The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city. If we look at the numbers for Tokyo 23 wards[1] (what would traditionally be called "the city"), we can see they are virtually half than those from Paris or London:
16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that falls in the median (50%) for Tokyo 23 wards[1]. Only 30% of houses have the minimum recommended of 25sqm/person (so, 70% live UNDER in under 25sqm/person). If the other cities in the graph are correct, that makes Tokyo median size around half of the average of those other cities[2].
So yes, definitely Tokyo housing is tiny. I know it since I live here and talk with people; when I invite someone who is not in tech to my place they all comment on how big my 37 sqm "house" (studio/single room) is, to which I can only agree and laugh/cry inside. I'm happy because I am well for living in Tokyo, but it's still a tiny place compared to my hometown where everyone lives like kings.
[2] I believe I'm using median/average correctly here, but happy for corrections! I check "at what sizes it's 50% of the # of households" and then took that measure. Sorry for mixing medians and averages, but I cannot calculate averages with the numbers I found.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience
I have friend living in Tokyo paying <10万円 in rent for a (very small) single unit. A couple other friends share a larger unit and pay similar per person. All are in the 23 wards. This is unimaginable for other friends living in Paris (one of the 20 Arrondissements) and New York (one of the 5 boroughs), regardless of size. I have no anecdata on London.
Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a small western apartment, or trying to save by bulk buying ingredients when you don't have the space to store it.
So I think the title of the article is half right (rent is cheaper than you'd think), missing some key info (wages are also cheaper than you'd think), half of it is roughly incorrect (housing is not any more spacious than you'd think), and the article itself doesn't back it up well.
550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo.
I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1 of London and "Yamanote area" in Tokyo, while New York 5 boroughs is a lot bigger and more comparable with 23 Wards. But anyway let's go with it, since at least it's much better than comparing it with Tokyo Metropolitan. With Airbnb (which is usually a lot more expensive than long-term rental) I can find a bunch of places for under 1k USD:
For London I could literally not find any, and for Tokyo also a bunch of places (you might notice that these are way further from the center than the area of Paris, but hey I said that was fair):
So it seems that London is particularly expensive, similar to Tokyo's Yamanote; while Paris 20 Arrondissements are at a similar place as Tokyo 23 wards.
Yes, the numbers are a bit skewed by the fact that more people live alone in Tokyo than Paris or NYC, but it's definitely true that you get more square meters per $ in Tokyo. Also, it is true that people on Tokyo on average earn less than NYC, London and Paris, but they also spend a smaller percentage of their total income on housing, so housing is cheaper in PPP terms too. I'll dig out the exact numbers tomorrow if anyone is interested, but now I'm out in one of Tokyo's extremely cheap bar districts having skewers and beers for less than $10
I lived 3 mins from Asagaya station (10 mins to Shinjuku) with my wife in a 23m2 apartment for 70k yen ($475) and loved it, very sunny apartment in a bustling neighborhood, tons of great street life, with everything I needed arranged very compactly. It requires an adjustment that location, not space, is the luxury (don’t invite friends over, go places with them). Probably part of why there are always so many people on the streets everywhere.
I lived in 250sqft with a shared bathroom in NYC for 2 years and loved it. Loved in 800 sqft in suburban America for 4 months and couldn’t handle it. In a big city with affordable Third Spaces you can simply live outside of your apartment.
I don't know about NY or Paris, but the comparison against London seems fair enough. They seem to be using a Tokyo metropolitan area of about 2000 km^2, and comparing it with Greater London at 1572 km^2.
And indeed, people throughout Greater London are entirely used to living in small, damp, shared boxes.
The geography of the "cities" is very different though (look at the density of population maps provided), where "Tokyo Metropolitan" is one third pure mountains, then one third low-density living (think L.A.) and then one third what people normally thinks of the city of Tokyo, all of these in a sausage-like shape, while "Greater London" grows in a circle and so it's a circle-ish area.
See this image with the labels, we should compare the green one instead of the 3 of them. Ideally "Tokyo" would be something more like the purple one, but the purple one is nothing. So we have "23 wards" (green), or Tokyo Metropolitan (the 3 together), neither of which is the best comparison, but def the green one vs London is much better than all of them (the purple dashes are how I think London would look like approx):
I’ve had the good fortune to visit Tokyo several times, and visited a few apartments of friends who have regular middle class jobs: animators, cooks, tailors. Every apartment was tiny. Like less than half the size of any apartment I've ever lived in at any point of my life living in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I’ve stayed many times with a friend whose father is a well-known Japanese movie actor and even they live in a house which would be modest by any US suburban standard, in a quiet part of a nice neighborhood (kichijoji) but still an 8-10 minute walk to trains and very bustling, active parts of town.
The thing I’ve found remarkable with Tokyo is how walkable it is and how, despite how crowded and dense it can seem, the street level experience can feel very accessible and not at all overwhelming. Many good parks, walking paths and general accommodations for people not in cars.
I'm sure you've researched this and sure some apartments in Tokyo are small. I'd like to touch upon the big-house comment, though. It may be that your Japanese friends say that simply because it is polite, and very common, thing to say when you visit someone's house for the first time.
Thanks for the additional info, I found it a rather terrible article. Even taking its numbers at face value, it makes me sad for non-Americans. The difference between the NY average of 43 sqm vs the rest is essentially an extra room.
When I thought I was going to be living in Tokyo for work for a couple of years, I had started to spend some significant time looking for places to rent, and yeah - I had to go out to Saitama or Chiba to find anything that I would be comfortable living in without paying absurd prices.
Which, honestly, wasn't the worst. 40 minutes to an hour on the JR is 10-30 minutes more than my current commute, but I could have dealt with that in exchange for more space.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city.
Yep. In that case half of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey etc. should count as well.
Should also be noted that Tokyo is one of the few major metropolises in the world where the price of housing has not meaningfully increased in real terms since 2000[1]. The Japanese constitution drastically limits zoning, building and land use restrictions. As a result the city of Tokyo builds more new housing than all of California or England.[2]
(And no, this isn't because of Japan's demographics. While Japan as a whole is stagnating, the population of Tokyo is still increasing as fast as London, New York or the Bay Area because of high rural to urban migration.)
Tokyo is very much proof that NIMBY reforms are the solution to the housing crisis in the West. Deregulating the ability of property developers to build new housing will incontrevirtibly increase supply, blunt runaway housing costs, and make dense cities with high economic opportunity affordable for the middle class.
This is my random personal post: Last weekend, while riding my bicyle between Shinjuku station and Shinagawa station, I was stunned by the density of buildings on major roads. It felt like a one hour bicycle ride surounded by non-stop 10-story buildings... forever(!). My point: A 10-story building is not impressive, but 500 of them on the same road is incredible. The wall of concrete is hard to understand in Tokyo before you see it with your own eyes.
Dutchies/Belgies: Is anywhere similar where you live?
California: 1 new home per 354 citizens per year (confirmed using primary US government sources).
Tokyo "city": 1 new home per 96 citizens per year (unconfirmed but reasonable).
Tokyo "metro": 1 new home per 113 citizens per year (confirmed using primary Japanese government sources)
I figured it would compare best if we translated this to "per capita" form. Eyeballing the FRED source[3], looks like California permits 8,000-10,000 new home units per month, or 110,000 per year for a state of 39 million people. This has been (relatively) stable for quite a few years.
The sightline blog quotes WSJ which asserted that Tokyo city built 145,000 new homes in 2018. I was unable to find the source for the WSJ claims -- sightline.org claims that this is just the Tokyo City, not metropolitan, but WSJ makes no such distinction (conclusion is uncertain). However we do have some contextual numbers:
Japan added 942,000 housing starts in 2018 according to Statista[0], whose numbers for 2020 and 2021 perfect match Japanese government numbers[1]. So "Tokyo's" housing starts accounted for 15% of national housing starts. 11% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "city" and 29% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "metro". Additionally, Tokyo "metro" ("National Capital Region" - 首 都 圏) added 327,128 homes in 2018[2], and this has also been relatively stable year-to-year. So "145,000" seems reasonable at least.
