general, this seems to lag behind demand.
2. Large buildings take a long time to build
3. There have been a number of years of high immigration, especially in and around the CBD.
All of these factors combine to cause high prices. In a high price environment, many residents are stretched for cash. They essentially have to pick the lowest price apartment available. It's not uncommon to have multiple people sharing a room in order to decrease costs. This creates a high price floor. Mid range apartments don't tend to be much more expensive, simply because many residents are already super stretched financially and unable to afford the extra marginal cost.
As a property developer in a high floor, low marginal payoff environment your financial incentive is now to build as many low cost apartments as possible.
>> The majority of Victoria’s newest apartments are so small they would be considered unliveable in Sydney…More than three-quarters of new one-bedroom apartments built across the state are 50 square metres or less, which means they probably would have been illegal in Sydney, London and Adelaide. [1]
Making these apartments meet a reasonable minimum standard could only be less than 5% of the total cost [1]. To achieve this governments have tried to intervene by increasing minimum standards [2].
What concerns me the most is the longer term impacts. When demand drops off (as covid is pointing to), you have a massive supply of low quality apartments. Is the end result of this many vacancies and people living in shoe boxes when they could've been somewhere nicer?
There are a few long bows there, but as someone who lives in a relatively sunny but not quite sunny enough apartment that is my take.
The big issues that consistently affects real-estate around Tokyo is proximity to a station and the age of the building. The basic rule is that a condominium must be within 10 minutes walk from a station, and a free standing house up to 15 minutes walk. A house around 30 years old is worthless, and a house younger will be some fraction of its original purchase price. There are exceptions but this is a pretty good rule of thumb. Land is generally the only thing that appreciates in value and only if its in a desirable location. As a point of reference, we live in an 90m^2 home 45min from Tokyo station and it was less then the above price.
>Or alternatively it's in bad neighborhoods. (bad is relative if you are from the US)
I've never been to Japan, but I imagine that a bad Japanese neighborhood is incredibly safe compared to a bad U.S. neighborhood. In a bad U.S. neighborhood one has to regularly take precautions in order to not be physically assaulted or even killed by other people.
That said, of course I'm not thinking that Japan is some paradise. What I hear/read about their justice system and their stifling conformist culture doesn't sound very good to me.
Their conformist culture is upsetting, as is the rampant institutional sexism, but a lot of the issues with their justice system are overblown. 99% conviction rates are more likely a result of cases being dropped below a high confidence threshold, not a result of kangaroo courts.
You can get a large house that gets a lot of sun and is somewhat walkable / bikeable in Compton for $350k. With 20% down and all taxes & fees & insurance included, that's close to $1700/mo. In San Bernardino, you can get stuff for $250k, which about $1200/mo. You can get trailers in Riverside for $150k, which is about $730/mo.
Given your name, I guess you live in Japan, so I'll just give my opinion for others who have never lived here. I also think the title is misleading, though I wouldn't express it so dramatically.
One thing to consider is that Tokyo is a prefecture, not a city. There are rural areas of Tokyo (like really rural), though most of it is very suburban. Anybody who has lived in the suburbs in western countries would probably be fairly comfortable in most parts of Tokyo prefecture.
It is true that in quite a few areas of Tokyo it takes a long time to get to central Tokyo. 2 hours is at the extreme, though. I live in very rural Shizuoka prefecture and I can get to Tokyo station in 2 hours if I time the bus and shinkansen perfectly. If you are on the train line, most places are no more than an hour away. It's pretty comparable to living in satellite cities in London, but the train is much better :-)
If you are not on the train line, though, it can take quite a long time. Roads in Japan are very slow, especially in rural areas. It's not unusual for it to take me over an hour to drive 30 km or so if I need to go through several towns. So you definitely can find houses in Tokyo that will be 2 hours away from the city center, but I don't think anyone working in central Tokyo would buy those houses.
