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A Sprawl of Ghost Homes in Tokyo. Discarded houses spreading across Japan like a blight in a garden.; When a society shrinks, what should be done with the buildings it no longer needs?
Topic Started: 25 Aug 2015, 03:12 PM (2,444 Views)
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A Sprawl of Ghost Homes in Aging Tokyo Suburbs

By JONATHAN SOBLEAUG. 23, 2015

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YOKOSUKA, Japan — Ever since her elderly neighbor moved a decade ago, Yoriko Haneda has done what she can to keep the empty house she left behind from becoming an eyesore. Ms. Haneda regularly trims its shrubs and clips its narrow strip of grass, maintaining its perfect view of the sea.

The volunteer yard work has not extended to the house two doors down, however. That one is vacant, too, and overgrown with bamboo. In fact, dozens of houses in this hillside neighborhood about an hour’s drive from Tokyo are abandoned.

“There are empty houses everywhere, places where nobody’s lived for 20 years, and more are cropping up all the time,” said Ms. Haneda, 77, complaining that thieves had broken into her neighbor’s house twice and that a typhoon had damaged the roof of the one next to it.

Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes are spreading across Japan like a blight in a garden. Long-term vacancy rates have climbed significantly higher than in the United States or Europe, and some eight million dwellings are now unoccupied, according to a government count. Nearly half of them have been forsaken completely — neither for sale nor for rent, they simply sit there, in varying states of disrepair.

These ghost homes are the most visible sign of human retreat in a country where the population peaked a half-decade ago and is forecast to fall by a third over the next 50 years. The demographic pressure has weighed on the Japanese economy, as a smaller work force struggles to support a growing proportion of the old, and has prompted intense debate over long-term proposals to boost immigration or encourage women to have more children.

For now, though, after decades in which it struggled with overcrowding, Japan is confronting the opposite problem: When a society shrinks, what should be done with the buildings it no longer needs?

Many of Japan’s vacant houses have been inherited by people who have no use for them and yet are unable to sell, because of a shortage of interested buyers. But demolishing them involves tactful questions about property rights, and about who should pay the costs. The government passed a law this year to promote demolition of the most dilapidated homes, but experts say the tide of newly emptied ones will be hard to stop.

“Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits,” said Tomohiko Makino, a real estate expert who has studied the vacant-house phenomenon. Once limited mostly to remote rural communities, it is now spreading through regional cities and the suburbs of major metropolises. Even in the bustling capital, the ratio of unoccupied houses is rising.

Yokosuka is on the front lines. Within commuting distance of Tokyo and close to naval bases and automobile factories, it attracted thousands of young job-seekers in the era of roaring economic growth that followed World War II. Land was scarce and expensive, so the newcomers built small, simple homes wherever they could.

Today the boom is relentlessly reversing itself. The young workers of the postwar years are now retirees, and few people, their children included, want to take over their homes. “Their kids are in modern high-rises in central Tokyo,” Mr. Makino said. “To them, the family home is a burden, not an asset.”

Japan’s birthrate has been stuck below the level needed to maintain the population since the 1970s, as young people postpone marriage and many women put off having children as they enter the work force.

The city of Yokosuka is trying to change that, by encouraging owners of abandoned houses to tidy them up and put them on the market. It has established an online “vacant home bank” to showcase houses that commercial real estate agents will not touch. Land prices in Yokosuka are down by 70 percent since their peak at the end of the 1980s.

The houses are a steal for the rare souls who will have them. But just one has been sold through the home bank so far, a 60-year-old single-story wooden home with a patch of garden that was listed for 660,000 yen, or $5,400. Places farther up the hill can be had for the equivalent of just a few hundred dollars. Four have been rented, including one to students in a nursing-care program at a nearby college who receive a discount in return for checking up on elderly people in the area.

Other towns have tried their own creative solutions, including offering cash payments to outsiders who move in and buy unoccupied homes. A few have succeeded in attracting pockets of artists and freelance workers, who stay tethered by the Internet to their urban clients.

