13.5 Percent of the Japan’s Housing Stock Vacant or Abandoned
February 26th, 2016I’ve been interested in Japan since I was a child, but I’ve never been there. The closest I’ll probably ever get to Japan is looking around on Google Maps. I pick a random spot and use the Street View function to see what there is to see.
So right up front, this is my disclosure: I might know slightly more about Japan than the average person outside of Japan—in terms of its international relations and military situation—but that’s about it.
Ok, so back to looking around on Google Maps…
I started to notice pretty quickly that there were more than a few homes that seemed to be very poorly maintained, or abandoned altogether. It’s nothing like the wholesale collapse happening in a place like Detroit—not yet anyway. It’s more like the odd house is left to rot while others nearby are perfectly fine. (And no, I’m not talking about Fukushima.) I don’t feel comfortable about posting links to individual properties. I don’t want to potentially cause any problems with local authorities for the owners of these properties, even if the chance of such a thing happening is low. If you doubt that this is happening, however, it would not be hard for you to see it for yourself. Pick a semi rural area outside of Tokyo and go into Street View mode.
I’m embarrassed to admit that these abandoned properties reminded me just a bit of the endless post-collapse visions of Japan that have appeared in various anime for decades. But I’d move on in my little virtual Google Maps tour and think that it was just my imagination, coincidence, nothing-to-see-here. Minutes later, another house with a tree growing through the roof.
This is JAPAN! Land of bullet trains and the life sized Gundam. I don’t know what immediately comes to mind when people think of Japan, but I bet it’s not a large number of abandoned homes and other ruins.
Beyond the brilliant glow of Tokyo, is Japan crumbling?
Again, I don’t know, but here are a few links about what’s apparently happening there:
Japan’s Population Declines for First Time Since 1920s – Official Census
Abandoned Homes Haunt Japanese Neighborhoods
Japan Keeps This Train Station Running for Just One Regular Passenger
In Ageing Japanese Village, Dolls Take Place of Dwindling Population
A Sprawl of Ghost Homes in Aging Tokyo Suburbs
Abandoned Japan Blog (Also seems to have been abandoned.)
Via: CityLab:
When an aging population meets a low birth rate, an awful lot of housing gets left behind.
…
Between the mid-1990s and 2013, the number of vacant or abandoned properties in Japan doubled. These neglected structures now make up an estimated 13.5 percent of the country’s housing stock. The phenomenon of abandoned Japanese homes is so widespread that people have begun writing poetry about it. When the Tokyo Association of Housing and Land Investigators put out a call for satirical haikus on the topic, it received 4,000 responses. “Where we were born, vacant houses gather, for legacy’s sake,” read one. “Watch out! Earthquakes and Thunder! Burning Vacant Homes,” read another.
It’s as though the entire country is facing a U.S. Rust Belt-style population problem. “Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits,” one Japanese real estate expert told The New York Times in August. And like some Rust Belt cities, Japan has taken to dealing with it through legislation.
Passed in May 2015, Japan’s newest Vacant Housing Law is similar to moves in some shrinking U.S. cities that give government more latitude to enforce code violations and tear down structures that have become blighted and potentially dangerous. But the Japanese law’s real innovation, according to Peter Manda, a New Jersey-based fraud investigator with EY (formerly Ernst & Young) who’s working toward an advanced international law degree at Boston University, is its focus on creating a database that not only identifies vacant properties and their owners, but also helps bring those properties into public use.
In the current edition of Cityscape, the journal of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Manda analyzes Japan’s Vacant Housing Law with an eye toward the U.S. experience.
“They’re not just going in and razing the properties,” Manda tells CityLab. “They’re also turning these properties into municipal buildings and affordable housing.”
