New Geography

Tag: housing prices

  • Hong Kong Response to High Housing Prices: Expand Land Supply

    Hong Kong financial chief John Tsang has promised to expand the city’s land supply for residential housing, "in response to rising public anger over soaring property prices and repeated warnings of a looming real estate bubble." Channel News Asia’s Hong Kong bureau indicated that the move was precipitated by the "sky-high" housing cost that have been drive by insufficient land for development and speculation (which routinely is intensified where demand for housing is permitted to outstrip supply.

    Buggle Lau, chief analyst at property firm Midland Holdings told Channel News Asia that he supported the expansion of the land supply "as a way to bring down house prices," adding "It’s simple economics – lower demand and higher supply will bring prices down." Channel News Asia noted that Hong Kong had been shown to be the most unaffordable metropolitan market in the recent (7th Annual) Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

  • Housing Crisis in Australia

    Even if Australia is a beautiful place to live, it is far from affordable. Results from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey show that some of the country’s major cities rank near the bottom of the list of areas with affordable housing. Out of the 325 cities analyzed, Perth ranks 291st, Melbourne ranks 321st, and Sydney ranks 324th. At 6.3, 9, and 9.6 respectively, each one has a median housing price to median household income ratio at least three to six points higher than the 3.0 price to income ratio demarcating affordable from unaffordable housing. Compared to these places in Australia, living in New York or London seems almost reasonable.

    Residential property prices in Australia have risen 250% in the past ten years, mainly due to the Government’s concentration on incentives for investors and speculators. A first home buyer’s program and negative gearing incentives for home and property owners have taken a toll on the housing market, creating such “inexcusable” conditions according to Australian Greens housing spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam.

    The 2008 Senate Select Committee on Housing Affordability’s investigation into this issue reveals that the Government spent about $50 billion annually on capital gains exemptions and negative gearing incentives, while only spending $512 million over the course of five years to improve the supply of affordable housing. Rental affordability is not much better, as indicated by the gap of 493,000 affordable and available rental properties in Australia.

    Ludlam and others have started to call this a “crisis,” an adequate term given migration trends all over the world. Cities with unaffordable housing, such as New York, London, and San Francisco, are losing people moving to the less expensive suburban areas. If Australia continues to have housing bubbles and affordability issues, cities like Melbourne and Sydney may experience high out-migration rates in the coming years, which would not bode well for cities on the rise.

  • Gifting China

    Listening to public radio, the host was interviewing a college professor as to why China has brought more innovation and progress in many areas of its growth, leaving other countries behind. In particular they mentioned high speed rail, low energy vehicles, and construction. The entire show was based solely upon how China’s universities educate differently than America, as if somehow a graduate student would suddenly posses the knowledge, experience, and drive to make major changes in transportation, science, design, and construction.

    When I hire American college students either as interns or graduates, what they have learned has little practical application as to the tasks that my business needs. Thus, we need to educate them on design (land surveying, civil engineering, planning and architecture), presentation techniques and the latest technology. What students do posses is a strong desire to make a difference in the world. I’m sure it is similar in China.

    China has made explosive progress by the process required of American companies who must comply with their restrictions to do business in their country. Let me explain:

    About 4 years ago we looked into designing neighborhoods in China. What we discovered is that an American company cannot do business directly in China. Instead of working directly, we would be required to enter into a partnership with an existing consulting firm in China. There is a problem with that requirement. If I would pursue business in China, I’d have to partner with a firm that did not have our talent, methods, or technologies we possessed. To work with an unknown firm would require us to share information that would have been exclusive to our firm, essentially training them in the strengths we took so long to accumulate. I figured that this would be a quick (and cheap) way their government could force American businesses to train their companies in our methods, and in most cases our advancements.

    Why would a company with a competitive edge want to provide privileged information to gain business? What is there to prevent that “partnering” business to break off relationships once they drain the knowledge base? Certainly they do not hire us because we have a larger workforce.

    American progress has been fostered by questioning why. Why is something being done this way? How can we make it better? This leads to innovation. Innovation was a major reason our country progressed more aggressively compared to countries that teach their students to think in only one way. China could see us as a knowledge base to farm information from our corporations wanting China’s riches.