I honestly don't think the example picture is representative of houses you'll find in Tokyo prefecture. They definitely exist in areas that are desirable, though. I think saying that you're probably looking at either a 1 hour commute by train or your are going to get a house jammed in wherever it will fit is correct. But it's not both at the same time.
I don't often go to Tokyo, but I occasionally go to surrounding areas. Probably if I was looking at houses for commuting to central Tokyo, I would probably look at places in Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama as well as Tokyo. There is actually quite a lot of choice.
The video linked in the article is well worth watching (as is anything from "Life Where I'm From" if you are interested in Japan) and is extremely balanced IMHO. Compared to other big city centers around the world, Tokyo and the surrounding area is quite affordable. Compared to Silicon Valley it's almost comically so, but Silicon Valley is really right at the other extreme.
And I am willing to bet that picture was taken somewhere like Shinagawa or Meguro, maybe Setagaya. Where houses like that start at a price rather double of what's stated in the article, potentially triple.
Although do note that those factors don't fully cover the differential. Even in Hudson County or Contra Costa County, you're gonna have a hard time finding a 3 bedroom for $300k.
Hm, it could use a bit of work but this 4 bed 3 bath, 2400 sq ft home in Hudson is $249 [1]. It's a little ways from the train station though - a 10 minute drive. There's regular service from there to Penn Station, which takes about 2 hours.
> The first thing to note is that in Japan, housing isn’t an investment. It’s a place to live.
Fixing this can be a major obstacle in countries with inadequate pension systems. In countries where dependency on rising property values is the chief or sole form of retirement planing for vast numbers of people, fixing a broken housing market becomes dependent on fixing the retirement system.
And when land values are consistently propped up by government to a greater degree than other investments, it moves people even more into land speculation as their retirement investment because of its artificial safety.
> The first thing to note is that in Japan, housing isn’t an investment. It’s a place to live. The country’s slow population growth means that increases in property values aren’t guaranteed
I feel like this is a misleading way to put it. Japanese houses decrease in value, generally quite severely - the conventional wisdom is that after a few decades you might as well just tear it down and build a new one. So there's very real option value you're losing in the Japanese model; if you have to move in a decade or two, you won't be able to get back the equity you put in.
> Japanese houses decrease in value, generally quite severely
And why shouldn't they? What keeps housing prices high in the U.S. is artificial scarcity. It's the land that's valuable, not the out-of-date structures that exist on it. And the land is so valuable because it's illegal to build enough housing to meet demand in most places.
"JAPAN'S 100-YEAR BANK LOANS (FORTUNE Magazine) By Susan Moffat May 21, 1990
"(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Japanese, famous for saving, are now loading their future generations with debt. Nippon Mortgage and Japan Housing Loan, two big home lenders, are offering 99- and 100-year multigeneration loans with interest rates from 8.9% to 9.9%. Borrowers put up their homes as collateral. Such deals represent sound fiscal planning for some families, especially the very wealthy living in Tokyo who, perversely, can almost not afford to inherit a house: Japan's graduated inheritance tax can take up to 70% of a family's assets, including its home. Under the 100-year loan plan, a second generation can move into a deceased parent's home and pay inheritance taxes on only a fraction of the house's value. Most Japanese, of course, don't have such problems. Their challenge is to find a house they can afford, especially if they want to live in Tokyo. The housing crunch there inspired Robinsons on the Sand, a 1989 hit movie that's now No. 8 on Japan's VCR rental list. It tells the story of a salaryman and his family, who are willing to do anything to escape the misery of their tiny rented apartment. The ''anything'' turns out to be living on constant display as a ''model family'' in a spacious model home while potential buyers tramp through. Jealous neighbors bully the children and make obscene phone calls. Before long, one of the two sons turns delinquent, the daughter is killing kittens, and the father ends up homeless in the street. Mom and the kids finally return to their old apartment, where they watch TV in the closet in blessed privacy. So much for that particular family's Japanese dream."
