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Notes -
Housing in Japan isn't affordable. Houses are small, probably roughly half of the sqft you'd get in most of the U.S. for the same dollars (my "huge" house in the countryside that shocked my co-workers was just over 1400sqft and it had 4BR, lol). The construction quality is shit, very poor insulation, crappy building materials that degrade significantly in the first 10-20 years. And all this for the low prices of 30,000,000 to 45,000,000 JPY if you want something new, or 25,000,000 to 35,000,000 if you want something used. And get ready to live in a 1000sqft "house" with maybe 1-2 meters of "land" surrounding your house, if that. (Yes, even in the countryside -- they build houses 1 meter apart even in the midst of massive open spaces.) AND! You get to pay for it with your Japanese salary, which PPP-adjusted is worth about half of an American salary.
As for why this is, the most plausible reasons seem to be that
Brain drain to the cities is extreme and WFH hasn't taken off nearly as much -- most people are still trying to cram themselves into Tokyo
Home construction is a racket -- There are a handful of massive national level builders that sit on top of a truly insane byzantine network of contractors, sub contractors, and sub sub sub contractors so that building even with shitty materials becomes horribly expensive due to the sheer number of parties taking their cut. This also makes QC'ing your house nearly impossible because there's no single "contractor" to hold accountable, it's buck-passing all the way down
Penalties for sitting on land are very low -- the attitude towards owning property here seems to be "sit on it and hope you win the lottery." I personally know people who own land in the countryside and who have zero plans for it -- it's just there, it's costing almost nothing, and maybe someday someone will want to buy it, who knows? And of course there's the famous inheritance/ownership problem, where a piece of land gets passed down to half a dozen grandchildren, only some of them cannot be located (and might even be purposely avoiding being located in order to dodge taxes) so nothing can ever be legally done with the land and it just sits in limbo forever.
Interesting! Maybe it's time to take the "Japanese housing is cheap" idea out to the river and drown it.
What do you think of the previous discussion where we talked about a (shitty but functional) rental in Osaka going for $150/month?
I haven't seen that discussion, but it sounds possible. Places like that are usually exactly what you'd expect, some combination of:
Extremely small
Filthy and/or damaged
Old
Structurally dangerous (predating latest earthquake safety laws)
In a natural disaster high risk zone (flood/tsunami/landslide)
Terrible location (far from public transit, or next to factories/noisy train station/graveyard/sewage plant etc)
Tainted by association (usually a suicide or high profile crime)
Shitty neighbors (almost by definition)
$150/month might still seem outrageously low given the above, but I again have to emphasize that these are usually basically pod "apartments" that would probably violate building codes in the U.S. for being so small.
150/month for 'old pod in natural disaster zone' is still amazing tbh (provided you get a day or two's warning for the disasters, and just move to other pods).
Are there any good reasons such building codes should exist? There'd be a bunch of new requirements for the specific constraints such small apartments ofc, building codes in general are useful, but as far as I can tell generally prohibiting them is pure deadweight loss
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