    China seems to present an image of more progress. By forcing partnerships to do business in China we may have taught their corporations our best secrets. “We” being not just the United States, but every other country with their top designers, scientists, and technologies sharing knowledge.

    Once they have this knowledge and know-how, why would they need us? That is the foundational problem, and one reason I have not pursued work in China.

    The American way is innovation – something which I’ve seen little of in the development of our land and the building of our housing by the largest of American corporations. We should be going back to the drawing boards to accelerate American innovation and technology, and this time, not hand over this competitive edge so easily.

  • Australian Opposition to Loosen Land for Housing

    The opposition Liberal-National Coalition, locked in a close battle with the ruling Labor Party in Australia’s Saturday elections, has adopted a housing policy to improve the nation’s housing affordability. The policy would require states to monitor housing affordability and to release more land for development. There would also be a review of the efficacy of development charges.

    Australia suffers from some of the most unaffordable housing in the world, with a Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income) of 6.8, which is more than double the historic norm of 3.0. With recent interest rate increases, the median household would have to pay more than 50% of its gross income to service a mortgage on the median priced house. Little more than 15 years ago, house prices were affordable in Australia, which had seen home ownership rise from approximately 40% before World War II to approximately 70%. The principal cause of the loss of housing affordability has been the virtual universal adoption of “smart growth” (“urban consolidation”) land use restrictions, which have (among other things) made it virtually impossible to develop inexpensive housing on the urban fringes, with the price of rationed land driven up many times.

    The Coalition’s housing policy includes the following provisions that are directly related to removing the urban consolidation barriers to affordable housing:

    In order to continue to receive federal funds, States and Territories will need to increase land supply and reform their planning and approval systems under the National Affordable Housing Agreement (NAHA).
    States and Territories will need to set affordability targets to guide land releases and dwelling approvals. In order to receive federal funds States and Territories would need to demonstrate that they had a plan for delivering these targets and those approvals and land releases occurred consistent with the targets established.
    The Coalition will review of State, Territory and local developer charges, which have been contributing an increasing component to the cost of development. State and local governments that build higher charges into the cost of housing will be less able to meet their home affordability obligations under the Compact.

    Housing affordability has been an issue of substantial concern in Australia for years and has emerged as the top concern among voters in this election. State governments have talked about housing affordability, but have done little. Over the past five years, house prices have continued to rise relative to incomes. Just in the last nine months, a mortgage payment on the median priced house has risen from $500 in Adelaide to more than $800 in Sydney.

    The Coalition policy, however, represents the second significant development in recent weeks (Note). The first was an expansion of the Melbourne urban growth boundary by 440 square kilometers. All of this may signal an overdue attention to housing affordability in Australia.

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    Note: Performance Urban Planning statement on the Coalition housing policy.

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    Photograph: Adelaide: Urban fringe land (no houses allowed). Photograph by author

  • Evangelicals: Preventing and Causing the Housing Bubble

    The International Monetary Fund has published some of the most peculiar econometric research in recent history in Irrational Exuberance in the US Housing Market: Were Evangelicals Left Behind? In it, Christopher Crowe associates the financial behavior of Evangelical Protestant Christians with more stable US markets during the housing bubble. It is well known that the housing bubble was concentrated in some metropolitan areas and largely missed others, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Indianapolis and many others, most of them with stronger underlying demand than in the metropolitan areas with huge house price increases. Crowe’s research raises the possibility that Evangelicals kept house prices down by not speculating, due to their religious beliefs.

    Evangelicals generally believe in missionary and conversion activities and tend to hold to beliefs that were largely liberalized in large portions, but not universally in the “mainstream” Protestant churches (such as Episcopal, United Church of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and Disciples of Christ churches) during the first half of the 20th century. In recent decades, Evangelical churches have grown strongly, Evangelical membership is now 50% greater than that of “mainstream” Protestantism (even with its Evangelical remnants), which has been relegated to “mainstream” in name only.

    The Crowe thesis is generally that Evangelicals, allegedly with an “intense” belief in “end times” theology (such as the “imminent” return or the “second coming” of Jesus Christ) were less inclined to speculate in housing, which kept house prices from rising strongly in metropolitan areas with larger concentrations of Evangelicals.

    There are some rather substantial difficulties with the thesis.

