Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses | Hacker News Reader

Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

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521 pointsrmason381 comments

The more interesting thing about this is that it is part of a new type of economics, contraction economics. The global trend toward birth rates below replenishment means that first-world countries are maintaining their population growth through immigration. As some countries embrace restrictions on immigration, and ultimately all countries plateau in their population growth (projected to be around 2100) it means that the driving force behind increases in property value (population increases) will be curtailed.*

As we saw in 2008 curtailing or reversing growth in real-estate can have major impacts on society, but in the future this won't be just a correction it will be a new phase of global economics. There will be fewer humans each year making the total pressure on land values negative. Even before that an aging workforce will cause the total working population to contract (as it already has in Japan). Everything the Japanese do with more land and fewer workers is a canary in the coal mine for the global economy.

One of the great predicates of modern economics (perpetual expansion) will need to be re-thought. In some ways it's great news (more space for everyone after the great pinch of the 21st century) but in others it will necessarily wipe out the speculative aspect of many current growth markets. Contraction economics means deflation becomes a norm not an exception.

* Urbanization means cities will lag behind this reversal.

I disagree that there is a significant correlation between expanding population and an expanding economy. In fact there are plenty of examples of countries whose economy expanded way faster than their population, which implies that factors other than population dominate economic growth. (If population was the dominant factor in economic growth, we would see a consistent correlation between the two.)

Every day we read articles about how AI is going to drive massive improvements in productivity, killing millions of jobs in the process. If we really believe this is true, then a shrinking population is what we want, to "soak up" those destroyed jobs. A bonus of massive productivity increases is that real property transactions as a percentage of the economy will shrink too, softening the blow of contraction there.

Real estate is not the first industry to be threatened by changes in the economy! Creative destruction is part of our economic story and there is no inherent reason real estate should be immune from that, or that we should feel special concern about that industry among all others.

In short, I see no reason to believe that a shrinking population necessarily creates a shrinking economy. "Contraction economics" sounds cool but it's just a new name for what happened to the buggy whip industry, the telegraph industry, the canal industry, etc. And yes, maybe the real estate industry too.

EDIT to add: In my opinion a more significant future for economics is accounting for externalities that have typically stayed off the books, like clean water, clean air, a stable climate, etc. Economics has typically modeled economies as open systems, that is, there are "inputs" like raw materials and energy sources, that create economic outputs. But we've conquered the Earth now... with the exception of insolation, the global economy is a closed system. Every ounce of raw material and every joule of energy creates a complementary cost somewhere else in the system. Unless we can account for that, we will fool ourselves about the actual net value we are creating.

"I disagree that there is a significant correlation between expanding population and an expanding economy."

In any functioning economy there is obviously a correlation.

Bodies have jobs, generate income, and they buy stuff meaning GDP.

Government spends on social services per body, meaning GDP.

Not only are 'warm bodies' a part of economic growth ... 'warm bodies' are the very basis of economic growth in most of the West! If you take out population growth from US economic data, it looks a little more like Europe. If you normalize for lower rates of children ... that explains a huge amount about lagging economic growth in the West.

Populations that require homes, cars, services, food, mortgages - that's what drives the economy.

So to your point - in a dysfunctional scenario, more bodies means problems, but overall no.

How do you think America became the most powerful entity in the Western world and in some ways in the world? And not Sweden?

The story of American economic growth from 1777 onwards includes a lot of things, but if you measure up against Europe, what mostly stands out is body count.

Also - remember that growth is measured in GDP, not 'efficiency' - so as AI does 'more for less' it's technically 'bad' paradoxically, for the economy, as you point out. But as long as we figure out a way (any way!) for the surpluses to be distributed, they will be spent, hence 'growing economy'.

Canada's economic strategy is fully based on body count. The nations banks drive our strategy, and they can't grow any more through competition or innovation - they can only grow through more mortgages, which come from more bodies. So they push for large scale immigration, which is in their self interest.

'AI' is not how the economy will grow.

A sea of new homes, out to the horizon, with a Starbucks on every corner, an IKEA in every neighbourhood, a Toyota in every driveway, and a dozen prescriptions per home ... this is how our current economy 'grows'.

How many of those economic growths situations weren't linked to local population growth, but were linked to global population growth and populations emerging from poverty?

Population correlates directly with some economies: food, housing, etc. I think most of our measures of an economy (GDP? VTI?) aim to get as many people in as many human-only productive jobs as possible. (I apologize for leaving "productive" open-ended)

”If we really believe this is true, then a shrinking population is what we want, to "soak up" those destroyed jobs”

The number of jobs is highway correlated with the number of people (most jobs exist to serve the population). So, population decline won’t help keep (relative) unemployment numbers down.

Yeah, but fewer people will still need fewer houses while construction will be more and more efficient.

One prominent recent example that destroys the myth that economic expansion is very tightly bound to population expansion, is the US.

2008 pop: 304m people. 2018 pop: ~327m people. A 7.5% increase in population across a decade.

2008 GDP: $14.72t ($17.64t inflation adjusted). 2018 GDP: $20.5t. Approximately a 17% real increase in GDP.

The US added an economy close to the size of Germany in just ten years while only adding 23m people (Germany's population is 83m). That's courtesy of increasing output per capita far more than it is population growth.

They can be correlated without being a tight linear relationship.

If every two people in a group have exactly one transaction, then adding 20 people to a group of 100 will create more new transactions than you'll find in a group with just 20 people.

To be fair, when I google for research on correlations between economic growth and population growth, I get a jumble of papers on opposite sides - some pro-natalist and some anti-natalist and some agnostic. (Maybe one camp is considered far more authoritative than the others?)

Maybe it's a nontrivial relationship if it exists, though I'm not convinced anyone knows definitively how the relationship plays out.

The fact that the slope of the growth line is not 1 does not imply that economic expansion is not tightly bound to population expansion, or that economic expansion could continue under population contraction. Consider the simplest possible linear model Y = beta * X + noise where beta != 1; to say nothing of nonlinear models or interaction effects between population growth and other factors. Surely output per capita matters, and the true data generating process is far more complex, but you have not come close to demonstrating population growth and economic growth are decoupled through this example.

It's easy to grow fast while borrowing heavily, and that should be taken into account when looking at growth curves for various economic regions. Oil prices have also dropped from around $100 to $60 iirc.

2008-2018: total US debt (government, corporate, household, non-profit orgs) increased almost 9% from ca $68.1T to $74.1T, if you trust the numbers (https://www.nwcapitalsolutions.com/project/us-deleveraging-a...)

I wonder if the effects of automation, which the previous commenter alluded to, contributed significantly to this phenomenon...

Japan is not a very good proxy due to their strict immigration policies and preference to be an "ethnically homogeneous nation." As you mentioned, other countries can just replenish their head count through relaxed immigration. I'd wager, for example, that the US will remain highly multicultural with looser immigration long term since it's baked into its identity[0], despite some recent policy changes.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot

"Japan has strict immigration policies" is often repeated, but I don't think this is tells the whole story. Some of the policies are very permissive:

* If you graduated university and have a 'skilled' job in Japan, you are likely to get a visa. There is no cap on the number of these. There is no language requirement.

* If you live in Japan for over 5 years continuously you can apply for citizenship, though you must renounce any other citizenships.

* If you live in Japan for over 10 years you are eligible for permanent residency.

* If you are married to a Japanese national you can do any kind of work and get permanent residency in 3 years.

* If you have enough points on the highly skilled professional visa you can get permanent residency in 1 year. This is retroactive as long as you lived in Japan during that time, you don't even need to have had the highly skilled professional visa.

So, is it really an issue of policy? I think the causes may lie elsewhere.

Based on my experience visiting Japan and talking to both expats and expat-friendly locals there, I think the issue is more cultural than political. If you live in Japan but don't look Japanese you never really feel welcomed as a Japanese.

Contrast that to countries like most of the West, where at least a solid proportion of people consider it socially unacceptable to discriminate socially based on someone's looks or origins...

This is misrepresentative.

You can apply, but actually getting both permanent residency and citizenship isn’t nearly that trivial.

