Housing Bubble in Brazil

Robert Shiller (Yale Prof. and 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”) talks about the recent home price boom in Brazil, aka 'Housing Bubble in Brazil' (via Sergio Jatobá).

Related Links:

• Call for chapter proposals: Trends and Issues in Housing in Asian cities
• Location, Location: The Hottest Real Estate Markets On Earth
• Where Housing Prices Are on the Rise in the US
• Brazil's High Flying Real Estate Prices Outpace All Countries

"The Land of Many Palaces"

In the local mongolian language 'Ordos' means “the land of many palaces". This is the title of a documentary (in production) on one of the famous Ghost Cities in China. It is an independent and low budget film featured by Adam Smith & Song Ting and I wish them luck because this is a great material for a documentary!

[I saw this at Paula Morais' facebook wall]

Assorted Links

1. GPSing Your Cat
   
   
2. London’s Changing Population
   
   
3. Perhaps you should reconsider your PhD topic (via MR)
   
   
4. Two good reasons to make a trip to China
   
   
5. Is there a shortage of STEM workers in the USA? Yes, No, Depends
   
   
6. Home prices in some U.S. metropolitan areas
   
   
7. The new issue of the Journal of Transport and Land Use is out
   
   
8. "WTF" link: Richard Nixon and Robocop ?!
   
   
9. An old interactive map with lots of info on murders in NY

12 years in the American housing market

A few months ago, Kevin Quealy has published in the NYT this interactive chart showing the ups and downs in the American housing market over the last 12 years.

Related Links: 

• Squaring house prices
• Jiang Jun Examines Housing in China
• Housing Trends, Short and Long Term
• Mapping the US housing bubble: 2000-2010
• Which country has seen the highest decadal housing price increase?

Assorted Links

1. Heading for success: or how not to title your paper (via David Levinson)
   
   
2. The 10 largest African cities in 2013
   
   
3. PAA 2013 Preliminary Program (via Eddie Hunsinger)
   
   
4. The Rio favela transformed into prime real estate (via Andres Marroquin)
   
   
5. Muddy Waters in Manchester (1964)
   
   
6. A monumental burden: Should Washington DC build skyscrapers?
   
   
7. Mapping climate change (via Per Square Mile)
   
   
8. The Skyscraper Index

Recent Real Estate Trends in China

Abstract:

We provide the first multi-city, constant quality land price index for 35 major markets in China. While there is meaningful heterogeneity in land price growth across cities, on average the last nine years have seen land values skyrocket in many markets, not just those on or near the coast. The typical market has experienced double-digit compound average annual growth in real, constant-quality land values. The 2009-2010 stimulus period typically saw large surges in prices. Three notable characteristics about the land value appreciation series are their strong mean reversion at annual frequencies, the strong common factor in their movement, and their very high volatility. Quantities, not just prices, have been sharply increasing in recent years. The typical amount of space supplied via land auctions in our 35 city sample has doubled since 2008. Some local political economy traits such as the time the local Chinese Communist Party leader has been in office are correlated with land supply volume.

I saw this at Andres Marroquin's blog (it goes to my blog-reading list, by the way)

Related links: 

• China's Housing Market: Is a Bubble About to Burst?
• The Economist interactive overview of global house prices and rents
• JTRG call for papers: Transport and Logistics in China

The home-ownership debate

The Economist Magazine has published a new 'Economist debate'. Should home-ownership be discouraged? (via Richard Green)

Green and Glaeser put the trade-off between market failure costs and public intervention costs in a very straightforward way. Very good food for thought! although I believe the market failures in the Brazilian housing sector (slums, informal markets, urban infrastructure deficit etc.) are quite different from those in the USA.

Anyway, perhaps the Brazilian Government should consider Glaeser's statements and rethink its housing policy.

• Related link: is there a real estate bubble in the Brazil?

 

Assorted Links

1. Brazil facts (via MR)
   
2. The Geography of James Bond
   
3. 10 cities where homes cost less than a car (via The Drunkeynesian)
   
4. Seven Minutes of Terror, or how hard it was to land on Mars
   
5. book: Megacities: Urban Form, Governance, and Sustainability
   
6. The new Schwartnegger Institute on State and Global Policy. (via Lisa Schweitzer) Funny to know that he is 'concerned with the future'.
   
7. Child mortality in Africa

[Click on the image to enlarge it]

[Image Credit: The Economist]

Angola's Chinese empty city

Chinese-built ghost town strikes again! now in Angola.

[image credit]

Related Posts:

• China's empty city (and here)
• It's Alive !!!