The 100-year Japanese residential mortgage: An examination
"A recent innovation in the Japanese real estate industry to promote home ownership is the creation of a 100-year mortgage term. The home, encumbered by the mortgage, becomes an ancestral property and is passed on from grandparent to grandchild in a multigenerational fashion. We analyze the implications of this innovative practice, contrast it with the conventional 30-year mortgage popular in Western nations and explore its unique benefits and limitations within the Japanese economic and cultural framework. Through the use of simulation, the conclusion is reached that the 100-year mortgage has failed to increase the affordability of homes. Instead, affluent homeowners are more likely to employ long-term mortgages as an estate-planning tool to reduce inheritance taxes."
Japan introduced taxes to remove the incentives for speculative investments in realestate. The changes mostly seemed to have worked, but it came at a high cost for the speculators.
A big component of this is that building codes aren’t really enforced for the construction of single-family housing in Japan. Even if you wanted to buy a used home, you run the risk that shoddy construction could put you at serious danger in the event of the country’s not-so-infrequent natural disasters. This is one reason why most people tear down and rebuild.
A good percentage of new homes I've seen in the last 30 years here in America are barely a step above that in quality. Most of them aren't outright dangerous, but they certainly aren't top quality.
Yeah, walking into an average home built 35 years ago and the average one built 5 years ago, the difference is huge. Older ones definitely feel like they'll just pancake during a moderately large earthquake. They also completely lack insulation and many don't even have double pane windows. Nobody wants to buy houses like that in this day and age.
You are loosing the investment potential of the building on your property. There is nothing to stop you buying an old house (that is essentially valued at nothing) on a property and living in it. That will essentially maintain the equity you put in.
This article is citing another article from the same source [1]
"The typical Tokyo metro area starter home would be an apartment (around 750 square feet) or detached wooden house (around 970 square feet) located in the outer suburbs. According to Zoe Ward of Japan Property Central, the average Tokyo office worker has about a one-hour commute by train each morning."
So part of the answer is that homes are tiny by American standards, and it's not actually in Tokyo proper.
A lot of the people with hour-long commutes are not going long distances by American standards. They live in "Tokyo proper" (which is really more of a prefecture than a city) or the neighboring cities.
Even square footage isn't a perfect metric for cross-national comparison. For example, furniture in Japan (at places like Nitori) is often designed for smaller spaces. When I lived there, a $300 couch fit[1] perfectly in my living room, while it would've looked hilariously undersized in any North American house. I was more comfortable in that apartment, approx 480 sqft, than I was in a 1000 sqft apartment I had in North America
The cultural differences make this comparison less meaningful than you’d expect. In Japan you absolutely never have friends over to your house or apartment. Everyone meets at bars or restaurants. Similar to nyc, many apartments in Tokyo are a few hundred square feet and literally only serve as a place to sleep and shower. That means houses aren’t such a major thing and so the Japanese invest way less time and energy (and place less importance on) their homes.
My parents lived in japan and I have a few friends there. I spoke with a friend who works in graphic design on the outskirts of Tokyo who doesn’t even own a fridge - all his meals are eaten outside of his home.
> The cultural differences make this comparison less meaningful than you’d expect
If these cultural differences are so strong, then surely a market that allows new construction in the U.S. will tend toward creating housing that meets those needs. If it doesn't, it's probably because people place more value on other things (e.g. proximity, price, etc).
The fact is that the market doesn't even get a chance to work itself out in the U.S. because cities encode a particular set of living preferences in law.
> absolutely never have friends over to your house or apartment
Absolute statements like that are just clearly not true. I've been to Japanese friends' apartments, even visited friends' family barbecue or wine tasting night.
I agree. When I lived in Japan, I was invited to (local) friends' places often, including for a couple of kotatsu sleepover parties. It was probably more frequent than being invited to a friend's place in Vancouver.
Probably because most of my friends in Vancouver live in sharehouses or basement suites where they aren't allowed to have guests by their landlord, while my friends in Japan had small but respectable spaces that they had much more permissive ownership of.
The article has almost no content, but one of the three facts it provides is that Tokyo has 3-bedroom houses on offer for anyone who wants one, for $300K and 1% annual interest. It's not about 300sqft apartments.