“Working in japan” and “becoming Japanese” are different things, and the latter is very much more difficult.

Japan is very happy to have foreign workers who will politely leave once they lose their jobs / get old, but the immigration figures, in absolute terms, are tiny.

The difference is in unskilled workers. The US has open gates to unskilled Mexican workers, Europe has open gates to unskilled Middle Eastern workers. Japan has nothing like that.

Yes, non-Japanese ex-pats are welcome to visit, but they are definitely not welcome to stay. Immigrants will always be foreigners in Japan.

The other question is, are there really any countries that are easy to immigrate to without the right to abode or right to return (for certain groups)?

Not just immigration, Japan also doesn’t rely on real estate speculation to drive middle class wealth. Houses and buildings have always depreciated and even land stopped appreciating after their bubble popped nearly 30 years ago. No one buys real estate to build wealth, but simply to live there. So they’ve got a huge head start in contraction economics.

In 2017, over a million people[1] received legal permanent resident status. In 2017 it was slightly less than in 2016, but on roughly the same level as the previous decade. So recent policy changes don't seem to have much effect in that regard.

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2017

Over 500,000 of those are familial green cards (spouses and children), meaning they likely would have been issued regardless of the changes in policy and don't really reflect a multicultural dimension for the country.

Other permanent resident status issuances take up to 15 years to achieve, meaning you won't see the effects of recent policy changes in that metric until the years to come.

A better metric is visa issuances, since those are the first step for many to becoming a legal permanent resident. Those have peaked in 2015 and have declined back to 2013 levels now: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...

Not a good proxy for now, sure. But if every country eventually does this, we'll all eventually be in the same boat.

> Japan is not a very good proxy due to their strict immigration policies

PM Abe is actively trying to change the immigration policies as of Nov. 2018.

It works well in America and Canada, but ethnic tensions are probably one of the root causes of tension in every other American nation, even Mexico. Everywhere south of the US has kind of a 'soft race war' going on between descendants of White colonialists, ex-black slaves, the indigenous population, the mixed crew, and other ethnic groups. It's a kind of overwhelming systematic ... 'racism' is not the best word ... more like 'systematic racial friction'. It's apparent everywhere, even by just driving through regions you can see it.

Ah right... just get more immigrants from the immigrant factory.

I know this is difficult for some to understand but brown, black and asian people are made via sex and birth (Shocker of shocks, I know).

What you're arguing for is for the birth rate of the undeveloped world to continuously grow at a never-ending rate in order to compensate for the utter laziness of the developed world.

I hate to break it to you but that'll simply lead to a flip in which countries are classified as developed.

George Friedman wrote a book of creative predictions called "The Next 100 Years" that argued mounting depopulation pressures and labor shortages would lead countries to begin competing for migrants.

Interesting that has not been Europe's solution so far...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_100_Years:_A_Forecast...

Japan's politics, with a strong aversion to open immigration and a desperate need for labor, have landed on some controversial compromises--for one, "internships" for temporary foreign workers with questionable protection for rights. May be an early signal for how the rest of the world will handle this.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-skirts-immigration-debate...

> Interesting that has not been Europe's solution so far

Not all immigration is of equivalent "quality". The worsening IQ test results in europe is often credited to the african immigration. On the other end of the spectrum, asians are being actively restricted from entering the top schools in the US.

Europe (and pretty much every country in the world) is already competing for qualified immigration.

If we keep going the way we're going now, by the time population decline puts a negative pressure on land and housing prices, they will be so high that 99% of people will have no way of ever owning it other than by inheritance.

I don't think we will arrive at declining housing prices the way you suggest. Something will have to give way before that.

> it means that the driving force behind increases in property value (population increases) will be curtailed

> There will be fewer humans each year making the total pressure on land values negative

Your premise about real-estate inherently contracting in value due to population contraction, is not correct. Nor is your premise about the driving force correct.

Double the US population and drop the total national income by 95%. See which is the greater driving force in real-estate values. You can see this in action right now just by looking at high population density countries that are poor. Bangladesh has extreme population density, their real-estate is not expensive compared to Canada (~1/400th the population density) or the US (~1/40th the population density).

You can increase the value of real-estate while contracting the population, by increasing the per capita income of each person enough to overcome the effect of the population decline. Germany's population has barely budged in 50 years, their real-estate has increased in value in that time as the economy has expanded in real terms with a climb in their per capita wealth and incomes.

Today nearly everything you've ever heard about healthy (ie non-war, famine, etc) population decline being a horrible outcome, is false. It may have been true in the past, it is no longer.

The ideal outcome is for populations to decline while productivity and income soars per capita, improving the standard of living of each person remaining and lightening the burden on earth's resources. The focus of all nations should be on aggressively increasing per capita output, not on fighting healthy population decline.

Well, this is all assuming that humanity will not expand out of Earth. If that does happen, we might actually have a perpetually expanding populace and economy. Fun times.

I think you're assuming the current decline in birth rates is due to scarcity of resources. But I don't think that's true. In the developed world food and energy are not scarce, and even land outside of major metro areas is not scarce.

Population might just stabilize at some point, and then there's not much of a driver to expand off of our planet (apart from some resource mining, and other activities.)

Food and energy are not what defines scarcity any more.

If you want to pay the mortgage, have a fulfilling job, have time to spend with your family, and give your child a good start in life, you can't have 8 kids in a middle class family.

Sometimes 1 is the right number if you want your child to be successful and have enough free time to enjoy life yourself.

That IS resource constraint, the resource just isn't food.

The replacement rate is a little above 2 children in the modern world. Three kids is a burden for a lot of people.

It's pretty clear that the major driver is education and freedom of career choice for women. The UN has lots of data supporting that. Industrialization and changing attitudes toward children have also played a role.

My paternal grandfather was a farmer. He had 20 children who survived to adulthood. By two wives, the second having been the nursemaid. As I understand it, all of the children worked. Basically as soon as they could walk. Girls focused on childcare and housework, and boys on farm work. If they'd been living in a city, the boys would have had factory jobs.

So anyway, that's how you raise many children. That or be wealthy, of course. But current expectations, social norms, and laws make that impossible. Except perhaps for farm families, where substantial child labor remains legal.

What's the resource constraint then if it's not food, energy, or shelter?

People want to buy more stuff? Hardly a requirement of years gone by.

People want more free time? Doubtful, otherwise people would work less and buy less stuff - which we don't see. People keep getting more productive, but they just funnel that into a more expensive lifestyle rather than cutting back on work.

I don't think the reasons are simple (or even the same between people) but I don't think it's dominated by resource constraints.

I know software engineers with no children and school teachers with four. Very different lifestyles, but all middle class. And I don't think resource constraints factored heavily into their decision making.

There are plenty of other drivers to expand off Earth:

1. Backup in case things go wrong (meteor strike, end of the Earth, nuclear war, mass plague, AI/robot revolt)

2. Outright inability to live alongside other cultures and societies/groups. Just like throughout history, some beliefs will also be controversial at best/illegal at worst, and while in the past finding a unoccupied area on Earth was practical, that's not really the case now. So space it is.

3. Science/academic study. Robots are neat, but there are some things it's better to send humans for, and a fair few scientists would probably rather be out there exploring than sat behind a computer screen.

4. General boredom/tourism/whatever.

5. Environmental concerns. Not just resource mining, but let's face it... eventually a lot of environmentally unfriendly industrial processes will probably work better in a place with no atmosphere/biosphere to ruin.

Probably a bunch of other things too.

The people left to live on earth will be more and more tied to doing mindless jobs. I think there are a lot of people that would be excited to start a new community on Mars, get paid to, basically exist and build homes (pods) and connect those pods to additional pods. The act of mining will have meaning again beyond helping someone else get rich off bitcoin.

You just accidentally summarized why growth obsessed global capitalists are completely delusional.

> growth obsessed global capitalists are completely delusional

Infinite growth and finite material resources are perfectly compatible. Case in point: Fortnite.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic; how does Fortnite demonstrate “infinite growth”?

