Chinese municipal governments are funded through the tax assessed on the sale of the home and not through a continuous property tax - or at least that used to be the case, haven't checked in a while. That resulted in municipalities encouraging higher prices for housing.

> And yet housing prices in much of Asia is still insane.

They're generally lower than the US, despite having a higher population density.

> Chinese housing market is completely messed up, with turn over almost halted since the government won’t let prices fall no matter what, while they have overbuilt like crazy.

A place with the government policy objective of not allowing housing prices to decrease isn't much of an argument that supply and demand doesn't work in general. China is just its own kind of broken.

Whereas prices are significantly lower in e.g. India, not just Japan.

The difference is that China had a housing bubble. After it popped, housing prices started plummeting. In the US, housing is just expensive. Given the current supply and demand, there isn't a good reason why the price should be lower.

This is not actually true.

There are only 5 states with federally owned land over 50% (Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon). Other states west of the Mississippi don’t necessarily have a large percentage of federal land. For instance, Texas only has 1.78% that is federally owned, Arkansas at 9.38%, Oklahoma at 1.59%, Kansas at 0.52%, and the Dakotas at 3.91% and 5.41%. In fact, there are only ten states with over 30% of federally owned land in the Union, granted they are all in the Western part of the States.

2024 https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-lan...

These have a cleaner interface but are from 2018

https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/federal-land-by-state/

https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state

I don't know that that is what they were claiming. Land use policy != Land availability. If it was, Russia would have ended homelessness 500 years ago.

Much of that are involves forests far away from where people would want to live anyway. Often without roads.

When people say the issue is land, that usually implies a very particular smaller subset of land which is in proximity other populations, economic centers, and with certain features and infrastructure.

Um, yes. That's what I was getting at.