You can do the exact same thing in nearly every part of the USA except Blue cities where regulation has moved home ownership out of the poor's reach. For example, California, new construction requires an electric vehicle outlet in garages. If you're poor, you have much better things to be spending $1500 than some charger outlet they will literally _never use_. Instead, regulations on how people want to live their lives and shelter themselves cement a cycle of poverty into these areas.
Extreme political bias aside, you need to check your facts. This article from 2014 estimates the cost for the required 40/80A breaker/conduit at a whopping $50. This is in contrast to the higher cost of adding such capability later.
An EV charger only costs about $400. Add $100 or so, if you don't already have a 240v line there pre-construction.
This seems like a totally fair thing for regulation to require, considering the majority of Californian homes are going to be hanging around for 40+ years or more.
"But zoning may be the real winner here. Japan’s zoning laws are national—so no local weirdness hampering construction and driving up prices. The system has 12 zones progressing from residential to commercial and industrial. Any buildings allowed in zone 1 are also allowed in the following zones. Basically: Housing can be built almost anywhere, even on extremely skinny or odd-sized parcels of land. This increases the amount of usable residential space and helps builders continue to meet demand, keeping housing costs under control. "
Fighting for something like this here will be one of the fights of the younger generations, otherwise they will be permanently locked out in any city with jobs. (There is plenty of housing where there are no jobs.)
Local NIMBY zoning must die. Its basically a cartel: collusion to restrict supply and drive prices artificially high.
Readit News
1. yes you might get a house at this price but it's either 1-2 hours out of the city center (which is fine, just saying Tokyo is large.) Or alternatively it's in bad neighborhoods. (bad is relative if you are from the US)
2. your house will most likely look like this: https://www.ii-ie2.net/dat/5ba1164d.jpg
Sayonara sunlight, hello neighbor.
here are listings: https://www.homes.co.jp/smp/kodate/shinchiku/tokyo/list/
there are nice ones in the list. I am just saying that this is the eastern country side of Tokyo (check the map) when the title probably makes everyone think something different.
Not sure what's wrong with that? That looks pretty amazing actually. I live in a unit that looks similar to that near downtown Chicago. My unit is north facing, and even so, there's more than enough sunlight.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with an apartment or microhouse, but it makes the quoted rent less impressive.
I live in a pretty well to do family oriented neighborhood in central Tokyo, and this is a very common design. Although I’m not sure about mortgages, but rents definitely ain’t just $850. But as the parent post said, it’s all about location. Prices nosedive once you leave the center of Tokyo or are off the main train lines.
For anyone living in one of the equivalent world cities (say, NyC, London, Shanghai, Paris, San Fran- you may quibble with me in the exact list but you know what I mean) these prices aren’t even remotely plausible.
(The one possible exception might be Berlin but that info could be dated)
This is the sort of thing that markets solve really well. If you want a dwelling unit with those properties, pay for it. If they're less important to you than cost, don't. If one is $300,000 and the other $600,000, it's very reasonable to choose affordability and go to a park.
Overall, the market for apartments seems to be supply constrained. The main factors:
1. Government approval is required to build large apartment buildings. In general, this seems to lag behind demand.
2. Large buildings take a long time to build
3. There have been a number of years of high immigration, especially in and around the CBD.
All of these factors combine to cause high prices. In a high price environment, many residents are stretched for cash. They essentially have to pick the lowest price apartment available. It's not uncommon to have multiple people sharing a room in order to decrease costs. This creates a high price floor. Mid range apartments don't tend to be much more expensive, simply because many residents are already super stretched financially and unable to afford the extra marginal cost.
As a property developer in a high floor, low marginal payoff environment your financial incentive is now to build as many low cost apartments as possible.
>> The majority of Victoria’s newest apartments are so small they would be considered unliveable in Sydney…More than three-quarters of new one-bedroom apartments built across the state are 50 square metres or less, which means they probably would have been illegal in Sydney, London and Adelaide. [1]
Making these apartments meet a reasonable minimum standard could only be less than 5% of the total cost [1]. To achieve this governments have tried to intervene by increasing minimum standards [2].