We're likely going to experience significant population contractions not driven by "stabilization" as humanity approaches 2100.

It seems to be the opposite, Africa has positive population growth with low economic growth.

The US saw similar efforts in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities. That mostly just resulted in asset flippers hoarding houses and letting them fall into further disrepair. I wonder what steps Japan is taking to mitigate that possibility.

It's not easy to asset flip in Japan. I have no idea about this program. I live in Japan and I haven't heard about it, so I'm not sure what the deal is. However, people in Japan don't buy used houses. Due to the large number of earthquakes, etc, older houses are felt to be unsafe. A house on a property is actually a liability because the new owner will have to knock down the house in order to build a new one.

I'm absolutely certain that the abandoned houses are abandoned because they are literally not saleable. Even perfectly good houses that were built in the last 20 or 30 years sit on the housing market in my area for years before they even get a single offer. Houses that cost $300K end up selling for around half that price, even after waiting for years to sell it. That's how non-existent the used housing market is in Japan.

And this is not to say that housing is flat. Empty lots sell relatively quickly. Nobody wants a used house. That's the reality of the market.

I don't know exactly what this programme is, but I would venture to guess that they will give you the house/land as long as you knock down the existing house and build a new one. This will cost you the aforementioned $300K, at which point you can flip it for $150K. That's how they mitigate that possibility :-)

Whenever I hear about the used housing market (or lack thereof) in Japan I wonder if there's an opportunity to find some amazing deals. Properties that could be purchased way under value and re-purposed. Either on a personal level (foreigner wants to buy a house) or as a cheap way of setting up a hotel or AirBnB kind of business.

Hotels are already cheap in Japan ($60 a night will get you quite a nice business hotel with hot spring in most places I've been) and Airbnb is subject to local restrictions (federal law passed recently allows local governments to place restrictions on Airbnb - you have to get a permission letter from your city Hall to be allowed to list on airbnb - and they can deny you for any reason eg neighbour complaints). Personal use would be a possibility for sure.

$60 a night is not cheap. I traveled (cycling) for 3 months in South East Asia and my average hotel bill was $8, some of them brand new hotels.

You can’t possibly expect a highly developed nation to have comparable prices against south east Asia.

SE Asia is a completely different economy though. Japan is a first world country, and the third largest economy in the world. Its not going to cost the same as someplace in SEA.

In addition to what everyone else said about it not being a useful comparison to look at SE Asia, I also wasn't looking at the cheapest options. Capsule hotels would generally be available for half that ($30) and sleeping in a manga cafe would be $10-$20 depending

My wife is in this business although she buys quite expensive old homes and buildings in cities. You will probably have trouble with sellers (and certainly with banks) if you’re a foreigner. Also, the short term rental legalities are a liability in most places unless you can get registered as a proper hotel. Some communities will outright ban short term rentals because they don’t like the turnover of visitors. It can be done though.

I outright bought and fully owned a newly-built house in the outskirts of Koriyama City (Tobu New Town), Fukushima prefecture, in 2008.

After the M9 quake, I mamaged to sell that house for basically the price I bought it for. Why? Because people were looking for houses located in areas which weren't dusted with the radioactive cloud from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant which went FOOM! at the time. My house just happened to be located in an area where the weather conditions had diverted most of said cloud, and it was a young family who bought the place.

I then skedaddled out of Japan back to my native Scotland, bringing my sona dn Japanese wife with me.

Point being, there will be certain factors involved in which used houses can be sold on and not suffer much depreciation. Admittedly, my house was only about 3 years old, and we had a professional cleaning team go right through the place before the new owners moved in.

What reasons do people have for not wanting a perfectly good 20-30 year old house for half the price of a new one?

A couple reasons that don't get much attention are that a.) newly-constructed houses are relatively cheap and b.) mortgage rates are very good.

A normal, custom-built house in the suburbs of Tokyo can be constructed for somewhere between $120,000 and $250,000 (source: I'm shopping for a house now) which, at the current Japanese mortgage rates for a 35-year loan, translates into a $400-$800 monthly payment for the home construction.

This is on top of what you have to pay for the value of the land itself, of course. But if you're already paying $300k-$500k for the lot, then why not just knock down the old building and put up your own, perfect-for-your-family, architect-designed, house?

Ha ha. Where I live a lot is about $50K, so I sometimes find it a bit strange that people build a $2-300K house instead of living in the one that was there.

But you are also right about the mortgages. Rates are super low and you can get 20 or 30 year terms. So for example even for a 25 year term, Shinsei bank is offering less than 2%: https://www.shinseibank.com/english/housing/loan_kinri.pdf

It's completely insane. I keep telling my wife we need buy a house just to lock into the nearly free money. On the other hand, if the bank thinks this is a good deal for them, they must be forseeing some pretty bad economy in the future...

Nearly free? 58k interest on 240k borrowed over 25 years is not exactly nothing.

The price is for the land, which can be quite expensive and can go up. The cost of demolition and building a new home is about USD200-300k for a very nice three bedroom home in a typical urban area. Credit is very cheap too. Also, people prefer new things in Japan. If you see a car that is more than a few years old, it will most likely be a mint-condition collectors item.

I'm in Kyushu. Seikisui houses cost 150-300k here on average. The house I personally want (saw at house demo place) is 750k. It's really nice!! In California that might buy a 3br in the outskirts of LA buy it won't be nice. The house I saw, in California would probably go for 1.5-3 mil in southern parts and much higher in SF.

$750k in Kyushu must be a mansion! Those home showcases are great aren’t they? Would you build wood or steel frame?

The most commonly cited reason is earthquake safety: the standards for construction are constantly increasing, and old homes are perceived as unsafe.

That said, the entire housing industry in Japan has formed around the idea that homes are disposable. Unless they're very old (e.g. traditional/antique machiya and farmhouses) or apartments in large complexes, they're not built to last. Detached houses built since WWII, in particular, are more expensive to repair than to rebuild. This is probably the real reason that used homes are viewed negatively.

Earthquakes are commonplace in Japan. You don't want an older house which may be structurally compromised.

I think that is the main reason. But also, people buy houses at different times of life in Japan. Often it's people nearing retirement, buying the "dream house". They want exactly what they want. It's a bit of a vicious circle, but people don't/can't do "starter homes" because you can't sell them.

Another common practice is to inherit your parent's or grandparent's house, knock it down and build a new one. So the same family will live in the same location for many generations, but they will rebuild the house in order to adapt to changing needs. I think this reflects the rapid rise in wealth in Japanese society. Before WWII, Japan was quite a poor country. From WWII onwards, Japan went from absolute poverty (where everything was flattened by the war) to the second largest economy on the planet (now, edged out by China for that honour). So every 20-30 years represented a major upgrade in housing.

I'm finding that in my area in the last 10 years used houses are getting slightly more popular. Certainly for me, when I eventually stop jetting back and forth between the UK and Japan I will buy a used house. A 20 year old house is still rated for a level 7 earthquake and I think they are perfectly good. I would say that at least 30% of my neighbours are over 60, so housing is going to be extremely easy to acquire (though still not a good investment).

People pay half a million dollars for 60 year old homes all the time in California, just as bad of an earthquake zone, yet these houses aren't worth half a million yen. Culture is a much bigger factor here -- I've never heard the phrase "used house" in the US. What I do hear is mid-century modern, arts and crafts, ranch-style.

> just as bad of an earthquake zone

As much as people living in California would like to believe that, it's not true. I was born in Chile, a place that's actually as equally-prone to earthquakes than Japan, and I've been living in California for about 8 years now. In here, I almost forgot what is like to feel an earthquake. In Chile/Japan is common to feel at least a magnitude 5 earthquake a couple of times a year (they are actually called "tremors"). California is in an unstable zone, but nothing compared to Chile/Japan.

Anecdotally, right before moving to SF, we had the 2010 earthquake[0] (8.8), I'm pretty sure with an earthquake like that in SF, there would be no city left behind.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake

CA quakes range under M7. while japan over M8 is relatively common.

also japan have snow and hot+humid summers. CA is mostly dry warm weather year around. timber will decay much, much faster in the former. if japan had low quality housing materials like used in CA, the houses would need to be redone every 10 years or less.