> California: 1 new home per 354 citizens per year (confirmed using primary US government sources).
> Tokyo "city": 1 new home per 96 citizens per year (unconfirmed but reasonable).
Are those using the same definition of new home?
According to comments on previous discussions here about housing in Japan, which a bit of Googling seems to corroborate, houses in Japan tend to depreciate with houses becoming worthless in 20 to 30 years. When the owner moves out the new owner often demolishes the old house and builds a new one on the lot.
That's much less common in the US.
To compare to new homes in the US you'd probably not want to count new houses in Japan that are replacements for a recently demolished 20 to 30 year old houses. You'd only want to count new houses that increase the available housing.
>(And no, this isn't because of Japan's demographics. While Japan as a whole is stagnating, the population of Tokyo is still increasing as fast as London, New York or the Bay Area because of high rural to urban migration.)
Tokyo had negative population growth in 2022 and is forecasted to continue decreasing in population. That said, these differences existed before Tokyo's population stagnated.
>Tokyo had negative population growth in 2022 and is forecasted to continue decreasing in population.
Any such forecasts you can take with a giant heap of salt. 2022 is this year, and isn't even over yet, and is on the tail end of a worldwide pandemic. Many people have moved away from urban cores because of the rise of WFH. Now, according to the news, many companies in the US at least are cracking down on this and demanding workers come back to the office, so it's anyone's guess what housing trends in cities, including Tokyo, will be in the next 5 years.
Even though everyone wants to live in Tokyo, the same is true for hit real estate markets in other countries that it is being compared to. We aren’t comparing Tokyo to Duluth.
Lack of building codes like must have central heat or must have bathroom also can bring housing prices down.
Do you actually think the comment you replied to was complaining about requirements like central heat or bathrooms? NIMBYs will trot out every excuse and misdirection to avoid addressing the dire shortage of housing. This anti-growth mindset is a philosophy of death. I suspect that deep down, many want the world to end with them and are actually sabotaging efforts to solve societal issues out of some sort of Freudian death-drive.
Tokyo's building codes do require bathrooms. Plus minimum sunshine for a room to count as a bedroom, along with shutters on all windows.
What caught my eye about your comment is central heating. Japan in fact penalizes central heating. Not just not requiring it but going so far as to increase property taxes slightly.
In Japan's case it is a desire to reduce energy intensity in a country dependent on energy imports.
The article makes a major mistake: it uses Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to, basically "Tokyo State", area 2,194.07 km2) for comparisons, not central Tokyo (23-ku, aka the former Tokyo City, area 619 km2). So it's basically the same as saying houses in New York are much larger than those in Paris, because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.
> Even more striking is that more people in Tokyo live in detached houses compared to apartments (30%) than in New York (16.3%) and Paris (12.3%).
I'm pretty sure this "striking" fact is an artifact of including a whole lotta suburbs, exurbs and farms in the Tokyo stats. Very few people live in detached houses within the 23-ku.
TL;DR: Housing in greater Tokyo is indeed affordable, but as anyone who's seen a "one-room mansion" (read: tiny studio) can attest, it's rarely spacious.
If you view page 6 and 7, you'll see why these numbers are largely irrelevant since the boundaries for all the "cities" except NYC (which is the 5 boroughs) include the large swathes of suburbs/exurbs around the city.
A study looking at 23-wards vs Inner London vs City of Paris would be a lot more informative.
BTW, the writer of the article seems to simply be using these numbers to push his view that real estate prices will continue to go up in Tokyo. Housing Japan, a Japanese real estate agency that caters to foreign investors shows pricing for apartments in the 23 wards have been on a pretty crazy upwards trajectory [1], but 1) this is denominated in JPY pricing, and the exchange rate has tanked by 35% vs USD this past year, and of course, I'd be much more interested in seeing that post revisited in 2023...
New York "metro" is always tricky. All of New Jersey, southern Connecticut, Staten Island, the Bronx, outer Brooklyn, outer Queens: Who the hell cares. Yes, I will be down-voted for this comment! My point: Defining inner city NYC that is wealthy requires some care and consideration. All the interesting "real estate action" happens in a very small radius from midtown Manhattan.
JPY is poised for an astronomical fall. The government cannot both keep servicing debt and buoying the currency . Those houses will appreciate in value JPY denominated and crater in terms of USD.
> because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.
But isn't the entire Tokyo Metropolis under an hour by mass transit? That's a far cry from Buffalo. Like, Buffalo cannot commute to NYC by anything other than private aircraft.
Technically Tokyo Metropolis includes some islands several hours by plane south of Tokyo, including Iwo Jima of WW2 fame. Their combined population is only a rounding error compared to the mainland though.
I don't have numbers, but I doubt that 12.3% of people living in Paris proper (the 20 arrondissements) live in detached houses. Yes, there are villas in the city, but they're extremely rare. I don't see them housing more than 1 in 10 people.
Aren’t the backstreets of the less central ku filled with houses? I mean Setagaya, Ota, Edogawa, Adachi, Suginami, etc.
I used to pick stations at random to arrive at and explore, and what I always saw was endless houses. Only the areas closer to bigger stations had manshon.
I think you might be conflating Shibuya/Roppongi/Shinjuku with less central parts of the 23 special wards.
even in Shinjuku there are cheap houses if you look. My friend rents an old house with renovated interior in Shimoochiai for what I thought was surprisingly cheap
Those are huge wards by themselves. There are plenty of busy as well as residential places. For example, Setagaya-ku - stations like Sangenjaya, Jiyugaoka or Futakotamagawa are far cry from the quiet residential areas. There's a lot of any kind of housing there - bigger, smaller, houses and mansions alike.
And the apartment as a comparison to houses doesn't help much, as Japanese houses tend to be smaller than western. Source is me, I've been living in Japan for over 10 years now.
Western being what exactly? Houses are rarely spacious in a lot of what qualifies as 'west'. You can't compare The Netherlands and Belgium with Germany, let alone the US.
Okutama, Tokyo is part of "Tokyo Metropolis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okutama,_Tokyo . The furthest I've been is Hachioji, which was about 1 hour by train from 23-ku. Hachioji is roughly half as far as Okutama. In New York City terms, getting to Hicksville, NY takes about 1 hour by train. For Bay Area folks, both Dublin / Pleasanton and Bay Point / Pittsburg ... or even Antioch are about an hour away by BART.
Not fair comparison, Okutama is literally in the middle of a mountain range with no much around, but you can get there combining a bunch of express trains in a very straightforward combination, which seems pretty hand-picked. Hicksville to NYC is 56km by car. Okutama from Tokyo Station is 96km.
> it uses Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to, basically "Tokyo State", area 2,194.07 km2) for comparisons, not central Tokyo (23-ku, aka the former Tokyo City, area 619 km2). So it's basically the same as saying houses in New York are much larger than those in Paris, because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.
As others have said, difference between NYC and NYS is much much larger than that...
But for reference, Ottawa, Canada, is one of the largest cities in Canada by area at 2778 km^2. But the Greater Toronto Area, what many call "Toronto", is ~7000km^2 and only has ~6 million people...
Toronto proper is only 630km^2, with 3 million people. The scale here is reasonable, Tokyo has excellent transportation options that make it realistic to live anywhere in that region.
Your point that we have to be careful about the basis of comparison is well-taken, but your analogy is not sound. New York state is 141,000 km2, it's over 1/3 the size of all of Japan.
