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wuchan wrote:out here bike parking by the station is a money maker. 2,500 yen a month x 200 bikes = don't have to work.
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
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.
matsuki wrote: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.
Isn't this what it pretty much comes down to?
Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes
Coligny wrote:Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes
Whut ?
Samurai_Jerk wrote:Coligny wrote:Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes
Whut ?
It's called mottainai, motherfucker!
Now you remember that next time you buy a potato in a foam cozy that gets triple wrapped in paper before being taped inside a plastic bag at the register.
Coligny wrote:Samurai_Jerk wrote:Coligny wrote:Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes
Whut ?
It's called mottainai, motherfucker!
Now you remember that next time you buy a potato in a foam cozy that gets triple wrapped in paper before being taped inside a plastic bag at the register.
In my sticks if I want potatoes I go to autobacs where they give a free kilo with any car related purchase...
Or was it JM's ?
Samurai_Jerk wrote:
It's called mottainai, motherfucker!
Now you remember that next time you buy a potato in a foam cozy that gets triple wrapped in paper before being taped inside a plastic bag at the register.
kurogane wrote:They only give Cho coordinates, no banchi, and I am allegedly Busy working right now.........
I also find the 30,000, 000 yen ($300,000~ CAD!???) yen amount for a teardown to be high, but in those chockablock stairs only neighbourhoods ya never know, eh!?
Dibs on this one: https://www.city.yokosuka.kanagawa.jp/4 ... en222.html
kurogane wrote:So, did we find out where the Utagawa's neighbourhood is, and is it nice? It sounds like I could save a bundle buying one of those up the hill places and renting AirBnB occasionally.
EDIT: Yokosuka, yes???? OOooook. At least I could buy me some shoes that fit.
Gots it:
https://www.city.yokosuka.kanagawa.jp/4 ... t-top.html
OR THIS???
http://www.city.yokosuka.kanagawa.jp/48 ... odate.html
Not quite the bargoon shoppe that article made out. Seems more like New Town mid-80s crap for rent than mid Showa Lost Treasures to buy for an enka song
Russell wrote:What were these people thinking when they built it?
MrUltimateGaijin wrote:http://www.fudousan.or.jp/system/?act=d&pref=14&type=14&n=100&s=n&p=2&v=on&bid=01286813&org=ZT
Pardon my posting skills, but who, the fuck, is going to pay almost a hundred grand for that?
MrUltimateGaijin wrote:http://www.fudousan.or.jp/system/?act=d&pref=14&type=14&n=100&s=n&p=2&v=on&bid=01286813&org=ZT
Pardon my posting skills, but who, the fuck, is going to pay almost a hundred grand for that?
MrUltimateGaijin wrote:http://www.fudousan.or.jp/system/?act=d&pref=14&type=14&n=100&s=n&p=2&v=on&bid=01286813&org=ZT
Pardon my posting skills, but who, the fuck, is going to pay almost a hundred grand for that?
Samurai_Jerk wrote:MrUltimateGaijin wrote:http://www.fudousan.or.jp/system/?act=d&pref=14&type=14&n=100&s=n&p=2&v=on&bid=01286813&org=ZT
Pardon my posting skills, but who, the fuck, is going to pay almost a hundred grand for that?
You know you also pay for the land it's on, right?
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