In an earlier article I discussed Tokyo’s remarkable return to housing affordability in recent decades. I speculated that a cultural tolerance to the ‘messiness’ of intensification could be a factor in Tokyo’s switch to affordable housing following the property boom of the 1980s.
Internationally, it is unusual for a city to change its long-term pattern of affordability. Generally the experience has been for unaffordable cities to remain unaffordable — perhaps due to the difficulty in achieving a societal consensus and therefore the political will to implement significant housing reforms (this seems to be the case for New Zealand in the last thirty years).