Comment by runnerup
3 years ago
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)
> 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.
Not that many people in Tokyo live in single-family homes; towers and other multi-unit buildings are very common. It's very common to see older buildings torn down and replaced with taller buildings, so even though they're losing the units in the demolished building, there's a significant net gain in units.
And these days, I don't think anyone is demolishing a house after only 20 years. 40-50 years certainly; those structures are unsafe because they don't meet modern buildings codes. Anything built before ~1981 is considered generally unsafe.