Can confirm. Three years ago I spent 2 months in a furnished two bedroom apartment two stops away from Shinjuku - paid $1,500 / month. Had three different subway stations within ~7 min walk each. Great location, very inexpensive.
The company I used is Fontana - English speaking, they set up gas/electric/water and all I had to do was pay for them at the convenience store nearby (7 Eleven). The only requirement is a 2-month minimum stay. Will do again.
Paris, London and New York - the key points of comparison - aren’t exactly known for their spacious housing.
One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more than you can say for New York) but clearly nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside. And I’ve never seen more miserable public parks in a developed country.
I’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983 and am as much of a Tokyo fan as they get, and I readily acknowledge how ugly Japanese cities are in general. But after buying a house here twenty-three years ago, and comparing my experience with those of houseowners I know in the U.S., I have started to see some beauty in that ugliness.
Many of the people I know in the U.S. live in attractive neighborhoods full of nice-looking houses and well-kept front yards. While some of that niceness is due to the owners’ own initiative, much is the result of zoning restrictions, homeowner association rules, and the like.
The only zoning restrictions on my house in Yokohama are limits on total floorspace and land coverage and fire and earthquake rules covering building design and materials. I can paint my house any color I want, pile whatever junk I want in my (tiny) yard, and hang whatever laundry I want from the balconies, and no one can or will say anything about it.
As a result of this tolerant, low-regulation regime, the neighborhood I live in is, like most neighborhoods here, an unattractive mish-mash of mismatched houses and apartments in many styles and states of upkeep. If that’s the price of (relative) freedom, I’m happy to pay it.
First, it's not clean, it's just different way of unclean and only during certain periods of the day. But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.
On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
"Nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside" => completely agree, my pet peeve here is that one of the best towns geographically speaking of Japan is probably the ugliest town I've seen in my life in a 1st world country (Kawaguchiko, with the beautiful lake, lush forest and Fuji San nearby).
"never seen more miserable public parks" again have to agree, the median local park is taken out of a horror movie. Though there are* a bunch of very, very beautiful ones!
> On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
Last time I visited Tokyo in 2016 there was clearly an encampment at the Ueno park. And that wasn’t the first time I saw an encampment in Japan (visiting Tokyo in 2008 I saw a few in Tokyo and Osaka). However, Japanese homeless encampments are always very clean and well organized. It’s a completely different feel from the states (even if they definitely exist).
> But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.
Apart from the worst parts of Roppongi on a Monday morning, I have never ever seen this.
Ugliness is subjective. Tokyo is varied but to me that's generally nicer and more interesting than uniformity. I don't think there's any part of Tokyo that looks as bad as the Barbican or the Brunswick, and to me the endless rows of identical beach-hut-style houses in San Francisco were far grimmer than Tokyo. YMMV I guess.
I'm not a huge fan of the look of the gravel parks, but every kid having a nearby park that they actually use beats a handful of parks that look nice, IMO. And it's not like Tokyo doesn't have big beautiful parks as well.
You folks ought to spend some time in Taiwan. I'm in Tokyo now, was in TW for a couple of years prior. Tokyo is extremely beautiful in comparison. (I'm Taiwanese Canadian)
Not just Tokyo, but the whole of Japan. I live in Aomori, I have traveled quite a bit around the country, and I haven't seen yet a single city that wasn't extremely ugly. I have asked many Japanese people, and they just don't care.
I live in and love Japan, and after many years have also gotten used to the general ugliness and just enjoy the beautiful parts when I can, but turning off the Japanese filter I’ve developed, good god this is so true.
As someone being in Tokyo right now chatting with locals about this topic it's just not generally true or comparable to other cities.
Sure there are parts of Tokyo that are cheaper, but Tokyo is gigantic. All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.
Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners. The cheaper accommodations are not going to be available especially if tenant isn't fluent in the language.
> All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.
I live 3 minutes commute to Shibuya, and my rent is half my rent in an outer borough of NYC. Brand new lofty unit designed by a famous architect. Space efficiency-wise, it's equal if not greater. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison to just look at floorspace, since Japan has lots of infrastructure such as actually convenient stores which means people don't need to own as much household items.
> Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners.
Yes, you need to bring someone who is fluent to sign papers, but if you have residence with a visa that's greater than 2 years, there's no real difference. Most foreigners have their company, or their school do the actual paperwork, as well.
If your visa is less than two (and in some cases three) years, then yeah, you're going to need a gaijin apartment, and they're a lot more expensive.
I live in fujisawa, takes me about 30 minutes to get to Yokohama which is pretty damn major.
House prices here are quite reasonable, nice distance to the ocean for the weekends. I'm considering buying and building a house in the next year or two.
I'm 3 minutes from the Chidoya line, and 10 minutes from the Yamanote. I live in a 95sqm apartment, with a private garden, and it's cheaper than the rent controlled apartment that I had in SF (which was roughly the same size, and I had rent control for 10 years).
These often use average rents paid today. They tend to be much lower than average rents if you rent a home today.
One of the main reasons why older people seem to think millennials are complaining about nothing: they locked in their rental rates back in the last millennia, and the laws generally only allow low-single-digit increases per year
Yeah, a more accurate measurement would be "baseline + X" - you don't really need to go above the average household size, but you can fit people in way denser than 25m^2 (270 sq ft) if they share common areas. The average dorm room is 230 sq ft (with a roommate!) but the dorm provides common areas and other amenities.
Another thing to consider when comparing countries is what is considered "living space" and what is not - some areas have large porches that are not considered "living space" even though they serve similar functions to what a living room might in other parts of the world.
It depends on how you measure those 25m^2; I lived in a studio in Copenhagen for a while and my 25m^2 included the common areas / roof garden etc. Private space was around 16-20m^2, and I am being generous here.
There's a lot of space needed in an apartment for "overhead" stuff: kitchen sink/counter, refrigerator, toilet, tub/shower, powder room sink, washing machine, entryway, etc. Going from a tiny 1DK to a massive 3LDK doesn't change the overhead requirements much; those extra 75 m^2 are mostly usable space.
The 4 person example has a lot more usable space though, since you're sharing common space. You're not adding 3 more kitchens. Or 3 more laundry areas. Or 3 more bathrooms (maybe 1). Or 3 more living rooms.
The 270 ft² space might have 100 ft² usable area, but the 1076 ft² could have 700 ft² usable.
Agree - I moved from 40m2 alone to 60m2 with my wife, and the experience is much better. We still have one sink, one toilet, one bathtub, one washing machine. Her space takes up maybe 10m2. The free walking-around space probably went from 5m2 to 25m2.
> the tallest building in Tokyo is only 255 meters
There is a hotel in this tower (called Andaz) and it has a proper swimming pool on the 37th floor. Quite an jaw-dropping experience on its own, but doubly so during an earthquake.
A peculiarity of renting in Japan (not mentioned in the article): you often need to advance a substantial amount of money upon starting a lease. It varies but a rule of thumb is about 5 months of rent. Part of it is advanced rent, but some is non-recoverable (key money, brokerage fee, insurance, cleaning fee...). Contracts are often two years, and at the end of it you typically have a renewal fee as well, at around a month of rent.
Outside of either aggressive capitalist desire to continuously lower wages or some groups wanting to destroy Japanese culture, I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.
A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.
We see in the animal kingdom the predator-prey cycle that population takes care of itself. When there's too many rabbits or deer, there's no cause for concern: the plentiful food supply means that wolves and foxes will be able to reproduce more and take care of the situation. When there's too many wolves/foxes and the situation reverses, the scarce food supply means that the predators aren't able to flourish and the rabbits and deer are able to reproduce more.
I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
> A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.
Population density is not homogenous. Excluding pandemic era, the trend has been decreasing population density in the countryside and smaller cities, while more population moves to the big cities. In general, population size need not correlate for the average persons lived population density.
> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.
> I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.
This is generally because the population is not stabilizing, it’s on the verge of collapsing. If fertility rate rises “naturally” in the future, as you suggest, then it’s obviously not an issue. But maintaining a 1.3 or lower fertility rate indefinitely will result in an exponential decay of population which could itself result in a decline of living standards. For example, if the population decreases too much to support a high speed rail system so these are abandoned as unprofitable.
>> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
>This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.
In South Korea, young people are struggling to find affordable places to live, to the extent that many people live with their parents well into their 30ies. Coincidently, they also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
In my city, I see a lot of people who first build a house or buy an appartement, and then have kids, in their 30ies, because they can't afford a big enough place before that.
As housing prices rise everywhere, it takes longer and longer for people to be able to afford a place big enough for a family. Of course people then delay having kids, and many end up not having kids at all.
GDP can’t go up without strong reproduction and/or immigration. The economy stagnates and government debt becomes massive, which is what you see with Japan.
The scary thing is that this is something the USA and lots of other countries are headed towards as well.
GDP can grow with a stable population if your Real gross domestic product per capita is growing which it has been for the USA [0]. Japans has barely grown for the past 30 years which is their big problem [1].
The birth rate is so low around the world that we may see peak population by 2060 (worst case) and then an exponential decline. Quality of life will decrease as the number of old people drastically out numbers the young people.
I dont know how accurate this report is, but i do wish western europe was as well organised and clean as japan. Many, if not all, west european capitals are a mess with poor living conditions with no signs of improvement.
An outlier indeed. Still feels a bit boring, but it ticks all the marks in my initial comment. I think europe strayed far from its path. We should look at japan and east asia (singapore, south korea) and reflect on why they look so much more advanced and well maintained compared to our countries.
I'm looking at buying next year. Unlike where I'm from (New Zealand) property in Tokyo is better quality (although that's not really difficult) and dare I say cheaper.
That's a stretch and it is hard to get a home loan in your first years. It is true that when searching for a rental you will probably come across landlords that don't rent to foreigners, and more that won't rent to Chinese people. Many landlords also expect you to speak at least some Japanese.
That being said, it's competitive only for average sized/priced places. Both low end and above-average properties are easier to rent.
For a data point: (admittedly, barely) inside Tokyo 23 wards, 15 min walk to nearest station, 70 sqm (753 sqft) 3LDK (3 bedrooms and a living-dining-kitchen). 140000 jpy / month. (945 usd at the current rate.) I think it's a reasonable deal. Less or similar than I would pay for a similar flat in my native Helsinki, Finland.
These statistics would be much more useful if the median had been used for prices and floor areas. These are both long tailed distributions, so the average is skewed. I would wager many of the “unexpected” results are due to this effect.
if you can't even tell where Tokyo and Osaka are on your maps, you probably shouldn't publish articles about Japan. Who knows what other numbers or diagrams are wrong there...
Older cities have a lot of legacy issues that manifest in multiple ways. Housing is one of them. Solving the problem is hard since the cities can't be re-planned and rebuilt.
The standard rental contract in Japan is not 1-year, but 2-years. For these engagements, as with employment, it's about consistency, predictability and long-term commitment.
One-month is ultra-short by Japanese standards. The rental inventory is distinct from regular apartments. This is effectively a hotel.
Kinda, it's 2 years but you can usually leave anytime after 6 months with no fee. After 2 years you need to sign a new contract, which means new fees etc
there is a maps-and-data company in Berkeley, California (urban planners) that maintains detailed and mostly-current information on occupancy for all of California; both renters and homes; unending policy battles behind-the-scenes about covid-19 and eviction very much at the fore. (trivia it is in the same physical building as the old After Dark screensaver company, so long ago)
That’s slightly larger that my very expensive apartment in Paris proper. I moved there from a bigger place when I broke up years ago and I’m surprised by how liveable it is. It’s not big but it’s mostly fine. For the time I spent there it seems like a good deal. Working from home was annoying when it was mandatory however.
Every time these articles come up I think about what a shafting people in Japan are taking on property and why western media want to write articles lying about it to the public. Japanese property is tiny by any metric compared to western property; maybe there are some rich people who would like to remove housing regulations and make more money selling crap tiny plastic homes to people at absurd valuations…
Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration? I've only been to Japan once, but I noticed how they're very formal compared to the various EU countries.
I keep meeting people who move to Appalachia and not register that the things that made it attractive (low crime etc) won't stay that way if people keep talking to me like I'm literally retarded.
(Every time someone tells me "I work in technology or whatever as I walk to get my espresso, I want to say "Great! Enjoy locking down your house like my South African neighbor told me they had to during apartheid, I've had too many of these conversations where the person was speaking in bad faith.")
> Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration?
Permanent Residency is helpful towards procuring a mortgage, but you don't need a visa to buy property in Japan. Non-resident cash buyers had no problem pushing up the real estate market in Vancouver, Canada.
The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city. If we look at the numbers for Tokyo 23 wards[1] (what would traditionally be called "the city"), we can see they are virtually half than those from Paris or London:
16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that falls in the median (50%) for Tokyo 23 wards[1]. Only 30% of houses have the minimum recommended of 25sqm/person (so, 70% live UNDER in under 25sqm/person). If the other cities in the graph are correct, that makes Tokyo median size around half of the average of those other cities[2].
So yes, definitely Tokyo housing is tiny. I know it since I live here and talk with people; when I invite someone who is not in tech to my place they all comment on how big my 37 sqm "house" (studio/single room) is, to which I can only agree and laugh/cry inside. I'm happy because I am well for living in Tokyo, but it's still a tiny place compared to my hometown where everyone lives like kings.
[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-sp...
[2] I believe I'm using median/average correctly here, but happy for corrections! I check "at what sizes it's 50% of the # of households" and then took that measure. Sorry for mixing medians and averages, but I cannot calculate averages with the numbers I found.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience
I have friend living in Tokyo paying <10万円 in rent for a (very small) single unit. A couple other friends share a larger unit and pay similar per person. All are in the 23 wards. This is unimaginable for other friends living in Paris (one of the 20 Arrondissements) and New York (one of the 5 boroughs), regardless of size. I have no anecdata on London.
Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a small western apartment, or trying to save by bulk buying ingredients when you don't have the space to store it.
So I think the title of the article is half right (rent is cheaper than you'd think), missing some key info (wages are also cheaper than you'd think), half of it is roughly incorrect (housing is not any more spacious than you'd think), and the article itself doesn't back it up well.
I never mentioned anything about prices though :)
550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo.
I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1 of London and "Yamanote area" in Tokyo, while New York 5 boroughs is a lot bigger and more comparable with 23 Wards. But anyway let's go with it, since at least it's much better than comparing it with Tokyo Metropolitan. With Airbnb (which is usually a lot more expensive than long-term rental) I can find a bunch of places for under 1k USD:
https://imgur.com/a/FIODYlo
For London I could literally not find any, and for Tokyo also a bunch of places (you might notice that these are way further from the center than the area of Paris, but hey I said that was fair):
https://imgur.com/a/0XEvBcT
So it seems that London is particularly expensive, similar to Tokyo's Yamanote; while Paris 20 Arrondissements are at a similar place as Tokyo 23 wards.
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Yes, the numbers are a bit skewed by the fact that more people live alone in Tokyo than Paris or NYC, but it's definitely true that you get more square meters per $ in Tokyo. Also, it is true that people on Tokyo on average earn less than NYC, London and Paris, but they also spend a smaller percentage of their total income on housing, so housing is cheaper in PPP terms too. I'll dig out the exact numbers tomorrow if anyone is interested, but now I'm out in one of Tokyo's extremely cheap bar districts having skewers and beers for less than $10
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I lived 3 mins from Asagaya station (10 mins to Shinjuku) with my wife in a 23m2 apartment for 70k yen ($475) and loved it, very sunny apartment in a bustling neighborhood, tons of great street life, with everything I needed arranged very compactly. It requires an adjustment that location, not space, is the luxury (don’t invite friends over, go places with them). Probably part of why there are always so many people on the streets everywhere.
