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Notes -
Where (in the industrialised world) are they not?
Houston, Texas has as close to a completely free market on housing as anywhere in the industrialized world- it's still relatively affordable rather than absolutely so.
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Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.
Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.
Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.
But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.
Hong Kong’s housing crisis is also partially manufactured because the construction of new subway / MTR stations is extremely slow and most people want to live within close walking distance of one in a city that gets extremely hot and humid and which has typhoons on a regular basis. There’s actually a lot of empty land in Hong Kong that’s just mountainous (which they’re very familiar with building on).
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