    The first problem is relates to speculation. Rising prices are needed for there to be any incentive to speculate. If, for example, the numerous Evangelicals in Dallas-Fort Worth had undertaken a furious speculative frenzy, prices would not have gone up, instead more houses would have been built. This is because the liberal land use regime in Dallas-Fort Worth permits housing to be built in response to demand and nullifies any potential for speculative gain. Evangelicals, of course, like Catholics, Mainstream Protestants, Jews and Atheists are not stupid and were no more inclined to speculate on housing in the plentiful Dallas-Fort Worth market than they would have been climb over one another to offer higher prices for sand on the beach.

    Another difficulty is that Crowe’s characterization of Evangelical beliefs is a caricature. In fact, the nation’s 40 million Evangelicals, including 15 million Southern Baptists more than 2 million Missouri Synod Lutherans, more than 1 million members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, non-denominational megachurch members and others behave similarly to other Americans in the economic sphere. Crowe hypothesizes that “that a belief in the end times reduces incentives to save simply because agents put a lower expectation on the future being realized.” It would have been equally reliable to conjecture on the subsurface geology of an undiscovered planet.

    Evangelicals like nice houses. They like nice cars. They like their children to be well clothed and to go to good schools. They do not refuse raises offered by their bosses because they expect shortly to be caught up into heaven like the prophet Elijah. True, some “end times” Christians have sold their property and trekked to mountaintops or otherwise awaited dates wrongly prophesied by their leaders. It happened in 1844 and in 1914, but these were not Evangelicals.

    While Crowe’s research suggests an Evangelical stabilizing effect on housing markets, an opposite, but no less improbable thesis was advanced in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Did Christianity Cause the Housing Crash?” This article suggests that the “prosperity” gospel preached in some Evangelical churches led parishioners to take on obligations they could not afford, leading to the bursting of the bubble, though it is mercifully devoid of spurious regressions. Author Hanna Rosin names names, such as Joel Osteen of Houston’s Lakewood Church and Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church in Southern California hosted President Obama as a candidate. It would not be surprising if a future article in The Atlantic pontificated about abandoned suburban megachurches.

    One can only wonder what the other nearly 90 percent of Americans were doing while Evangelicals were simultaneously causing and preventing the housing bubble.

    Wendell Cox a contributing editor of newgeography.com is the son of an Evangelical clergyman (Pentecostal), became Presbyterian and later an Episcopalian.

    Photo: Hollywood Presbyterian Church: An Evangelical Church in a Mainstream Protestant Denomination (by the author).

  • China’s Housing Bubble: Quality Research Required

    It is extremely difficult to find reliable reporting on the intensity of the housing bubbles across China, but this article from the China Post of June 1, 2010 “Economist sees housing market bubble”, appears to be realistic.

    It states that in 2009 the average house price to average annual household income in China was 9.1 times earnings and that it rose to 11.15 during the first two months of 2010. Beijing and Shanghai are reported to have exceeded 20 times average household earnings during early 2010. These figures are from Yao Shujie, head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham.

    The article noted that last week, Chinese real estate services company E House China released figures suggesting that house prices to incomes nationwide in 2009 were 8.03 times incomes, but those in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen were over 14 times household incomes.

    Recently, Wendell Cox of Demographia, working with the South China Post, estimated that the Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income) for Hong Kong was 10.4 – as reported in this New Geography article Unaffordable Housing in Hong Kong. Because sufficiently reliable data is now available from Hong Kong, it will be included within the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Surveys going forward.

    As the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Surveys clearly illustrate, house prices do not exceed three times gross annual household incomes in normal markets.

    Rather remarkably, in researching and reporting on the China Housing Bubble, there has been no discussion of the land ownership differences of China and western countries.

    Freehold land is not available in China. The land is leased for a remarkably short term of 70 years. Instead of conventional ground leases in the west where ground rentals are paid, Chinese Local Governments demand an upfront payment of capitalized rental. On this basis, the land interest should be a wasting asset over the term of the lease.

    Rather remarkably – this appears not to be the case in China, where the buying public have convinced themselves (no doubt with encouragement from real estate agents and developers) that at the end of the term of the ground lease, Local Government will simply “gift” the land to home owners!

    On the sound income to house price measure, China’s housing bubble is clearly the worst in the world. When the unsatisfactory and uncertain land ownership issue is factored in as well, it is particularly concerning.