I lived in 250sqft with a shared bathroom in NYC for 2 years and loved it. Loved in 800 sqft in suburban America for 4 months and couldn’t handle it. In a big city with affordable Third Spaces you can simply live outside of your apartment.
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10万円 = 100,000 yen, which is about:
USD 675.18
EURO 683.40
GBP 588.43
For anyone who is interested but too lazy to search
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I don't know about NY or Paris, but the comparison against London seems fair enough. They seem to be using a Tokyo metropolitan area of about 2000 km^2, and comparing it with Greater London at 1572 km^2.
And indeed, people throughout Greater London are entirely used to living in small, damp, shared boxes.
The geography of the "cities" is very different though (look at the density of population maps provided), where "Tokyo Metropolitan" is one third pure mountains, then one third low-density living (think L.A.) and then one third what people normally thinks of the city of Tokyo, all of these in a sausage-like shape, while "Greater London" grows in a circle and so it's a circle-ish area.
See this image with the labels, we should compare the green one instead of the 3 of them. Ideally "Tokyo" would be something more like the purple one, but the purple one is nothing. So we have "23 wards" (green), or Tokyo Metropolitan (the 3 together), neither of which is the best comparison, but def the green one vs London is much better than all of them (the purple dashes are how I think London would look like approx):
https://imgur.com/a/nCmkE80
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I’ve had the good fortune to visit Tokyo several times, and visited a few apartments of friends who have regular middle class jobs: animators, cooks, tailors. Every apartment was tiny. Like less than half the size of any apartment I've ever lived in at any point of my life living in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I’ve stayed many times with a friend whose father is a well-known Japanese movie actor and even they live in a house which would be modest by any US suburban standard, in a quiet part of a nice neighborhood (kichijoji) but still an 8-10 minute walk to trains and very bustling, active parts of town.
The thing I’ve found remarkable with Tokyo is how walkable it is and how, despite how crowded and dense it can seem, the street level experience can feel very accessible and not at all overwhelming. Many good parks, walking paths and general accommodations for people not in cars.
I'm sure you've researched this and sure some apartments in Tokyo are small. I'd like to touch upon the big-house comment, though. It may be that your Japanese friends say that simply because it is polite, and very common, thing to say when you visit someone's house for the first time.
Thanks for the additional info, I found it a rather terrible article. Even taking its numbers at face value, it makes me sad for non-Americans. The difference between the NY average of 43 sqm vs the rest is essentially an extra room.
When I thought I was going to be living in Tokyo for work for a couple of years, I had started to spend some significant time looking for places to rent, and yeah - I had to go out to Saitama or Chiba to find anything that I would be comfortable living in without paying absurd prices.
Which, honestly, wasn't the worst. 40 minutes to an hour on the JR is 10-30 minutes more than my current commute, but I could have dealt with that in exchange for more space.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city.
Yep. In that case half of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey etc. should count as well.
It is the price one has to pay for living in the city and being fashionable.
I see this in Amsterdam: rich expats who barely grasp that there is a country outside the city.
If they are considering Tokyo Metropolis, they might be including Ogasawara, which is 1000km from downtown Tokyo.
Should also be noted that Tokyo is one of the few major metropolises in the world where the price of housing has not meaningfully increased in real terms since 2000[1]. The Japanese constitution drastically limits zoning, building and land use restrictions. As a result the city of Tokyo builds more new housing than all of California or England.[2]
(And no, this isn't because of Japan's demographics. While Japan as a whole is stagnating, the population of Tokyo is still increasing as fast as London, New York or the Bay Area because of high rural to urban migration.)
Tokyo is very much proof that NIMBY reforms are the solution to the housing crisis in the West. Deregulating the ability of property developers to build new housing will incontrevirtibly increase supply, blunt runaway housing costs, and make dense cities with high economic opportunity affordable for the middle class.
[1]https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-... [2]https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-...
This is my random personal post: Last weekend, while riding my bicyle between Shinjuku station and Shinagawa station, I was stunned by the density of buildings on major roads. It felt like a one hour bicycle ride surounded by non-stop 10-story buildings... forever(!). My point: A 10-story building is not impressive, but 500 of them on the same road is incredible. The wall of concrete is hard to understand in Tokyo before you see it with your own eyes.
Dutchies/Belgies: Is anywhere similar where you live?
California: 1 new home per 354 citizens per year (confirmed using primary US government sources).
Tokyo "city": 1 new home per 96 citizens per year (unconfirmed but reasonable).
Tokyo "metro": 1 new home per 113 citizens per year (confirmed using primary Japanese government sources)
I figured it would compare best if we translated this to "per capita" form. Eyeballing the FRED source[3], looks like California permits 8,000-10,000 new home units per month, or 110,000 per year for a state of 39 million people. This has been (relatively) stable for quite a few years.
The sightline blog quotes WSJ which asserted that Tokyo city built 145,000 new homes in 2018. I was unable to find the source for the WSJ claims -- sightline.org claims that this is just the Tokyo City, not metropolitan, but WSJ makes no such distinction (conclusion is uncertain). However we do have some contextual numbers:
Japan added 942,000 housing starts in 2018 according to Statista[0], whose numbers for 2020 and 2021 perfect match Japanese government numbers[1]. So "Tokyo's" housing starts accounted for 15% of national housing starts. 11% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "city" and 29% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "metro". Additionally, Tokyo "metro" ("National Capital Region" - 首 都 圏) added 327,128 homes in 2018[2], and this has also been relatively stable year-to-year. So "145,000" seems reasonable at least.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/667913/japan-dwellings-c...
1: https://www5.cao.go.jp/keizai3/getsurei-e/2022sep/4.pdf
2: https://www.lij.jp/pub_f/monthly_data/2019_11.pdf (p. 35, 4th column)
3: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B0kN
> California: 1 new home per 354 citizens per year (confirmed using primary US government sources).
> Tokyo "city": 1 new home per 96 citizens per year (unconfirmed but reasonable).
Are those using the same definition of new home?
According to comments on previous discussions here about housing in Japan, which a bit of Googling seems to corroborate, houses in Japan tend to depreciate with houses becoming worthless in 20 to 30 years. When the owner moves out the new owner often demolishes the old house and builds a new one on the lot.
That's much less common in the US.
To compare to new homes in the US you'd probably not want to count new houses in Japan that are replacements for a recently demolished 20 to 30 year old houses. You'd only want to count new houses that increase the available housing.
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>(And no, this isn't because of Japan's demographics. While Japan as a whole is stagnating, the population of Tokyo is still increasing as fast as London, New York or the Bay Area because of high rural to urban migration.)
Tokyo had negative population growth in 2022 and is forecasted to continue decreasing in population. That said, these differences existed before Tokyo's population stagnated.
>Tokyo had negative population growth in 2022 and is forecasted to continue decreasing in population.
Any such forecasts you can take with a giant heap of salt. 2022 is this year, and isn't even over yet, and is on the tail end of a worldwide pandemic. Many people have moved away from urban cores because of the rise of WFH. Now, according to the news, many companies in the US at least are cracking down on this and demanding workers come back to the office, so it's anyone's guess what housing trends in cities, including Tokyo, will be in the next 5 years.
Good point. One small issues: I think your first sentence is missing a negative or you want to change "increased" to "decreased"
Thanks!
Even though everyone wants to live in Tokyo, the same is true for hit real estate markets in other countries that it is being compared to. We aren’t comparing Tokyo to Duluth.
