Can anything be done about the base rate other than building a lot more buildings with a lot more units?
With cities like San Francisco and New York, are the prices so high because so many people want to live there or are the prices so high because developers and NIMBY folk are creating artificial scarcity of housing? Or both? In Tokyo (well, parts of Tokyo anyway, but still fairly centrally located), you can get a 30 or 40 square meter place (small, but good enough for many, including those raising families) for half of the price of anything in NY or SF, and the only reason that I can think of for why is that Tokyo has more units, and Tokyo has more units because it has more smaller units.
I bought a condo a couple of years back and it is 67 square meters (about 720 square feet), which still feels just huge to me. I simply don’t know what to do with all of this space, even with a wife and a 2 year-old. I bought it outright, but the realtor said that the going rate for rent would be around 1,000 USD or so. And this is in a central area of a city of 1.5 million, right next to a train station with a 30 minute journey to downtown Osaka (which is a city the size of Los Angeles).