What concerns me the most is the longer term impacts. When demand drops off (as covid is pointing to), you have a massive supply of low quality apartments. Is the end result of this many vacancies and people living in shoe boxes when they could've been somewhere nicer?
There are a few long bows there, but as someone who lives in a relatively sunny but not quite sunny enough apartment that is my take.
[1] - https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/05/18/apartment... (great blog for planning issues)
[2] - https://architectureau.com/articles/victorias-draft-apartmen...
Living in a city which city center was (re-) build between the 16th and 17th century, the 30 years till worthless puzzles me.
Even the house I live in is over 100 years old and in excellent condition.
Why do houses loose their value so rapidly in Tokyo?
I've never been to Japan, but I imagine that a bad Japanese neighborhood is incredibly safe compared to a bad U.S. neighborhood. In a bad U.S. neighborhood one has to regularly take precautions in order to not be physically assaulted or even killed by other people.
>your house will most likely look like this: https://www.ii-ie2.net/dat/5ba1164d.jpg
Looks pretty amazing for less than $1000/month.
That said, of course I'm not thinking that Japan is some paradise. What I hear/read about their justice system and their stifling conformist culture doesn't sound very good to me.
Dead Comment
One thing to consider is that Tokyo is a prefecture, not a city. There are rural areas of Tokyo (like really rural), though most of it is very suburban. Anybody who has lived in the suburbs in western countries would probably be fairly comfortable in most parts of Tokyo prefecture.
It is true that in quite a few areas of Tokyo it takes a long time to get to central Tokyo. 2 hours is at the extreme, though. I live in very rural Shizuoka prefecture and I can get to Tokyo station in 2 hours if I time the bus and shinkansen perfectly. If you are on the train line, most places are no more than an hour away. It's pretty comparable to living in satellite cities in London, but the train is much better :-)
If you are not on the train line, though, it can take quite a long time. Roads in Japan are very slow, especially in rural areas. It's not unusual for it to take me over an hour to drive 30 km or so if I need to go through several towns. So you definitely can find houses in Tokyo that will be 2 hours away from the city center, but I don't think anyone working in central Tokyo would buy those houses.
I honestly don't think the example picture is representative of houses you'll find in Tokyo prefecture. They definitely exist in areas that are desirable, though. I think saying that you're probably looking at either a 1 hour commute by train or your are going to get a house jammed in wherever it will fit is correct. But it's not both at the same time.
I don't often go to Tokyo, but I occasionally go to surrounding areas. Probably if I was looking at houses for commuting to central Tokyo, I would probably look at places in Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama as well as Tokyo. There is actually quite a lot of choice.
The video linked in the article is well worth watching (as is anything from "Life Where I'm From" if you are interested in Japan) and is extremely balanced IMHO. Compared to other big city centers around the world, Tokyo and the surrounding area is quite affordable. Compared to Silicon Valley it's almost comically so, but Silicon Valley is really right at the other extreme.
On the other hand, rural (so cheap) areas are less packed so sunlight is less of an issue.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/116-Route-9h-Hudson-NY-12...
Deleted Comment
Fixing this can be a major obstacle in countries with inadequate pension systems. In countries where dependency on rising property values is the chief or sole form of retirement planing for vast numbers of people, fixing a broken housing market becomes dependent on fixing the retirement system.
And when land values are consistently propped up by government to a greater degree than other investments, it moves people even more into land speculation as their retirement investment because of its artificial safety.
I feel like this is a misleading way to put it. Japanese houses decrease in value, generally quite severely - the conventional wisdom is that after a few decades you might as well just tear it down and build a new one. So there's very real option value you're losing in the Japanese model; if you have to move in a decade or two, you won't be able to get back the equity you put in.
And why shouldn't they? What keeps housing prices high in the U.S. is artificial scarcity. It's the land that's valuable, not the out-of-date structures that exist on it. And the land is so valuable because it's illegal to build enough housing to meet demand in most places.