Lack of building codes like must have central heat or must have bathroom also can bring housing prices down.
Do you actually think the comment you replied to was complaining about requirements like central heat or bathrooms? NIMBYs will trot out every excuse and misdirection to avoid addressing the dire shortage of housing. This anti-growth mindset is a philosophy of death. I suspect that deep down, many want the world to end with them and are actually sabotaging efforts to solve societal issues out of some sort of Freudian death-drive.
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Tokyo's building codes do require bathrooms. Plus minimum sunshine for a room to count as a bedroom, along with shutters on all windows.
What caught my eye about your comment is central heating. Japan in fact penalizes central heating. Not just not requiring it but going so far as to increase property taxes slightly.
In Japan's case it is a desire to reduce energy intensity in a country dependent on energy imports.
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Hat tip for "Duluth". If anyone is not famaliar, it is north-central United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth,_Minnesota
Here's an archive of the FT piece to which the Vox article refers:
https://archive.ph/pVrex
Lots of additional detail.
The article makes a major mistake: it uses Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to, basically "Tokyo State", area 2,194.07 km2) for comparisons, not central Tokyo (23-ku, aka the former Tokyo City, area 619 km2). So it's basically the same as saying houses in New York are much larger than those in Paris, because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.
> Even more striking is that more people in Tokyo live in detached houses compared to apartments (30%) than in New York (16.3%) and Paris (12.3%).
I'm pretty sure this "striking" fact is an artifact of including a whole lotta suburbs, exurbs and farms in the Tokyo stats. Very few people live in detached houses within the 23-ku.
TL;DR: Housing in greater Tokyo is indeed affordable, but as anyone who's seen a "one-room mansion" (read: tiny studio) can attest, it's rarely spacious.
Agreed, this article is basing it's numbers off of this (linked) study: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/airdrive-images/wp-conten...
If you view page 6 and 7, you'll see why these numbers are largely irrelevant since the boundaries for all the "cities" except NYC (which is the 5 boroughs) include the large swathes of suburbs/exurbs around the city.
A study looking at 23-wards vs Inner London vs City of Paris would be a lot more informative.
BTW, the writer of the article seems to simply be using these numbers to push his view that real estate prices will continue to go up in Tokyo. Housing Japan, a Japanese real estate agency that caters to foreign investors shows pricing for apartments in the 23 wards have been on a pretty crazy upwards trajectory [1], but 1) this is denominated in JPY pricing, and the exchange rate has tanked by 35% vs USD this past year, and of course, I'd be much more interested in seeing that post revisited in 2023...
[1] https://housingjapan.com/blog/tokyo-residential-real-estate-...
New York "metro" is always tricky. All of New Jersey, southern Connecticut, Staten Island, the Bronx, outer Brooklyn, outer Queens: Who the hell cares. Yes, I will be down-voted for this comment! My point: Defining inner city NYC that is wealthy requires some care and consideration. All the interesting "real estate action" happens in a very small radius from midtown Manhattan.
JPY is poised for an astronomical fall. The government cannot both keep servicing debt and buoying the currency . Those houses will appreciate in value JPY denominated and crater in terms of USD.
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> because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.
But isn't the entire Tokyo Metropolis under an hour by mass transit? That's a far cry from Buffalo. Like, Buffalo cannot commute to NYC by anything other than private aircraft.
Technically Tokyo Metropolis includes some islands several hours by plane south of Tokyo, including Iwo Jima of WW2 fame. Their combined population is only a rounding error compared to the mainland though.
If you replace "Buffalo" with "an hour out of NYC" his point still stands.
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I don't have numbers, but I doubt that 12.3% of people living in Paris proper (the 20 arrondissements) live in detached houses. Yes, there are villas in the city, but they're extremely rare. I don't see them housing more than 1 in 10 people.
So their numbers seem indeed dubious.
Edit: I found official stats (French only): https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2011101?geo=DEP-75#chif... Table "LOG T2". "maisons" = "house", "appartements" = "apartments"
In 2019, less than 1% of housing stock were "houses".
Aren’t the backstreets of the less central ku filled with houses? I mean Setagaya, Ota, Edogawa, Adachi, Suginami, etc.
I used to pick stations at random to arrive at and explore, and what I always saw was endless houses. Only the areas closer to bigger stations had manshon.
I think you might be conflating Shibuya/Roppongi/Shinjuku with less central parts of the 23 special wards.
even in Shinjuku there are cheap houses if you look. My friend rents an old house with renovated interior in Shimoochiai for what I thought was surprisingly cheap
Those are huge wards by themselves. There are plenty of busy as well as residential places. For example, Setagaya-ku - stations like Sangenjaya, Jiyugaoka or Futakotamagawa are far cry from the quiet residential areas. There's a lot of any kind of housing there - bigger, smaller, houses and mansions alike.
And the apartment as a comparison to houses doesn't help much, as Japanese houses tend to be smaller than western. Source is me, I've been living in Japan for over 10 years now.
Western being what exactly? Houses are rarely spacious in a lot of what qualifies as 'west'. You can't compare The Netherlands and Belgium with Germany, let alone the US.
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Okutama, Tokyo is part of "Tokyo Metropolis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okutama,_Tokyo . The furthest I've been is Hachioji, which was about 1 hour by train from 23-ku. Hachioji is roughly half as far as Okutama. In New York City terms, getting to Hicksville, NY takes about 1 hour by train. For Bay Area folks, both Dublin / Pleasanton and Bay Point / Pittsburg ... or even Antioch are about an hour away by BART.
Not fair comparison, Okutama is literally in the middle of a mountain range with no much around, but you can get there combining a bunch of express trains in a very straightforward combination, which seems pretty hand-picked. Hicksville to NYC is 56km by car. Okutama from Tokyo Station is 96km.
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Is 1 hour by train a reasonable metric to use given the differences in trains
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Japan also has a declining population, extremely low immigration, and minimal foreign housing purchases.
These are the opposite factors of what urban US is facing.
Even Tokyo metro area population has been in decline and is forecast to decline, as NYCs continues growing.
Tokyo housing-space-per-resident being higher is probably also an artifact of lower household formation / childrearing than western cities.
That said Tokyo has different zoning which allows for smaller apartment units than NYC/SF/etc and should be applauded for that.
> it uses Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to, basically "Tokyo State", area 2,194.07 km2) for comparisons, not central Tokyo (23-ku, aka the former Tokyo City, area 619 km2). So it's basically the same as saying houses in New York are much larger than those in Paris, because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.
As others have said, difference between NYC and NYS is much much larger than that...
But for reference, Ottawa, Canada, is one of the largest cities in Canada by area at 2778 km^2. But the Greater Toronto Area, what many call "Toronto", is ~7000km^2 and only has ~6 million people...
Toronto proper is only 630km^2, with 3 million people. The scale here is reasonable, Tokyo has excellent transportation options that make it realistic to live anywhere in that region.
Your point that we have to be careful about the basis of comparison is well-taken, but your analogy is not sound. New York state is 141,000 km2, it's over 1/3 the size of all of Japan.
I paid $1,500 for furnished 2 bedroom:
Can confirm. Three years ago I spent 2 months in a furnished two bedroom apartment two stops away from Shinjuku - paid $1,500 / month. Had three different subway stations within ~7 min walk each. Great location, very inexpensive.
The company I used is Fontana - English speaking, they set up gas/electric/water and all I had to do was pay for them at the convenience store nearby (7 Eleven). The only requirement is a 2-month minimum stay. Will do again.
Paris, London and New York - the key points of comparison - aren’t exactly known for their spacious housing.
One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more than you can say for New York) but clearly nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside. And I’ve never seen more miserable public parks in a developed country.