There is even a sprawling art project, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, which has taken unoccupied buildings in a cluster of towns northwest of Tokyo and turned them into contemporary artworks. Visitors can spend the night in a “Dream House” designed by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, with coffin-like beds and tinted lights designed to elicit dreams, or tour other buildings that have been intricately carved, painted or filled with sculptural installations.

“They may not be used for their original purpose anymore, but preserving them physically is important,” said the project’s founder, Fram Kitagawa. “The key is to preserve them in a positive way.”

Raw numbers suggest there is a limit to how many homes can be rescued through reuse, however. Japan’s population of 127 million is expected to drop by a million a year in the coming decades. Efforts to increase its low birthrate have been only modestly successful, and the public has shown no appetite for mass immigration. “We have too much infrastructure,” said Takashi Onishi, an urban planning professor and the president of the Science Council of Japan. The government, he believes, will eventually have to cut services like water and road and bridge maintenance in the most depopulated areas. “We can’t maintain it all. We’ll have to make those hard choices.”

The most blunt solution for abandoned houses is to tear them down before they become hazards or their neighborhoods earn an irreversible reputation for blight. But owners can be hard to track down, and are often reluctant to pay demolition costs.

The house that Ms. Haneda tends is owned by the family of Mioko Utagawa, 74, who lives a 10-minute walk down the hill. Ms. Utagawa’s husband bought it for an aunt in the 1970s after she divorced and moved here from Tokyo. Now she is in a nursing home. The family has been paying her modest property taxes but has otherwise left the house alone. The interior is a musty wreck; a small addition that once housed the bath has been ripped out, and the bathtub sits upturned on the faithfully manicured lawn.

“Even if we fixed it up nobody would want it,” Ms. Utagawa said.

The Utagawas recently agreed to have the house demolished, after the city offered to subsidize the estimated 3 million yen cost, under a municipal program introduced last year to deal with hazardous or hopelessly unsellable homes. It is scheduled for destruction this fall. Noriyuki Shima, the director of the city’s planning department, said cost considerations meant the city was targeting only the worst-affected neighborhoods.

“Giving public money to demolish a private house isn’t something we can do lightly,” he said.

The new national law, which came into effect in May, could help more municipalities cull their vacant houses. Among other changes, it removed a perverse incentive that has contributed to the problem. A tax break introduced decades ago to encourage home construction sets property tax rates on vacant lots at six times the level of those on built-up land. That means that if an owner demolishes a home, the tax rate soars — a big reason many let even crumbling houses stand.

Now the government can revoke the preferential tax treatment for houses whose absentee owners are letting them fall apart. But some critics say Japan needs a more fundamental shift in its approach to housing, which has long prioritized new construction over reuse.

Hidetaka Yoneyama, a housing specialist at the Fujitsu Research Institute, a think tank, said that until recently, homes in Japan were built to last only about 30 years, when they were then expected to be torn down and rebuilt. Building quality is improving, but the market for secondhand homes remains tiny. Developers are still building more than 800,000 new homes and condominiums a year, despite the glut of vacancies.

“In the high-growth era, everyone was happy with this arrangement,” Mr. Yoneyama said. But in 20 years, he calculated, more than one-quarter of Japanese houses could be empty. “Now the tables are turned. The population is declining and no one wants to live in these old houses.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/world/a-sprawl-of-abandoned-homes-in-tokyo-suburbs.html
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The Whole Truth
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Bullshit Alert!

So we are supposed to believe that a piece of prime real estate in one the most crowded nations of earth (and a supposed wealthy one at that) is laying idle for years just because the population is falling?
I don't think so. I think a lot of those people in the hi rise's across the way would be dreaming of being able to afford a bit of land but the poverty in that once great nation prevents them.

The owner is probably holding out for a decent price. End of story.
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." John Stuart Mill
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Loki
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They should market these properties to Australian property investors.

There has never been a better time to buy in Japan! These houses are selling at under market price! Buy now or lose out!


