Jul 1 JDN 2458301

My posts for the next couple of weeks are going to be shorter, since I am in Europe and will be either on vacation (at the time I write this) or busy with a conference and a workshop (by the time this post goes live).

For today, I’d just like to point out that the crisis of extremely high housing prices is not unique to California or even the United States. In some respects it may even be worse elsewhere.

San Francisco remains especially bad; the median price for a home in San Francisco is a horrifying $1.6 million.

But London (where I am at the time of writing) is also terrible; the median price for a home in London recently fell to 430,000 pounds (about $600,000 at current exchange rates). The most expensive flat—not house, flat—sold a couple years ago for the mind-boggling sum of 150 million pounds (about $200 million). If I had $200 million, I would definitely not use it to buy a flat. At that point it would literally be cheaper to buy a yacht with a helipad, park it in the harbor, and commute by helicopter. Here’s a yacht with a helipad for only $20 million, and a helicopter to go with it for $6 million. That leaves $174 million; keep $20 million in stocks to be independently wealthy for the rest of your life, and then donate the remaining $154 million to charity.

The median price of a house in Vancouver stands at 1.1 million Canadian dollars, about $830,000 US.

A global comparison finds that on a per-square-meter basis, the most expensive real estate in the world is in Monaco, where $1 million US will only buy you 15 square meters. The remaining cities in the top 10 are Hong Kong, London, Singapore, Geneva, New York, Sydney, Paris, Moscow, and Shanghai.

There is astonishing variation in the level of housing prices, even within countries. Some of the most affordable markets in the US (like San Antonio and Oklahoma City) cost as little as $80 per square foot; that means that $1 million would buy you 1,160 square meters. That’s not an error; real estate in Monaco is literally 77 times more expensive than real estate in Oklahoma City. 15 square meters is a studio apartment; 1,160 square meters is a small mansion. Just comparing within the US, the price per square foot in San Francisco is over $1,120, 14 times as high as Oklahoma City. $1 million in San Francisco will buy you about 80 square meters, which is at least a two or three-bedroom house.

This says to me that policy choices matter. It may not be possible to make San Francisco as cheap as Oklahoma City—most people would definitely rather live in San Francisco, so demand is always going to be higher there. But I don’t think it’s very plausible to say that housing is just inherently 14 times as expensive to construct as housing in Oklahoma City. If it’s really that much more expensive to construct (and that may not even be the issue—this could be more a matter of oligopoly than high costs), it must be at least in part because of something the local and state governments are doing differently. Cross-national comparisons underscore that point even further: The geography of Hong Kong and Taiwan is not that different, but housing prices in Taiwan are not nearly as high.

What exactly are different cities (and countries) doing differently that has such large effects on housing prices? That’s something I’ll try to figure out in future posts.