“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.
Table of Contents
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