Assorted Links

1. The Age of Reason
   
   
2. Breathtaking Aaerial panoramas of several cities around the world (HT Paulo Afonso Rheingantz)
   
   
3. No reason to worry about Chinese housing bubble .... not for now.
   
   
4. The Three Laws of Future Employment
   
   
5. VI World Conference 2012 - Spatial Econometrics Association (HT Bernardo Furtado)
   
   
6. International Workshop on the Economic Impacts of Extreme Events (March 23 in São Paulo)
   
   
7. Tracing the Liveliness of Mobile Phone Usage in Geneva  (via infosthetics)

   

The Economist house-price indicators and the Chinese housing bubble

The Economist Magazine updated its house-price indicators.They say that the bursting of the global housing bubble is only halfway through. 

Krugman and Wendell Cox have a few words suggesting why we shouldn't be so optimistic about the Chinese real estate market.

soundtrack: Caetano

China's empty city (again)

Another video on China's Ghost Cities (this one by Adrian Brown from SBS). As David Levinson said:

"If people believe that other people/firms will move there, they too will move there. If they believe it will fail, they won't and it fails. Changing expectations is critical for success."

I beleive that's the point. Chinese Urbanization has been so accelerated in recent years (mostly driven by government initiatives) that this pace seems to be leading to a sort of mismatch between future expectation and current actions of economic agents. [Ok, I recognize China must be much more complicated than that. I'm jus trying to keep it simple]

via The Transportationist

Check other posts about China here at Urban Demographics Blog.

The Economist house-price index (updated)

The Economist Magazine updated its house-price index (here),

They also published a chart of Robert Shiller’s index of real (ie, inflation-adjusted) house prices in America (1890!-2010). [Something is rotten.... and it is not Denmark]

ps. Catherine Mulbrandon posted an interesting chart on the same topic: US Housing Prices (Real vs Nominal) 1890-2010.

Love and Housing Bubbles

Nelson Rodrigues (a great Brazilian playwright, journalist and novelist) once said: "Love is eternal. If it ends, it wasn't love."

I tend to believe that housing bubbles are in some way like love. One can only be sure that there is a bubble after it burst. [Before the burst, one can always argument that rising prices are reflecting a buoyant market]

Nelson Rodrigues [photo credit: O Globo]

By the way, The Economist Magazine published a very good report on property: Bricks and slaughter. Some interesting snippets:

• Construction of exceptionally tall buildings is a reliable indicator of economic crises in the making (According to Andrew Lawrence of Barclays Capital)
  
  
• If housing were like any other consumer good, rising prices should eventually dampen demand. But since it is also seen as a financial asset, higher values are a signal to buy. And if housing were simply a financial investment, buyers might be clearer-eyed in their decision-making. [... but] the experience of buying a home is a largely emotional one.
  
  
• Brazil is thought to be short of some 8m homes
  
  
• The whole of India has fewer hotel rooms than Las Vegas
  
  
• According to Barclays Capital, more than 40% of the skyscrapers due for completion in the next six years will be in China, increasing the number of tall buildings in Chinese cities by more than half. [I tend to be skeptical about such numbers...]

The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)

Google has scanned 15 million books originally published from 1800 on. And they have also developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer. It's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in literature and other books (Google books database). One could irresponsibly use it as a proxy for the popularity of words in literature. And I did!

This chart above shows how often "Urban Sociology" has appeared in the literature (Google database - english literature only) since 1800. It looks to me that the Chicago School have had played an important role in the rising 'popularity' of Urban Sociology*. And it looks that Urban Sociology is not as 'popular' as it used to be....

*obviously, it would be necessary to scrutinize other keywords to conclude this (such as the major researchers in the first Chicago School)

And here are some queries of other keywords of interest:

• Aging Population; Demographic Transition; Demography related words; urban mobility, housing bubble, 'Great Cities' as urban hierarchy (?), Space Syntax, GIS, urban, regional and environmental studies, urban and rural, etc.

And my favorites:

Traffic Jam:

Urban sprawl, compact city, smart city, smart growth, compact growth, New Urbanism.

Thanks Vinicius Netto for the tip!

Chinese housing bubble (?)

A great article about the uncertain Chinese real estate market by Wendell Cox. And guess what? Insufficient available data and fragile official statistics... hard to tell.

The Economist house-price indicators updated

The Economist Magazine updated its house-price indicators (here)

The Economist: "In Asia policymakers are trying to prick a bubble. In America they are still dealing with the consequences of the last one."

Thanks to Leonardo Monasterio again.

China's empty city

How sustainable can that be?



Thanks to Leonardo Monasterio