I lived in an old wooden house in Sanjo, in Niigata prefecture, for a while back in the 80s. It was a pre World War 2 house and didn't have any indoor plumbing, though it did have a nice smelling campground-style toilet on the first floor. You could stand outside and shake the corner of the house and hear all the windows rattling. It seemed pretty junky, but it withstood at least eight decades of earthquakes without falling down.

Also, I went to Sadogashima earlier this year. While there, we visited an entire town that was built in the 1600s. A couple of the homes had been turned into museums, but people were living in the rest of them, so there must be something to the way they build those old homes in Japan. I don't know if the same would be true of more modern houses though.

old code (pre-1980s) houses have poor resistance to MAJOR earthquakes. Their heavy roof tiles make them liable to collapse in major earthquakes (Kobe), which is a pretty nasty way to die

Comparing to California, which also has earthquakes, and nobody thinks twice about buying a used house. And it's not like they are built to be super-resilient either - it's mostly wooden planks, particle boards, sheet rock and stucco...

"Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years": https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

tl;dr it's a historical accident that has become a self-perpetuating cultural phenomenon

This doesn't explain similar phenomena, though, like the Japanese replacing their cars frequently: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/12/world/why-the-cars-in-jap... https://www.picknbuy24.com/column_146.html It makes me wonder if a deeper cultural factor is at work here.

Japanese replace their cars frequently because taxes are structured so that after a few years it becomes worthwhile to buy a new car.

It's a lot more complex than that. Usually these deals have tax liabilities and liens that aren't chargeable unless the city agrees to it. Anyone can tell you, there is nothing more expensive than a free house/boat/car.

St. Louis is the market I’m most familiar with, but I’m sure it’s the same everywhere: it’s not just taxes and liens; it’s that most of the properties are worth less than the cost of making them habitable. Every municipality has occupancy requirements and building codes. Any house you can buy for $100 in Detroit is going to cost roughly the same (or more) as new construction to meet these codes. In St. Louis, for example, you’re required to present construction plans and hard timelines as a condition for purchasing abandoned property. They aren’t going to accept your optimistic DIY dreams. They have to be real plans at market rates. And if you don’t meet the agreed-to dates, you lose the property.

A lot of these properties literally have a negative value; it would cost more to renovate them and complete environmental mitigations on them than is profitable. When you see a property for $100, you almost certainly wouldn’t want it unless you were paid to take it.

Use common sense; there’s a reason these properties were completely abandoned by their previous owners.

Why don't they sell it at a discount, then?

These are usually handled through city property auctions. Bidding usually starts at a few dollars. But you have to read the fine print. They will usually have city, county, state, federal, and private liens on them.

For example a federal treasury auction will discharge IRS tax liens but not state, county, and city charges. I've seen $1mm beach-side homes auctioned for <$100k. But then have $500k+ in state liens on them.

A savvy buyer will get the titles and try to get the liens discharged by negotiating with the other agencies or pay them off. This is factored into the offer they will make on the property. If you think you've stumbled into a method to get rich quick you're sadly mistaken.

They do, but you still have to pay the back taxes, which in a lot of cases are more than what you paid for the property.

Detroit: If you have a credit card and a want to own an apartment building, it is the place to be. Just needs some elbow grease. There MUST BE opportunity at $5 USD per square foot -- but it is hard to visualize.

https://www.point2homes.com/US/Multi-Family-For-Sale/MI/Detr...

[I think you can talk this guy down to $10k].

Sometimes one guy can rehab an entire neighborhood one house at a time. Opportunities are still there in Detroit and the risks are a lot smaller than ten years ago. You could even be a determined BMW mechanic who backed into a new career supported by his neighbors capital. An only in Detroit story:

https://www.freep.com/story/money/real-estate/2018/04/14/vir...

Saying it's the place to be seems a bit an overreach. That building, as an example, is in a neighborhood that is just block after block of wasteland, with derelict abandoned houses falling to disrepair, and the empty lots where they removed them before. This particular building likely has no furnace, pipes were probably removed, and almost certainly requires many tens of thousands in upgrades.

It seems like illusory opportunity. There are areas of Detroit where some of the grand old homes are being resurrected and there have been opportunities, but this isn't one of them.

No furnace is not a big deal by itself, but likely no windows, no wiring, no plumbing, no fixtures. What remains likely has mold, lead paint, and other hazards. It's at best a gut-to-the-frame-and-rebuild. If severely weather damaged it might even be a tear-down.

If they’d throw in a working visa I’d be intrigued

If you could pull that off, sounds like an incredible program to me. I don't think anything could revitalize Detroit like large amounts of immigrants would.

Actually Michigan's Governor proposed to then President Obama a special Detroit visa where immigrants with skills would get a green card in exchange for moving to Detroit for a minimum of five years. Sadly he never got an answer.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/detroit-save...

This is how you build "new cities" [1]; pair startups with working visas and tie it together with funding and resource commitments (cough cough PlanGrid et el) to bring dilapidated housing back into inventory. Inexpensive corporate housing with you bootstrapping the culture and the community core.

[1] https://cities.ycr.org/

If you have the capital you can basically just buy an EB-5 investor visa.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...

Starting a construction / rehab company might work.

A 4,664 sqft house on .1 acres, and its across from an abandoned parking lot/store or gas station to boot.

Only in America!

If you want the lowdown on Detroit (and other regions of the country) check out https://makeloveland.com/ They focus on helping people keep their homes and away from the county auction.

There's a Detroit entrepreneur who is trying to put together a pool of investors to rehab Detroit rental properties. He details every step he's taking on his blog which unfortunately is down right now.

Here's the under 2 minute where he shows off the 5 unit apartment building he bought on Craigslist for $13K and yes there are other opportunities out there just like that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bapcgs1v62Q&t=4s

I think initiatives like the guy this one is taking is incredible, and these types of initiatives are a necessary risk in piecing the city back together. However, there is so much external risk in throwing capital into projects like these. We need the federal government to be on board, we need the local gov to have their heads on straight and to be willing to fight for appropriate legislation that is going to be attractive enough to bring people to the city. So far, I think we haven't seen enough of either. My feelings are therefore mixed. I want to see these localities do well; a rising tide lifts all boats; but the people at the top have demonstrated an ineptitude in being able to create real incentives. You only really see it in the private sector with players like dan gilbert.

In what looks like a terrible neighborhood, right across the street from a funeral home. I think gaining tenants will be a challenge.

Midwestern cities have large real estate taxes relative to younger parts of the country because there are so many legacy pension costs per worker. No free lunch.

"Elbow grease" isn't going to fix major structural or infrastructural issues. I'm sure you were being funny, but most of those structures are tear downs.

Only a property in Detroit in the deserted areas could mean frequent meetings with muggings, violence, etc.

In Japan it will just be a regular house.

Actually if you look at what happened to the majority of homes that were rehabbed that's not the case. Most of them were in the downtown area and crime actually went down. Grant you there were urban pioneers that chose less than desirable areas but they were the exception.

In Detroit the formal program run by the city that gave away houses mandated that they be rehabbed and inhabited by the person receiving them for a minimum of five years.

Then there's the Land Bank that buys the houses, then rehabs them and sells them at auction. Know some people who've gotten really good buys, some houses sell below the Land Bank's cost.

https://buildingdetroit.org/?SID=kqj4u36nhvgh8e54pm6v434ai5

So, what if you purchased these with the express intent to tear them down and install pre-built tiny-homes on them.

So you effectively get a plot of land, with service-hookups and low property taxes. but you can install beautiful, yet-tiny home on it.

http://windrivertinyhomes.com has amazing units.

I have lived in crappy neighborhoods[1][2]. Violence is not likely to be an issue as long as you don't inject yourselves into your neighbors' business it's really not the big deal the upper classes make it out to be with all their hand wringing. Violent crime doesn't really happen that often per capita (i.e. odds are it will never happen to you). Not getting involved with drugs is like 90% of the battle. If you do get unlucky and encounter crime it's probably going to take the form of someone stealing something from your yard.

