From Copenhagen to Tokyo

The root causes of the San Franciso Bay Area’s housing crisis are embedded in state and local policies and the way our real estate market operates. These systems sometimes feel intractible and impossible to change. But other countries have vastly different ways of organizing their policies and markets around the production of housing, and there’s a lot we can learn from them.

As part of the SPUR Regional Strategy, AECOM prepared a set of international case studies of housing delivery to explore how the Bay Area might reshape policies to improve its housing delivery systems. The study explored the cities of Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Tokyo and Singapore. Each shares similarities with the Bay Area in terms of demographics, economic composition and housing market characteristics. Although the political and economic systems are very different in each case, these cities all have compelling and noteworthy approaches to housing delivery that could inform future policy innovation in the Bay Area