  • Obama Throws Life-Line to Smart Growth Areas

    President Obama has announced a special program of assistance for home owners in the five states that have been hit hardest by the housing crisis. The proposed program is targeted at California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, where house price declines are more than 20% from the peak of the bubble.

    The greatest losses occurred in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada (see note), where peak to trough house price loses exceeded 40% in all 12 metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population except Jacksonville. These markets accounted for 70% of the gross housing value loss in the nation before the Lehman Brothers collapse. House prices were driven to unprecedented levels of up to four times historic norms by overly prescriptive land use regulations (“growth management” or “smart growth”) that makes land unaffordable.

    Average losses were more than $175,000 in the markets of these states, more than 10 times those in traditionally regulated markets such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Cincinnati. These intense losses were beyond the ability of the mortgage industry to sustain and it is generally acknowledged that this precipitated the Great Recession.

    Smart growth had nothing to do with the Michigan price collapse. There, the strong economic downturn pushed prices down even as the state escaped without a housing bubble.

    The President’s program means that the nation is now paying twice for smart growth policies. The first payment was, of course larger, which cascaded into the huge household wealth losses in the Great Recession.

    Note: While Las Vegas and Phoenix are sometimes perceived as not having prescriptive land use policies, the Brookings Institution ranks both metropolitan areas as toward the more restrictive end of the regulatory spectrum. These overly prescriptive regulatory environments are exacerbated by the fact that in both metropolitan areas much of the developable suburban land is owned by government, and is being auctioned, though at a rate less than demand. These factors combined to drive auction prices per acre up nearly 500% in Phoenix and nearly 400% in Las Vegas during the housing bubble.

  • Housing Affordability in Darwin, Australia: Still Dreadful

    Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory is located next to the sea, across from the Indonesian archipelago. Darwin is also located next to a sea of developable land in one of the world’s least developed nations. Only 0.3% of Australia’s land is developed, approximately 1/10th the rate of the United States or Canada (in the agricultural belt) and even less compared to European nations.

    Local Officials Report Erroneous Data: Yet, Darwin has severely unaffordable housing in our 6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. Upon initial publication of this year’s report, local officials identified a mistake in the median house price figure that they had made available to the press (and that we had used). Rather than a median house price of $607,000 (US$510,000), they announced that the median house price in September 2009 was $499,000 (US$425,000). Officials also corrected the median house price figure for the previous quarter.

    Housing Affordability: Still Dreadful” The result was that the Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income) fell from 8.6 to 7.1. Affordable markets have a Median Multiple of 3.0 or below. As originally reported Darwin was the 4th least affordable market out of 272. We have revised our report to reflect the newly revised data. Darwin is now rated as 13th least affordable market, which is only marginally less dreadful.

    Still As Unaffordable as New York or London: This was cause for celebration by the Chief Minister (Premier) of the Northern Territory, Paul Henderson, who noted that housing was less expensive in Darwin than in Tokyo. We do not know the Median Multiple for the Tokyo metropolitan area, because data is not readily available. However, Darwin is as expensive relative to incomes as New York and London.

    Darwin: A Metropolitan Area in Housing Stress: At the median house price, the median household will pay half its income for the mortgage. This is well above the “mortgage stress” level of 30% as defined by government agencies. The overwhelming majority of Darwin’s future households will be faced with housing stress or could be life-long renters. The price for most residential building lots (blocks) in the new suburb of Johnston is approximately the same as the US median house price, even after adjusting for currency differences.

    High Demand Markets are More Affordable: Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth each have added the equivalent of Darwin’s population annually during the 2000s and have exhibited far higher underlying demand for housing. Yet housing is affordable (Median Multiples under 3.0). If Darwin had the same price to income ratio as Atlanta, the median house price would be little more than $150,000.

    Extinguishing the “Great Australian Dream:” It was not always this way. Before the widespread adoption of “urban consolidation” policies (also called growth management, smart growth or compact city policies), sufficient land was always available to build on across Australia. In the last two decades, however, urban consolidation policies have ravaged Australia’s household wealth, driving prices to the highest levels in the English speaking world.

    Few places in the world are more unaffordable than Darwin. Few places have more land to grow. Heavy handed and stingy planning has extinguished the Great Australian Dream in Darwin.