I think you either need to already be comfortable living somewhere like that in order to do so stress free.

[1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ma/fitchburg/crime

[2] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ma/new-bedford/crime

Edit: This reminds me of every time crappy minimum wage jobs come up. I have first hand experience with and offer my opinion but then get told that I have no idea what I'm talking about. The filter bubble is real.

This is a single person thing (especially a single male thing)

as a single male, I can reliable predict that I can mind my own business and probably be fine

as a parent, I can't reliably predict that my kids will mind their own business and probably be fine

You've clearly never lived in a shitty neighborhood.

You are out of your mind.

> i.e. odds are it will never happen to you

In the reality of the situation, odds are that it will eventually happen to you.

As an object level fact, Japan has a homogeneous culture centered around honor, which is much different from Detroit.

It's much less so today than it was when I first went to Japan back in the 80s. Still, the culture supports vending machines lining the streets and not a single little shit vandalizing them in sight.

In Kyoto the free, public bathroom, in the middle of the city, was cleaner than my own bathroom. Whereas in Seattle I won't use one for fear of syringes.

Source? When I looked into buying an “abandoned” house, the city used a bizarre tax calculation that used historical values to value the house (and it’s tax liabilties) in a bizarre and costly way.

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-detroit-housing/cheap-de...

I was never talking about the taxes, just the sticker price for the house. Japan doesn't seem to be waiving property tax for these houses, either, so the comparison is still valid.

Japan is a peculiar country, I'd bet a few dollars that they won't abuse the system that much.

Houses depreciate quickly and I don't know that land appreciates at a very high rate, so there isn't much to abuse in the first place. And because japan's zoning is not completely stupid, redevelopment can be done piecemeal. So if you buy to flip, either you flip very quickly for little to no gain or you don't and the neighbourhood gets redeveloped around and without caring about your property, which will likely be too small for anyone to be much bothered. The exceptions could likely be significant plot of lands like old temple grounds and the like which could sustain an entire development on its own.

I've seen programs like these where you have to live in the house, which is a good solution.

I doubt that, I guess. I checked into the program in Detroit and you had to live in the property for a year. Now maybe people got around that somehow but that's not how the program was structured.

The layouts of those suburbs are terrible. State should have just tried at least to make some greenbelts of those areas.

So wait, there are places where there are houses being given away (e.g. US, Japan and Italy as far as I know) and I'm a person that has the ability to work remotely.

Am I missing something? Is this my ticket to cheap housing and a more stress free life? At what point am I going to be scammed and/or disappointed?

Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?

When you work from home, you wanna leave home often, where do you go if you're in the middle of nowhere?

I work from home in the middle of a dense city, pay a premium for it! You leave home and there are about 100 places (cafes, theatres, museums, parks etc.) I can go to that are walking distance. Is that possible in say rural Michigan, where housing is apparently practically free?

I work remotely from "rural" Japan. I am surrounded by rice fields and mountains, but also only a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bike/bus ride to the city center where there is shopping and night life. From there it's a couple hours to Tokyo by bullet train, which I visit a handful of times a year.

There are old or abandoned houses nearby that can be had for very little money.

I love being in the mountains. I get outdoors for cycling, hiking, running, or skiing almost every day.

The language barrier is a bit scary, but fortunately I knew enough to get by on day-to-day tasks. Google translate is also a godsend.

Wait, you do this before getting an N3? How is that possible?

Not sure if this is what OP used, but the Google Translate app is nearing sci-fi levels of accuracy and speed. The conversation function is good enough that you can talk with someone while both using different languages and actually understand each other with minimal delay.

Yes but I was under the impression that Japanese long term work visa was only granted to those that had achieved N3 in Japanese language, seems I might be under a mistaken impression...

sounds like a dream. what am I doing in this small room in London? I'd like to do it...

Explain more.. what visa, insurance etc

Sure... my spouse is a Japanese citizen, so that made getting a visa trivial in my case.

The company I work for has offices in the U.S. and Japan. They were able to transfer me to Japan and let me work remote with my team in the U.S. They probably would have been able to get me a work visa, too, though it wasn't necessary in my case since the spousal visa was much simpler to obtain. Since my company has a presence in Japan, all of typical payroll, benefits, insurance stuff is handled through the Japan HR dept.

For anyone looking to spend time living abroad, I think this approach of working for a large multinational and asking to be transferred is a viable option. Of course it requires that you have a tremendous level of trust with your manager, and you need to be senior enough that it is worth the hassle for them. Also - if there is no business justification for the transfer, don't expect them to help out with relocation costs, and if you are moving to an area with a lower cost of living they may give you a negative cost of living adjustment, too.

I should make it clear that this move wasn't easy to make by any means. It took years of planning and even a job change to find a team I was confident enough I could make it worth with. While getting the visa was simple enough in my case, actually moving to Japan and buying a house, opening up bank accounts, getting a drivers license, etc were all enormously time consuming and at times very frustrating.

So it can be done, and I feel it is worth it, but it does require a fairly large amount of effort.

It may sound weird, but working remotely in rural Japan sounds like a dream come true.

Hi, do you have an email or something I could contact to discuss your living situation and the process undertook a little better? I would like to do something similar but would like some more information on it.

No, you're right, for a person like you or me it could be terrifying. But huge swaths of the population enjoy this lifestyle - in the USA they mostly depend on cars, ATVs, or horses to get around (speaking from my Texas experience).

It's not city life, but it's life. It's just a little bit "slower" sometimes. It can be relaxing in its own way.

I mean, I live in the core of SF, but how often do I go to the theater or museum anyway? No more than I did when I lived in the suburbs.

Personally, I am looking to buy a place in Llano or Blanco (between Austin and Fredericksburg, basically) in summer of 2019 and then spend a lot of time camping and visiting people and travelling.

Just because you're remotely based in the sticks and use property there as a place to park equity and a place to keep your big stuff (I have a lot of tools and music equipment) doesn't mean you have to stay there if you're remote.

Years ago, I lived with a friend in Blanco for a few months - a little house built by the owner on the top of a hill, with a big garden, horses, goats, chickens, dogs, as well as occasional rattle snake or scorpion.

It was fairly isolated (in a comforting way), so having access to an automobile was a necessity. If I recall, about ~1 hour to Austin, with a lively music scene.

I learned how the Texas hill country can be quite charming - wildflowers, forests, rivers.. Fond memories. Good luck with finding a homestead there!

Yeah, it's beautiful. I have a bunch of friends in different places out here and that makes it even better.

I can't imagine trying to live out here without a car or truck though.

Do you find there are a lot of places to camp around there? I'm in San Antonio, and I find it very sparse compared to places that feel made for camping and hiking (looking at you, PNW).

Yeah, there is very little public land in Texas.

I've been to a lot of the state parks (there are some good ones). The dinosaur tracks in government canyon are cool, lost maples is nice. I've spent a whole lot of time at Enchanted Rock.

None of the places is very big, but if there should be enough to keep someone busy for most weekends if they are motivated.

As you get farther, Mustang Island state park is nice, and I'm very much looking forward to build some lead rock climbing skills-- El Portrero Chico is only 6 hours south.

As other folks have mentioned, Big Bend, Terrlingua, MArfa, Alpine, etc. are all quite good. If you haven't been to Big Bend NP, I'd recommend a trip out that way.

If you can go 9hrs, Ruidoso NM will get you into the mountains.

What's the limit of how far you're willing to drive? Big Bend and Marfa are great road trips if you've never been to either.

> or horses to get around (speaking from my Texas experience).

Heh not unique to Texas. I've seen horses outside of strip malls just outside of Indy -> http://imgur.com/gallery/i1Rflum

Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?

It's (probably) not just you, but at the same time working from home for me, a full-time worker who has a boss that takes the "as long as you get your work done" approach to remote work, which results in me in the office one day, but the very next deciding "yeah I'm not dealing with the blue line's crap today"...rarely comes with the urge to get up and go anywhere and usually don't unless it's to walk the dog or take a smoke break on my porch.