I’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983 and am as much of a Tokyo fan as they get, and I readily acknowledge how ugly Japanese cities are in general. But after buying a house here twenty-three years ago, and comparing my experience with those of houseowners I know in the U.S., I have started to see some beauty in that ugliness.
Many of the people I know in the U.S. live in attractive neighborhoods full of nice-looking houses and well-kept front yards. While some of that niceness is due to the owners’ own initiative, much is the result of zoning restrictions, homeowner association rules, and the like.
The only zoning restrictions on my house in Yokohama are limits on total floorspace and land coverage and fire and earthquake rules covering building design and materials. I can paint my house any color I want, pile whatever junk I want in my (tiny) yard, and hang whatever laundry I want from the balconies, and no one can or will say anything about it.
As a result of this tolerant, low-regulation regime, the neighborhood I live in is, like most neighborhoods here, an unattractive mish-mash of mismatched houses and apartments in many styles and states of upkeep. If that’s the price of (relative) freedom, I’m happy to pay it.
I have to agree and disagree :)
First, it's not clean, it's just different way of unclean and only during certain periods of the day. But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.
On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
"Nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside" => completely agree, my pet peeve here is that one of the best towns geographically speaking of Japan is probably the ugliest town I've seen in my life in a 1st world country (Kawaguchiko, with the beautiful lake, lush forest and Fuji San nearby).
"never seen more miserable public parks" again have to agree, the median local park is taken out of a horror movie. Though there are* a bunch of very, very beautiful ones!
> On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
Last time I visited Tokyo in 2016 there was clearly an encampment at the Ueno park. And that wasn’t the first time I saw an encampment in Japan (visiting Tokyo in 2008 I saw a few in Tokyo and Osaka). However, Japanese homeless encampments are always very clean and well organized. It’s a completely different feel from the states (even if they definitely exist).
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> But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.
Apart from the worst parts of Roppongi on a Monday morning, I have never ever seen this.
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Ugliness is subjective. Tokyo is varied but to me that's generally nicer and more interesting than uniformity. I don't think there's any part of Tokyo that looks as bad as the Barbican or the Brunswick, and to me the endless rows of identical beach-hut-style houses in San Francisco were far grimmer than Tokyo. YMMV I guess.
I'm not a huge fan of the look of the gravel parks, but every kid having a nearby park that they actually use beats a handful of parks that look nice, IMO. And it's not like Tokyo doesn't have big beautiful parks as well.
You folks ought to spend some time in Taiwan. I'm in Tokyo now, was in TW for a couple of years prior. Tokyo is extremely beautiful in comparison. (I'm Taiwanese Canadian)
Not just Tokyo, but the whole of Japan. I live in Aomori, I have traveled quite a bit around the country, and I haven't seen yet a single city that wasn't extremely ugly. I have asked many Japanese people, and they just don't care.
I live in and love Japan, and after many years have also gotten used to the general ugliness and just enjoy the beautiful parts when I can, but turning off the Japanese filter I’ve developed, good god this is so true.
Can you post examples of this ugliness? I’ve never been to Japan and am curious. I had never heard of this.
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> how extraordinarily ugly the place is
First impression as well, but it's an aquired taste.
As someone being in Tokyo right now chatting with locals about this topic it's just not generally true or comparable to other cities.
Sure there are parts of Tokyo that are cheaper, but Tokyo is gigantic. All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.
> locals about this topic
Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners. The cheaper accommodations are not going to be available especially if tenant isn't fluent in the language.
> All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.
I live 3 minutes commute to Shibuya, and my rent is half my rent in an outer borough of NYC. Brand new lofty unit designed by a famous architect. Space efficiency-wise, it's equal if not greater. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison to just look at floorspace, since Japan has lots of infrastructure such as actually convenient stores which means people don't need to own as much household items.
> Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners.
Yes, you need to bring someone who is fluent to sign papers, but if you have residence with a visa that's greater than 2 years, there's no real difference. Most foreigners have their company, or their school do the actual paperwork, as well.
If your visa is less than two (and in some cases three) years, then yeah, you're going to need a gaijin apartment, and they're a lot more expensive.
How much do you have to pay in monthly housing costs with the inclusion of utilities and amenities?
Then why doesn't everyone just live in Tokyo? You just got your answer.
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I live in fujisawa, takes me about 30 minutes to get to Yokohama which is pretty damn major.
House prices here are quite reasonable, nice distance to the ocean for the weekends. I'm considering buying and building a house in the next year or two.
I'm 3 minutes from the Chidoya line, and 10 minutes from the Yamanote. I live in a 95sqm apartment, with a private garden, and it's cheaper than the rent controlled apartment that I had in SF (which was roughly the same size, and I had rent control for 10 years).
The graph with many countries is ABSOLUTELY WRONG.
It says with $1500 rent you can get a 140m2 or 1500 sqft apartment in Berlin. HAHA! MAYBE IN THE 90s.
Not to mention that I'm willing to bet that less of 5% of housing in Berlin is 140m2 or higher. (might be 1% or less even)
These often use average rents paid today. They tend to be much lower than average rents if you rent a home today.
One of the main reasons why older people seem to think millennials are complaining about nothing: they locked in their rental rates back in the last millennia, and the laws generally only allow low-single-digit increases per year
I think measuring per person is pretty misleading.
A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped.
A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.
So if you look at living space per person, then societies with smaller household sizes will appear to have more living space per person.
so if you measure that, you also have to compare how many people are in households as well.
Yeah, a more accurate measurement would be "baseline + X" - you don't really need to go above the average household size, but you can fit people in way denser than 25m^2 (270 sq ft) if they share common areas. The average dorm room is 230 sq ft (with a roommate!) but the dorm provides common areas and other amenities.
Another thing to consider when comparing countries is what is considered "living space" and what is not - some areas have large porches that are not considered "living space" even though they serve similar functions to what a living room might in other parts of the world.
It depends on how you measure those 25m^2; I lived in a studio in Copenhagen for a while and my 25m^2 included the common areas / roof garden etc. Private space was around 16-20m^2, and I am being generous here.
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There's a lot of space needed in an apartment for "overhead" stuff: kitchen sink/counter, refrigerator, toilet, tub/shower, powder room sink, washing machine, entryway, etc. Going from a tiny 1DK to a massive 3LDK doesn't change the overhead requirements much; those extra 75 m^2 are mostly usable space.
> A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.
depends on your perspective, I guess! that sounds horribly cramped to me.
It's not about perspective. Both average to 25m2 per person, but they are vastly, unambiguously different.
In a 100m2 home: 3x15m2 bedrooms, 25m2 living room, 10m2 kitchen and you still got 20m2 left.
It's no comparison to a single 25m2 apartment where all these functions have to fit.
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> A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped. > A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.
I would argue very much the opposite!
The 4 person example has a lot more usable space though, since you're sharing common space. You're not adding 3 more kitchens. Or 3 more laundry areas. Or 3 more bathrooms (maybe 1). Or 3 more living rooms.
The 270 ft² space might have 100 ft² usable area, but the 1076 ft² could have 700 ft² usable.
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Agree - I moved from 40m2 alone to 60m2 with my wife, and the experience is much better. We still have one sink, one toilet, one bathtub, one washing machine. Her space takes up maybe 10m2. The free walking-around space probably went from 5m2 to 25m2.
Offtopic, but
> the tallest building in Tokyo is only 255 meters
There is a hotel in this tower (called Andaz) and it has a proper swimming pool on the 37th floor. Quite an jaw-dropping experience on its own, but doubly so during an earthquake.
https://youtu.be/lJ8cv4t2tT8
You barely feel it during an earthquake, because the building has multiple stabilising mechanisms.
Yep, but you do feel it, because something is... off.
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Why these people think I will subscribe to their mailing list before I even read the third sentence?
