John Wiley & Sons Housing Booms in Gateway Cities Cover In Housing Booms in Gateway Cities, renowned geographer Dr. David Ley delivers a detailed exploratio.. Product #: 978-1-119-85359-6 Regular price: $69.07 $69.07 In Stock

Housing Booms in Gateway Cities

Ley, David

Studies in Urban and Social Change

Cover

1. Edition September 2023
336 Pages, Hardcover
Professional Book

ISBN: 978-1-119-85359-6
John Wiley & Sons

Short Description

In Housing Booms in Gateway Cities, renowned geographer Dr. David Ley delivers a detailed exploration of housing markets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Vancouver, and London and explains why these gateway cities have seen dramatic increases in residential real estate prices since the 1980s. The author describes how the globalization of real estate has rapidly inflated demand and uncoupled local housing prices from local wages, causing acute problems of affordability, availability, and inequality. The book implicates government policy in massive real estate price inflation, describing a shift from welfare-based to asset-based societies. It also highlights the relatively unique experience in Singapore, where asset-based housing policy has encouraged the dispersion of ownership and accumulation through an increased supply of subsidized leasehold apartments and the regulation of disruptive investment flows.

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HOUSING BOOMS IN GATEWAY CITIES

"David Ley examines the development of housing booms, and policies intended to stimulate or limit them. Utilising a comparative approach in five gateway cities, he provides a superb understanding of the politics of booms, lifting the debate beyond narrow housing and real estate studies. This book is required reading for anyone interested in global cities, housing markets, or comparative urbanism."
--Manuel B. Aalbers, Professor of Human Geography, KU Leuven, Belgium

"A stellar contribution to housing and its financialisation as central to the capitalist project globally, Housing Booms offers a wonderful window into the ascendancy of the secondary circuit of real estate in Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver, and London. Critically, through careful, empirically rigorous comparison, an eminent urban social scientist urges us to understand the importance of placing urban housing theoretically."
--Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities, Boston University

"Mastering a wealth of information and insights from five gateway cities, David Ley provides fresh and inspiring explanation of both common global logics and diverse local trajectories of housing booms in the era of financialisation and asset-based accumulation. A timely and ground-breaking contribution, (re)positioning housing to the centrality pervasively felt in everyday life but largely unacknowledged in mainstream social science."
--George Lin, Chair Professor of Geography, University of Hong Kong

In Housing Booms in Gateway Cities, renowned geographer Dr. David Ley delivers a detailed exploration of housing markets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Vancouver, and London and explains why these gateway cities have seen dramatic increases in residential real estate prices since the 1980s. The author describes how the globalization of real estate has rapidly inflated demand and uncoupled local housing prices from local wages, causing acute problems of affordability, availability, and inequality. The book implicates government policy in massive real estate price inflation, describing a shift from welfare-based to asset-based societies. It also highlights the relatively unique experience in Singapore, where asset-based housing policy has encouraged the dispersion of ownership and accumulation through an increased supply of subsidized leasehold apartments and the regulation of disruptive investment flows.

Housing Booms in Gateway Cities is an ideal resource for academics, students and policymakers with an interest in urban geography, sociology, and planning, housing studies, and any of the cities discussed in the book. It is an innovative treatment of housing as a central category in wealth accumulation in urban economies and societies.

Series Editors' Preface viii

Acknowledgements ix

List of Figures xi

List of Tables xii

1 Introduction: Housing as Asset 1

The New Centrality of Housing 2

The Volatile Housing Markets of Gateway Cities 5

The Globalisation of Residential Markets 7

A Narrative of Key Relationships 10

Homeownership and Asset-based Welfare 13

Corollaries of Homeownership in Asset Society 17

Concerning Method 18

Notes 21

2 Singapore: Housing and Nation Building 23

The Busy Life of House and Home in Singapore 24

The Property State 30

Global Pressures... 36

...and National Defences 39

Reproducing Labour: Housing Costs and Fertility 45

The Immigration Fix 49

Tears in the Seamless Society: Housing Affordability 51

The 2011 General Election and Since 53

Conclusion 56

Notes 57

3 Housing Divides: Property and Society in Hong Kong 61

The Tycoons and the Property Market 63

Hong Kong's Land Supply 66

Collusion: A Cohesive Growth Coalition 68

Housing Prices and Their Causes 73

The Response of Government Policy 83

Cooling Measures 86

Inequality in the Housing Market and Beyond 89

Residential Alienation and Its Discontents 95

Conclusion 97

Notes 98

4 Sydney: Investors, Offshore Relations, and the 2013-2017 Residential Boom 102

Sydney's House Price Profile 105

Consequences of House Price Inflation 108

Maurice Daly and the International Drivers of Sydney's Property Market 112

From the British Empire to an Asian Hegemon: Australia Pivots 116

The Economic Contexts of the 2013-2017 Housing Boom 119

Off-shore Residential Investors: Evidence from the Foreign Investment Review Board 121

China and the 2013-2017 Real Estate Boom 124

Gifted Migrants from China 129

From External to Internal Relations: Investor Profiles 131

The Domestic Property Investor and Tax-Subsidised Rental Assets 134

From Financial Policy to Cooling Measures 137

Housing Policy: What Policy? 139

Conclusion 141

Notes 144

5 Vancouver: From Housing Deregulation to Reregulation? 149

Vancouver Housing: The Back Story 152

Ownership, Assets, Gains 155

Spring 2015: An Emerging Counter-Narrative 158

The Angus Reid Survey and the Shaking of an Ideology 161

Governments and Elections: All Change 164

Towards Reregulation? Clipping the Libertarian Wings of the Real Estate Council 166

Serious Reregulation? 169

Assessment: Reregulation Achieved? 173

Conclusion 178

Notes 181

6 London 2012: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times 184

London's House Prices 187

The Significance of Prime London 190

'The World Capital for Property Investment' 196

Opaque Investment and Money Laundering 201

Global Property Developers 203

The Supply-Demand Imbalance 205

Public Policy and the Transformation of Housing Supply 209

Austerity: The Metanarrative 213

Austerity Vs. Social Housing 215

Conclusion 220

Notes 223

Contents vii

7 Conclusion: The Place of Housing 228

Intercity Generalisations 229

Gateways and Nations 229

Housing Booms in Time and Space 230

The Globalisation of Residential Markets 232

Housing Inequality 235

Housing Booms: Market-Based Causes 236

The State's Role in Incentivising and Cooling Housing Booms 238

Homeownership and an Asset-Based Society 242

Placing Urban Housing Theoretically 250

Notes 257

References 259

Index 310
David Ley, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines and The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. He has been awarded the Massey Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Association of American Geographers.

D. Ley, University of British Columbia, Canada