And I live and work in the middle of Chicago, where there's no shortage of places favorable to remote workers or walkable spots for lunch very close by.

But at the same time I've also found myself in Hawaii getting paged for an all hands "oh shit" emergency and been just as productive despite the time difference, so I think it's very much a YMMV type of thing.

>Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?

That situation is literally my dream. I live in a suburb now and literally go 3-4 days without needing to leave home. I most often leave to go get firewood or meat to BBQ out back.

In my dream I'd be on a full acre(instead of the little 0.2 acre lot we're on) with enough room for a normal family home, and a "mancave/study" so I "go to work".

What's your house budget? For a place with a man cave you'd probably need 250k here in southern Japan. While not really remote, it's far from the busy likes of Tokyo. All of my work is with companies around the globe in all sorts of time zones. I'd say it's boring for a single person out here, you'd definitely only put up with it if you had a family. Securing a visa would be another challenge unless you married a Japanese citizen, which you wouldn't want to do after coming here as divorce rates are high for mixed couples. Culture can be very frustrating too after a while.

I work remotely from a town of 200 full time residents in the North Cascades Mountains in North Central Washington State. The closest grocery store is about 25 miles away and the closest stoplight is about 80 miles. You have to plan a bit around shopping and logistics but it is a wonderful place to live. We are in the middle of the largest maintained network of nordic ski trails in North America, I can literally backcountry ski from my front door and we have hundreds of climbing routes within a 10 minute drive. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Actually it is wonderful. I work from home and live in a small village minutes from the ocean in New Zealand.

Groceries are can be delivered. The only reason to drive to town is the odd meetup.

Ha snap, I live in Northland and do the same. My day breaks are running around a track through the bush, body surfing when the surf is up and checking my traps. Small world.

I'm thinking of doing the same! Living in Sydney at the moment, but am an NZ citizen. Looking at Northland or Taranaki for the kitesurfing :)

Could I ask you a bit more about Northland? My email is in my profile.

This sounds amazing and I wouldn't consider this to be the "middle of nowhere", you have beautiful bush and surf to run through!

We are closer than you might think, as I am too in Northland.

For me it is hiking and sometimes kayaking.

Hi Max drop me a line if you want to catch up, email in profile

> Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?

My wife dragged me kicking and screaming to a rural area that's a popular vacation area.

(I must admit that I wanted to end up in a different rural area that's also a popular vacation area.)

My neighborhood is excellent, and there's plenty to walk to. Rural areas still have dense spots with plenty of things to do. There's just a lot of open forests around the dense areas!

What's terrifying is that I still telecommute for the job I got when I lived in Silicon Valley. I have no idea what's going to happen when I need to change jobs.

(Edit) I still miss living right on University Ave in Palo Also, CA. But, that's not sustainable given how much it costs to live there, and our (me and wife's) overall lifestyle desires.

I did that jump, but in Canada. I moved from a medium-sized city (pop. ~180K) to a literal village (pop. ~900), then I lost my remote job a few months ago. I just jumped back into freelancing, and for now I actually have too much work. There's a lot of demand for North-American developers on the freelance market. Also if your cost of living is low (as it tends to be in rural areas), you can afford to charge a little less but still make a lot of money (I suspect my rate is pretty cheap for my clients, but it's double the amount I used to make).

> I just jumped back into freelancing, and for now I actually have too much work.

What would patio11 say?

Charge more.

I work from home from a house in the countryside. There are no businesses here, no traffic, nothing disturbing me in my work. The closest neighbor lives a kilometre away. As a bonus, I don't even have a driver's license and the nearest bus stop is a 20-minute bike ride away from here.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but I guess it does take a certain kind of person to pull it off.

If you're working remotely and want cheap housing and a slower life, and you're interested in moving to some random place abroad, why wait on an opportunity like this?

Have you considered just moving somewhere much cheaper? I work from a beach in Mexico, pay almost nothing, and have a nice and slow life. And... it's a beach!

Obviously, there are plenty of places in the world to do this from if Mexico isn't your thing. I have a buddy in Triste, Italy, and another one down the coast in Croatia.

Anyways, I only write this because it seemed like something you want to do but are just looking for some "today's the day" chutzpah. I hope you end up where you want to be one day!

Where in Mexico? I've often thought about moving there, but I hesitate mostly because of crime. I also have a neighbor who lived there for almost a decade, until they were shaken-down by the Federales (with actual gunfights and shallow graves in his story! So they moved back to the US.)

Petty crime is always there, but you probably already have habits that thwart it like locking your door and taking your laptop to the restroom at the cafe. If a cop catches you smoking a joint on the beach and he happens to care, he'll ask for your cash, but I prefer that to getting caught in the States. ;)

More serious crime is unlikely to target you. Stay out of the north. And you can always live where the wealthier mexicans live in a city if you're nervous.

Quiet towns like a lazy beach town are pretty safe.

I'm currently based in Pto Escondido, a beach town in Oaxaca.

A good way to get your feet wet is to book an airbnb at one of the beach cities you can fly into, take a taxi down a highway that runs parallel to the shore, and get off at any of the smaller beaches/towns for a day trip. You could do a different one every day and get some work done at a cafe/bar on the beach there.

That way, worst case scenario, you're still at the beach with your touristy creature comforts (e.g. easier to find good network if you need to `npm install` -- half-joking!). But if you end up feeling more adventurous, you can take a taxi and find yourself alone on a tiny beach, which as far as I'm concerned, is one of the remaining wonders of the world.

Of course, the hardest part of travel is taking the first step at all. If it wasn't for finding a job in Guadalajara at a small incubator run by an American in /r/IWantOut, I would probably still be miserably working from a Starbucks table in Austin wondering when I'll have the balls to do something new.

This is akin to buying a totaled car. You're signing yourself up for a lot of work and the Government isn't going to really give you any help. In this case you're going to be in a very rural area, to the point of likely not having any real kind of internet.

The houses from what I saw looking through translated listings seem to have no insulation, ancient (ie nonexistent) plumbing, and "traditional" toilets (hole in the ground) with no heating/cooling. You're buying a badly insulated cabin in the woods more or less.

I think one of the main pain points in renovating the houses is going to be actually getting materials to the house. Some of these are rural to the point of not having real roads and being hours away from civilization. If you need to truck in a new water heater, you might be building your own gravel road first.

If you're looking to be really remote and more or less build a house, this might be an awesome opportunity - just realize this is more akin to buying a plot of land than "a house" per say.

Owning property or land in Japan does not give you right to reside within the country and you will still need to get some sort of visa in place in order to move in.

What's the easiest path to get a visa in Japan without being attached to a company?

Wedding. Would like to know that, too.

Ah this might work! But this makes you to be legally attached to someone, what isn't great I guess :(

Found a better option actually: setting up business. Should be fairly straightforward to do for a single remote developer.

The point where these houses have no insulation in the walls, no air conditioning or heat and a septic system that must be manually pumped.

Have fun in winter!

Also the location often means that you need to travel (an hour or more each way) for basic amenities and fuel, in some locations you might get snowed in at winter.

Totally true. Actually even more modern buildings are made to be (somewhat) cool in summer and no care at all is done about winter. So each room/apartment is warmed individually using air-conditioner instead of having a central heating per building.

Houses are generally not being given away but there are tons of places in the US where housing is dirt cheap compared to prime coastal urban real estate.

Where?

Look at a map of US MSAs [1]: nearly anywhere outside of an MSA will be cheaper than within the MSA. Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap.

Of course, the catch is that standing up your own slice of civilization infrastructure will get either expensive and/or time-consuming, depending upon your non-negotiables. The more requirements you will not do without, the more inputs you will want to haul into or build upon the property.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

> Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap.

This is so very very wrong. MSAs are purely based on population density. I grew up in one of these white counties on the map you linked. It's small towns, scattered among farmland and coal mines, and the local MSAs are nothing but a larger (but still quite small) town with an interstate.

