What are some (recent?) historical cases of urban land decreasing in price?
My current model is that this can’t really happen, because land owners have something that a lot of people gravely need, will pay basically anything to get, and until we implement a radically different civic mechanism for allocating urban land, urban life is generally going to stay close to the worst that people will tolerate rather than approaching the best that the market can provide.
The first city that came to my mind was Tokyo. I looked it up and the urban land prices decreased from 885k in 2009 yen per square meter to 758k yen per square meter in 2012. Prices also fell in Tokyo after the bust in 1992.
In completely unrelated matters, Tokyo is also the city without zoning laws...
Urban land doesn’t need to decrease in price, just urban housing. If you allow building up then it’s profitable to keep building units even as their rent falls.
What are some (recent?) historical cases of urban land decreasing in price?
My current model is that this can’t really happen, because land owners have something that a lot of people gravely need, will pay basically anything to get, and until we implement a radically different civic mechanism for allocating urban land, urban life is generally going to stay close to the worst that people will tolerate rather than approaching the best that the market can provide.
The first city that came to my mind was Tokyo. I looked it up and the urban land prices decreased from 885k in 2009 yen per square meter to 758k yen per square meter in 2012. Prices also fell in Tokyo after the bust in 1992.
In completely unrelated matters, Tokyo is also the city without zoning laws...
Urban land doesn’t need to decrease in price, just urban housing. If you allow building up then it’s profitable to keep building units even as their rent falls.
Recent historical cases of urban land decreasing in price aren’t ones to emulate; they’re cases like Detroit where a city has become dramatically less desirable over time due to an industry dying. But Seattle has recently built enough new housing that they’ve seen a small decrease in rents: https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/01/apartment-rents-dropping-in-seattle-landlords-compete-for-tenants-as-market-cools.html