“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” - Euripides
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Terry
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There are dilapidated properties in the some of the most expensive real estate areas of Tokyo such as Mita and Meguro, typically owned by people who refuse to sell give hell or high water. Nothing wrong with cities where people have choices to buy or rent based on their means without any "fear or missing out."
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Will
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The Whole Truth
25 Aug 2015, 05:33 PM
Bullshit Alert!

So we are supposed to believe that a piece of prime real estate in one the most crowded nations of earth (and a supposed wealthy one at that) is laying idle for years just because the population is falling?
I don't think so. I think a lot of those people in the hi rise's across the way would be dreaming of being able to afford a bit of land but the poverty in that once great nation prevents them.

The owner is probably holding out for a decent price. End of story.
Yes, well spotted. I probably would have bought the article hook, line and sinker.

One thing I noticed in the Ukraine was heaps of unused buildings of all shapes and sizes. Ukraine has lost quite of lot of population over the last 30 to 40 years.
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The Whole Truth
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This recent story is typical of the swill fed to the average investor. The article raves on and on but at no point does it mention any actual data showing an actual recovery in prices.

Japan's real estate market looking up as recovery continues

The outlook for the Japanese real estate market is positive even though the country is in recession.From the so-called “Abenomics” policy interventions to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the view among government representatives, investors and chartered surveyors is that the market is recovering from the 2008 global financial crisis and the earthquake the devastated much of the country in 2011.This emerged from a seminar held in London and hosted by the RICS, the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Bank Corporation (MUTB) and the Japan Real Estate Institute (JREI), both based in Japan.

http://www.rics.org/us/news/news-insight/comment/japans-real-estate-market-looking-up-as-recovery-continues/

Blame bear Stearns Leeman brothers an earthquake, anything but the actual truth, that an economy with no natural resources and that has been bypassed by other cheaper manufacturing bases, is out of the game permanently.
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." John Stuart Mill
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Gossamer
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Q. When a society shrinks, what should be done with the buildings it no longer needs?
A. Demolish anything that has no historical value and is worthless.
Common sense is a curse - those who have it need to suffer dealing with those who don't have it.

APF idiot list
Nelson
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Loki
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Gossamer
25 Aug 2015, 07:39 PM
Q. When a society shrinks, what should be done with the buildings it no longer needs?
A. Demolish anything that has no historical value and is worthless.
And who is going to pay for the demolition, cartage and disposal?

Anyhoo, property values double every 7-10 years, so how can they be worthless?


“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” - Euripides
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peter fraser
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Loki
25 Aug 2015, 10:07 PM
And who is going to pay for the demolition, cartage and disposal?

Anyhoo, property values double every 7-10 years, so how can they be worthless?
They don't have high value when supply exceeds demand. Australia will possibly face this problem next century.

Any expressed market opinion is my own and is not to be taken as financial advice
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Terry
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It's been highlighted before but the Chinese have been flocking to Japan to buy property. No different than anywhere else.

------------

Peter Peng, a Shanghai developer, is hoping to develop properties in Japan.

“I like Tokyo because its people are polite and homes are well kept,“ he said. Mr. Peng, who owns homes in San Francisco and Hong Kong, said he recently bought a $1.4 million three-bedroom apartment in Tokyo for investment.

An apartment in Tokyo is not just a trophy for rich Chinese. Those who are priced out of their home markets are looking at Tokyo for an opportunity to become a homeowner. Apartments in Tokyo’s suburbs start at $100,000, according to Mr. Yeung.

Each month, Mr. Yeung says clients from Hong Kong and China buy dozens of Japanese apartments or retail properties in Tokyo.

“One million Hong Kong dollars (US$129,000) can’t even buy you a parking lot in Hong Kong,” said Mr. Yeung. “But you can buy a 200-square-foot apartment in Tokyo and get HK$4,000 to HK$5,000 a month in rent.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-real-estate-buyers-turn-to-tokyo-1413488976
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