As a heuristic, after looking myself for a couple decades for a residence that didn't participate in the global real estate mania we're still in the grips of, the MSA boundary works "good enough" as a starting point for median households setting up a search for a place to live that still follows a conventional 30% DTI ratio (or a safer 15-20% DTI to account for the greater income precarity for median US households today).

We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household.

A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity.

Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional.

YMMV of course.

Thanks, and something a little bit better? Have heard about Dayton OH

In addition to the sibling comment, you can also find relatively cheap housing in some of the Sunbelt although I understand that the real housing crash in Las Vegas has largely recovered.

If you're serious about it, you really need to think about your non-negotiables, your strong preferences, and how high you're willing to go for "cheap" housing. For some people the answer might be a condo in a smaller city that isn't in demand. For others, it might be a house that's out in the sticks someplace. There's also a huge difference between cheap as in $100K and cheap as in $300K.

Contra another post, you probably don't want land that isn't already engineered. Of course, also consider Internet. I know tech people who manage with satellite but there are a lot of compromises.

I'm a big fan of western/piedmont of NC for remote workers. It's not the absolute cheapest compared to the midwest, but the weather is better if you don't love snow, and it's still extremely cheap if you're in some non-hip parts (Greensboro, High Point, Winston Salem are very affordable small cities that have universities, and other less-connected mountain towns like Morganton/Wilkesboro/Marion/Hickory are even cheaper, but less vibrant), and there are plenty of roads connecting you to airports and bigger cities with more robust economies (Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte). Asheville is probably the nicest remote work city in NC, and would definitely beat Dayton culturally, but it's nowhere near as cheap.

You could probably move to a cheap part of your own country already with much less hassle and fewer integration issues.

The reason you don't is that cheap places in rich countries are usually cheap for a reason.

Hmm... in my country it'd only be affordable not cheap (The Netherlands). We're pretty populated over here and the government has every square meter planned out. We have a name for it in Dutch "bestemmingsplan" (literally: destination plan or purpose plan).

I bet I could find some cheap parts of the Netherlands. Although I guess it depends on your definition of cheap.

Looks like there are some cheaper areas here: https://www.koopwoningen.nl/nieuws/487:de-20-duurste-en-goed...

Now, compared to cheap places in the US, the house price is still somewhat high. But cheap areas in the US, you often have to live in a detached house, as apartments are often very uncommon, or even non-existent, whereas in the Netherlands multi-family housing is much more common(1). And in the US, cheap places you almost always need to own a car, which is inherently expensive, whereas in the Netherlands you can get by with just walking and biking. Plus, the safety net means that even if you're poor as shit, you're taken care of for things like healthcare, to a greater extent than the US.

1 - Looking at the example of Delfzijl, you can rent an okay-sized 1br apartment for ~600 EUR/month: https://www.iamexpat.nl/housing/rentals/delfzijl/apartment

Factoring in extremely low transportation costs, that makes for a pretty damn cheap lifestyle.

Fixing a dilapidated house is not a stress free life

This is the biggest reason keeping me and mine from making that leap. It's 2-3 years of hard work for a pretty solid potential payout

Not a house but if you're a remote employee Vermont will pay you $10,000 cash a year for two years for moving there.

https://www.businessinsider.com/move-to-vermont-remote-worke...

If you can keep a high salary and work wherever you want, and you want a quiet life, then just throw a dart on a map of the USA or the world. Basically everywhere except a few metropolitan areas is very cheap to live. If this is something you want, yes you are missing something, you should look around a bit.

Depends on if you know Japanese language and culture. Prepare to always be considered a foreigner by institutions and the general public. Plenty of English signs help me get by when I visit but that's in touristy areas (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, etc).

Where are houses being given away in the US?

I imagine that you need to be a Japanese citizen to get a free house.

Detroit. It's not free anymore but it's still dirt cheap.

I didn't believe you, but then I looked online and I saw that you were right! Here's a perfectly reasonable house in Detroit for about 4000 USD

https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/15285-Manning-St-48205/hom...

I've seen multiple programs similar to the Detroit one, though you need to know where to look. Generally they follow the same idea as the above: You get a house for cheap, but it needs major repairs/renovations. Essentially you get a house for below market rate, but the city gets tax revenue and their dangerous buildings fixed.

Where are houses being given away in Italy? I would love to know of the program.

Rural Italy is beautiful and the food (in the grocery stores and markets) is both great and ridiculously cheap. But there are a few downsides. 100-plus-year-old houses often require significant refurbishment including earthquake mitigation (depending on the area) and they can be expensive to heat unless you spend $$$ on new windows and good seals and insulation. But the biggest problem for a foreigner moving to Italy might be the bureaucracy: Huge stacks of paper forms to be filled out and handed in to a guy who just happens not to be in his office today. Repeatedly. If you have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, Italy is lovely.

Also, if you do a job that is defined in law (doctor, architect, journalist, etc), the bureaucracy might actually stop you from working until you’ve jumped several hoops - exams, payments, years of practice, and so on.

I lived in Italy for a number of years and would love to move back.

This made the news last year (you have to renovate and make a tourist trap or some economic positive): https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/italy-is-giving-away-over-10... That was an update on an older program that was pretty popular: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/world/europe/sicilian-tow...

I upvoted you, expecting that OP might deliver with the relevant article, but decided to do a search of my own and found some stuff.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free%20italy%20houses like the first few articles are about free or 1 Euro houses. Seems to be true!

Hmm... I was too lazy to do the Google search, sorry about that. I figured the average HN type would prefer to do a DYOR Google search anyway. I happened to have seen it on a Dutch program (a Dutch couple moved to Italy).

I know of a few places with schemes to incentive people to move to dying towns, in the regions bordering with Northern Appennini mountains and in the deep South. The catch is that these towns are dying for a reason: they are far from everything, there are no local jobs (or rather, no jobs most people would do - being a farmer in 2018 is unappealing), and the housing stock is often crumbling and centuries-old. The kids go to school in cities and never go back, so you’re left with a bunch of oldies. Do not expect any help from the State, but do expect hindrance, especially in building matters - Italian laws on paper are the best in the world, but in practice, compliance is hell.

don't forget about property taxes and HOAs. sometimes the property taxes can be higher than the value of the house. just watch out.

these houses should probably go to extremely low income people, not a software engineer

That feels like the wrong way of looking at it. The houses are very rural and dilapidated and cheap because no one wants them. Encouraging just about anyone to get out there and make it a home, highly-paid software engineers included, would be an economic boon for that area.

Houses don't get left abandoned in places with jobs. Knowledge workers are the only ones that can do remote work and thus are the ideal people to take those houses.

That's how you end up with an unhealthy neighborhood. All modern "let's give houses to poor people" program learned this lesson the hard way, and the current, better method is to ensure the recipients of these welfare programs are distributed among the rest of the neighborhood.

If the empty houses described in the article are clumped up, it would be best if the economic status of the recipients is disregarded.

This sounds great but you have to factor in that up to very recently, houses have been fairly poorly built in Japan as they prefer to demolish and build anew. Average lifespan of a house in Japan is 20-30 years. Which means that it doesn't always make sense to renovate these abandoned houses.

Some reading:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/03/15/w...

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-dispo...

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/disposable-...

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/03/31/how-tos/ja...

> This sounds great but you have to factor in that up to very recently

Has that changed?

I assume you get the actual property, not just the house sitting on it. The land is what japan generally values.

Houses are depreciating assets. It's the land that has value most places.

Japan seems to be the exception actually, in the US houses certainly are appreciating assets, market crashes and such notwithstanding.

I seem to have been unclear, when I said "houses are depreciating assets" I meant the structure itself. This is almost always true.

However, the land it is on may well be rising in value enough to counteract the depreciation - so your house + land may well be worth more in 10 years, even though the house itself is probably worth less.

Make more sense?

I believe a lot has to do with advances in Earthquake safety making it preferable to have a new house.

This is cool. Would not know where to begin with gut renovation in Japan, though. And some of these look quite weathered.

In US for example, you can typically sub-contract parts of the renovation to get decent pricing. One team for the basement flooring. One for waterproofing / sump pump installation. And then perhaps install drywall / paint DIY.

