There is definitely a positive to not treating a home as an appreciating asset that’s for sure… but the point of my rant is that it can go too far and you end up with a different type of housing crisis where there are plenty of cheap homes to go around, but nobody wants them.
The proper way to calm the housing crisis in the west is to heavily disincentivise the mass acquisition of property as an investment, through strong taxation and fees that increase with every property purchased and funnel that money to first home buyers, new construction, and overhauling zoning laws. hell, you could go as far as to put a hard cap on how many separate properties any person or entity can own for the next 10 years… force that market to cool by squeezing the top.
An average 4 bedroom family home in the suburbs should never be 20-30x the average salary, that’s ridiculous. the market needs to crash in order to recover to a state where a normal person can pay off a mortgage at an affordable rate in 15 to 20 years, not 30 or even 50 as we are seeing in some areas. property should still be an appreciating asset, but not one that is able to be hoarded en masse.
The whole ideology of nimbyism has to die too, protecting your investment at the detriment of the greater good holds us all back. that’s another thing that is mostly non-existant in japan, there is no investment to protect in a lot of cases, so there is no backlash when the government or council want to change something nearby or build a block of cheap apartments nearby. If you vote for your local government and they say they will build a train station here, and a subsidised housing block there, you cant complain, it is for the greater good.