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.