This is a follow up article to a lot of questions on this thread: How Tokyo Avoided the Affordable Housing Crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894963
A peculiarity of renting in Japan (not mentioned in the article): you often need to advance a substantial amount of money upon starting a lease. It varies but a rule of thumb is about 5 months of rent. Part of it is advanced rent, but some is non-recoverable (key money, brokerage fee, insurance, cleaning fee...). Contracts are often two years, and at the end of it you typically have a renewal fee as well, at around a month of rent.
When did paying 30% of your paycheck in rent become "very affordable?"
What else do you need to spend lots of money on?
In the US you might need to plan for health care expenses and higher-education.
30% of your paycheck seems to be the general rule for housing. At least in the states.
Better than New York, Paris and London is a low bar
It is a big modern industrious city, what should it be compared to?
Outside of either aggressive capitalist desire to continuously lower wages or some groups wanting to destroy Japanese culture, I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.
A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.
We see in the animal kingdom the predator-prey cycle that population takes care of itself. When there's too many rabbits or deer, there's no cause for concern: the plentiful food supply means that wolves and foxes will be able to reproduce more and take care of the situation. When there's too many wolves/foxes and the situation reverses, the scarce food supply means that the predators aren't able to flourish and the rabbits and deer are able to reproduce more.
I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
I think there a few flaws with your thoughts
> A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.
Population density is not homogenous. Excluding pandemic era, the trend has been decreasing population density in the countryside and smaller cities, while more population moves to the big cities. In general, population size need not correlate for the average persons lived population density.
> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.
> I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.
This is generally because the population is not stabilizing, it’s on the verge of collapsing. If fertility rate rises “naturally” in the future, as you suggest, then it’s obviously not an issue. But maintaining a 1.3 or lower fertility rate indefinitely will result in an exponential decay of population which could itself result in a decline of living standards. For example, if the population decreases too much to support a high speed rail system so these are abandoned as unprofitable.
>> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
>This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.
In South Korea, young people are struggling to find affordable places to live, to the extent that many people live with their parents well into their 30ies. Coincidently, they also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
In my city, I see a lot of people who first build a house or buy an appartement, and then have kids, in their 30ies, because they can't afford a big enough place before that.
As housing prices rise everywhere, it takes longer and longer for people to be able to afford a place big enough for a family. Of course people then delay having kids, and many end up not having kids at all.
GDP can’t go up without strong reproduction and/or immigration. The economy stagnates and government debt becomes massive, which is what you see with Japan.
The scary thing is that this is something the USA and lots of other countries are headed towards as well.
https://dailyinfographic.com/government-debt-by-country
GDP can grow with a stable population if your Real gross domestic product per capita is growing which it has been for the USA [0]. Japans has barely grown for the past 30 years which is their big problem [1].
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDJPN
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The birth rate is so low around the world that we may see peak population by 2060 (worst case) and then an exponential decline. Quality of life will decrease as the number of old people drastically out numbers the young people.
Recent and related:
How Tokyo avoided the affordable housing crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894963 - Sept 2022 (90 comments)
I dont know how accurate this report is, but i do wish western europe was as well organised and clean as japan. Many, if not all, west european capitals are a mess with poor living conditions with no signs of improvement.
Purely as a visitor, Zürich definitely felt cleaner and better organized than other cities in western Europe.
An outlier indeed. Still feels a bit boring, but it ticks all the marks in my initial comment. I think europe strayed far from its path. We should look at japan and east asia (singapore, south korea) and reflect on why they look so much more advanced and well maintained compared to our countries.
I think Switzerland in general is exceptional and not at all representative of the rest of western Europe.
I'm looking at buying next year. Unlike where I'm from (New Zealand) property in Tokyo is better quality (although that's not really difficult) and dare I say cheaper.
I've heard good things about New Zealand real estate. I'm guessing spiraling prices are why you'd want to leave?
I've also heard it's rather easier for a foreigner to buy than to find a willing landlord...
That's a stretch and it is hard to get a home loan in your first years. It is true that when searching for a rental you will probably come across landlords that don't rent to foreigners, and more that won't rent to Chinese people. Many landlords also expect you to speak at least some Japanese.
That being said, it's competitive only for average sized/priced places. Both low end and above-average properties are easier to rent.
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For a data point: (admittedly, barely) inside Tokyo 23 wards, 15 min walk to nearest station, 70 sqm (753 sqft) 3LDK (3 bedrooms and a living-dining-kitchen). 140000 jpy / month. (945 usd at the current rate.) I think it's a reasonable deal. Less or similar than I would pay for a similar flat in my native Helsinki, Finland.
These statistics would be much more useful if the median had been used for prices and floor areas. These are both long tailed distributions, so the average is skewed. I would wager many of the “unexpected” results are due to this effect.
if you can't even tell where Tokyo and Osaka are on your maps, you probably shouldn't publish articles about Japan. Who knows what other numbers or diagrams are wrong there...
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2323:_Modeling_St...
Older cities have a lot of legacy issues that manifest in multiple ways. Housing is one of them. Solving the problem is hard since the cities can't be re-planned and rebuilt.
I spent a month in Tokyo in 29 Square meters it was painfully small, and expensive. It was the best I could find. These numbers are deeply suspicious.
The standard rental contract in Japan is not 1-year, but 2-years. For these engagements, as with employment, it's about consistency, predictability and long-term commitment.
One-month is ultra-short by Japanese standards. The rental inventory is distinct from regular apartments. This is effectively a hotel.
Kinda, it's 2 years but you can usually leave anytime after 6 months with no fee. After 2 years you need to sign a new contract, which means new fees etc
there is a maps-and-data company in Berkeley, California (urban planners) that maintains detailed and mostly-current information on occupancy for all of California; both renters and homes; unending policy battles behind-the-scenes about covid-19 and eviction very much at the fore. (trivia it is in the same physical building as the old After Dark screensaver company, so long ago)
I would love to stay there, but keeping western hours for your job would be very difficult. Not to mention the dislike of foreigners
The hours depends on your job, and the "dislike of foreigners" is mostly a myth. Tons of foreigners live here and love it.
32 square meters per person? That's 344 square feet. It's amazing to me people would choose to live in such a tiny space.
That’s slightly larger that my very expensive apartment in Paris proper. I moved there from a bigger place when I broke up years ago and I’m surprised by how liveable it is. It’s not big but it’s mostly fine. For the time I spent there it seems like a good deal. Working from home was annoying when it was mandatory however.
To be fair, in the US people live in a cardboard box on the street
Ever since experiencing sticker shock in Silicon Valley housing 7 years ago.
Housing in Tokyo or Seoul no longer looked expensive in my eyes.
Every time these articles come up I think about what a shafting people in Japan are taking on property and why western media want to write articles lying about it to the public. Japanese property is tiny by any metric compared to western property; maybe there are some rich people who would like to remove housing regulations and make more money selling crap tiny plastic homes to people at absurd valuations…
Tokyo and Osaka are reversed on the map
Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration? I've only been to Japan once, but I noticed how they're very formal compared to the various EU countries.
I keep meeting people who move to Appalachia and not register that the things that made it attractive (low crime etc) won't stay that way if people keep talking to me like I'm literally retarded.
(Every time someone tells me "I work in technology or whatever as I walk to get my espresso, I want to say "Great! Enjoy locking down your house like my South African neighbor told me they had to during apartheid, I've had too many of these conversations where the person was speaking in bad faith.")
> Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration?
Permanent Residency is helpful towards procuring a mortgage, but you don't need a visa to buy property in Japan. Non-resident cash buyers had no problem pushing up the real estate market in Vancouver, Canada.
People who think denser housing lowers rents haven't been to a big city.
Someone always mentions "But Tokyo...". That person never lives in Tokyo.