"JAPAN'S 100-YEAR BANK LOANS (FORTUNE Magazine) By Susan Moffat May 21, 1990
"(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Japanese, famous for saving, are now loading their future generations with debt. Nippon Mortgage and Japan Housing Loan, two big home lenders, are offering 99- and 100-year multigeneration loans with interest rates from 8.9% to 9.9%. Borrowers put up their homes as collateral. Such deals represent sound fiscal planning for some families, especially the very wealthy living in Tokyo who, perversely, can almost not afford to inherit a house: Japan's graduated inheritance tax can take up to 70% of a family's assets, including its home. Under the 100-year loan plan, a second generation can move into a deceased parent's home and pay inheritance taxes on only a fraction of the house's value. Most Japanese, of course, don't have such problems. Their challenge is to find a house they can afford, especially if they want to live in Tokyo. The housing crunch there inspired Robinsons on the Sand, a 1989 hit movie that's now No. 8 on Japan's VCR rental list. It tells the story of a salaryman and his family, who are willing to do anything to escape the misery of their tiny rented apartment. The ''anything'' turns out to be living on constant display as a ''model family'' in a spacious model home while potential buyers tramp through. Jealous neighbors bully the children and make obscene phone calls. Before long, one of the two sons turns delinquent, the daughter is killing kittens, and the father ends up homeless in the street. Mom and the kids finally return to their old apartment, where they watch TV in the closet in blessed privacy. So much for that particular family's Japanese dream."
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
The 100-year Japanese residential mortgage: An examination
"A recent innovation in the Japanese real estate industry to promote home ownership is the creation of a 100-year mortgage term. The home, encumbered by the mortgage, becomes an ancestral property and is passed on from grandparent to grandchild in a multigenerational fashion. We analyze the implications of this innovative practice, contrast it with the conventional 30-year mortgage popular in Western nations and explore its unique benefits and limitations within the Japanese economic and cultural framework. Through the use of simulation, the conclusion is reached that the 100-year mortgage has failed to increase the affordability of homes. Instead, affluent homeowners are more likely to employ long-term mortgages as an estate-planning tool to reduce inheritance taxes."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/106195...
"The typical Tokyo metro area starter home would be an apartment (around 750 square feet) or detached wooden house (around 970 square feet) located in the outer suburbs. According to Zoe Ward of Japan Property Central, the average Tokyo office worker has about a one-hour commute by train each morning."
So part of the answer is that homes are tiny by American standards, and it's not actually in Tokyo proper.
[1] https://www.curbed.com/2016/6/21/11946606/starter-homes-swed...
[1] たとえば https://www.nitori-net.jp/ec/product/1141031-1140061s/
My parents lived in japan and I have a few friends there. I spoke with a friend who works in graphic design on the outskirts of Tokyo who doesn’t even own a fridge - all his meals are eaten outside of his home.
If these cultural differences are so strong, then surely a market that allows new construction in the U.S. will tend toward creating housing that meets those needs. If it doesn't, it's probably because people place more value on other things (e.g. proximity, price, etc).
The fact is that the market doesn't even get a chance to work itself out in the U.S. because cities encode a particular set of living preferences in law.
Absolute statements like that are just clearly not true. I've been to Japanese friends' apartments, even visited friends' family barbecue or wine tasting night.
Less common doesn't mean it never happens.
Probably because most of my friends in Vancouver live in sharehouses or basement suites where they aren't allowed to have guests by their landlord, while my friends in Japan had small but respectable spaces that they had much more permissive ownership of.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...
This seems like a totally fair thing for regulation to require, considering the majority of Californian homes are going to be hanging around for 40+ years or more.
Fighting for something like this here will be one of the fights of the younger generations, otherwise they will be permanently locked out in any city with jobs. (There is plenty of housing where there are no jobs.)
Local NIMBY zoning must die. Its basically a cartel: collusion to restrict supply and drive prices artificially high.