Of course this is aided by close availability to Home Depot, Lowes, and wide array of contractor grade materials and fixtures ;)

Japan doesn't renovate. It's probably the only country in the world where "used homes" are considered something to be ashamed of. People buy homes only to knock them down and start over, even if they're only a year or two old.

EDIT: You can read about it here: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/03/15/w...

In general completely true. However there are now a small number of people doing up old minkas. In fact my friend has a nice side business buying up these old properties in the countryside for ridiculously small sums of money, restoring them and AirBnB-ing them to tourists.

While you care to share a link to this minka-renovation business? Or is this just in Niseko...

> It's probably the only country in the world where "used homes" are considered something to be ashamed of.

That's generally true though it depends on the specifics e.g. they would renovate and maintain things like temples, ryokan or major multi-generational homes.

It's the "personal" homes which are considered disposable (pretty much anything you'd have in a suburbs in the US for instance).

US is becoming more like that over time too, if you look at a lot of the new builds in subdivisions it's hard to imagine them lasting that long.

I wonder if at some point the cultural attitude to "old houses" will become more like Japan's.

[edit]: I find the downvotes curious - I know plenty of people living in ~120 year old houses, and plenty living in 5-15 year old new builds in subdivisions. None of us can really see the new ones being in service in another 110 years. So what I am curious about is - will this (apparent) fact change attitudes towards houses over time? It may just be selection bias. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things about newer builds that are improvements; longevity doesn't seem to be one of them. Of course the older houses have their own set of problems.

Japan doesn't renovate. It's probably the only country in the world where "used homes" are considered something to be ashamed of.

I had heard that older Japanese were very 'allergic' to anything used or old, as it reminded them of the time during the war and post-war when everyone had to scrounge for everything. There was this thing in the 90's called '{some derogatory term}-shopping' where you'd dumpster dive in well off neighborhoods, and if you found a bit of 2 year old consumer electronics, you could assume it still worked.

> I had heard that older Japanese were very 'allergic' to anything used or old

That seems to be an exception pertaining to houses and especially single-family units. Objects/items seem to be restored as much as elsewhere if not more (see e.g. kintsugi).

Although transience/impermanence is also part of japanese tradition / aesthetics.

Not exactly dumpster diving. The Japanese simply left their not-so old stereos and appliances on the street, where people like me were only to happy to give them a second life.

> ashamed of

It might be true for some people, but that’s far from the mainstream. same for destroying a 2yo house, that’s an outlyer, as the title says the line is at 22 years in average.

The basic calculation is wether it will cost more to renovate a house or tear it down and build anew.

When considering redoing all the plumbing, upgrading insulation, eventualy the basic frame of the house if it built on wood, to then redo the whole kitchen and bathroom because so much has ch aged in the meantime, just tearing it down is the most cost and effective approach. For anyone buying an appartmwnt in Japan, the budgeting of all of that is layed out in the maintenance fees planning, where some part of it will be set aside for rebuilding.

Some people are renovating anyway, but think of it more like how people renovate 1920 area cars. The cost/benefit analysis is different.

Insane, every 22 years house goes to zero value. Probably adding relatively little money can extend the life to 40-50 or so. If I'm 30 and buy a house, makes no sense to need to tear it down when I'm 52.

People don't tear down their own homes (though the home may get torn down for them by e.g. an earthquake), they tear down the house on the land they buy when they move, and get their own house built on it.

Its just thinking of your house as a depreciating asset instead of an appreciating one. Much like a car. I actually can't imagine wanting to live in the same house for more than 10 years.

How often to people these days plan to be in the same house they bought at 30, when they are 50? How many actually do?

Do you know a place where I can read more about this? Sounds very interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

IIRC this is why living in Tokyo is actually affordable compared to, say, New York City.

How does that work for apartment buildings? Surely they don't casually demolish and rebuild massive structures made of reinforced concrete?

No, apartment buildings don't get town down as much, although the japanese tendency of buildings having limited value means as urban centers "grow out" first suburbian plots get torn down and merged to build a low-rise (2~3 floors), then that might get squared away for a mid-rise (half dozen floors or so), and if the city center grows enough that would ultimately get replaced by a high-rise.

If I remember correctly the rule of thumb is that a house is built to last 30 years, a normal building 60 years, and a high rise 90 years.

I think that is changing as standards have improved and houses are more able to cope with earthquakes.

Slightly off topic, but I was in rural Portugal recently, and my impression was that about one in three buildings was in some state of ruin, from otherwise delightful little cottages with holes in their roofs and empty windows, to remains of ancient walls just clinging together by the sheer will of their graffiti. (This isn't to pick on Portugal either - I've seen it in several different parts of Europe.)

For the less damaged ones, I don't really understand why it's not economical to throw a new roof on them to make them habitable. In the US, when a house rots it rots, because it's going to be made out of wood and gypsum and insulation that can't come back from exposure to the elements, but the buildings I was seeing were all stone. Is there some special failure mode that's harder to see in them, like black mold in the cracks or structural instability that makes them unrepairable, or is just lack of demand?

A good example is this building: https://goo.gl/maps/7uzuvfrUQHD2 This is right next to the national palace in one of the wealthiest regions of the country, and instead of fixing it up and putting it on Air BnB as "The Cottage by the Palace" you can see from google that it's abandoned and the roof has slowly been caving in for the last ten years.

It might be more expensive to fix than a new house due to location, lots of specialized manual labour needed (you cannot use eg standard window because the holes in the walls are non-standard etc) and regulation (concerning building codes, appearances (especially in such a prime old-town location) and, if you're unlucky, monument protection), and probably some issues with moisture that you'll have to address, etc etc., and everything but the walls need to be redone.

Plus then you sometimes have issues due to ownership. It might belong to somebody in an old-people's-home who basically forgot about it. It might be part of an inheritance and the heirs are in conflict about what to do for many years. It might belong to somebody in another city, who doesn't want the trouble of selling and not the expense of fixing it and renting it out. The owner might also have an emotional attachment, and lacking the money to fix it. It might have been in the family for generations... etc etc.

It's surprising how many places are empty because the owners can't be bothered. It seems to me one of the better ways to find a way to live in German cities right now is to find an empty one, locate the owner and badger them into letting you rent it.

Then again, there is a political culture of squatting empty places as well, especially if they are derelict...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting

(https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausbesetzung is a little better)

My guess is that the house is inhabited, the owners are probably poor, but have lived there for probably many decades, and have no intention of leaving. Their heirs won't have enough money to fix it up either, unless they emigrated to Luxembourg or something, and may very well keep living there, since they can't afford anything closer to Lisbon.

The problem with Portugal is quite often just a simple one: lack of capital.

By the way, the lower walls may be stone, but the rest is often just brick with terrible cement slapped on top. Water infiltration issues are rampant, especially in a humid area like Sintra. Mold is certainly an issue, and the solution often requires removing all the cement and reapplying it, which ain't that cheap.

The larger issue of rural dilapidated housing seems way less of a structural or engineering issue and just more of a desirability issue. Not for the house itself, but for whatever the area is. If you have enough people in that area that want to stay there and more people moving in then the residents will either figure out a way to make the house work, fix it up, or replace it.

The title says "Japan Is Giving Away 8 Million Abandoned Houses — Here's How to Get One (Video)" there is nothing explained in the article nor in the video how to get one!

The article title is misleading. A better title would be:

"Japan has 8 million abandoned houses. A small fraction are being given away"

The article then links to a blog which occasionally links to empty houses for sale for very low prices. The blog gets its information from local government "empty house banks". Many local governments have these, but lots of them are not web based, you would have to go to the government offices in person to ask about empty houses.

In reality, the best way to find an empty house in Japan is to go driving around the countryside and talk to some locals. They know who owns what and who might be interested in selling.

The article is linking to http://inakanoseikatsu.com

Yeah stupid clickbait titles i want my abandoned house

I went to Japan in March to buy one of these houses for a vacation home (I go to Japan once or twice a year). I could have bought a decent sized house in rural Japan for about $20,000 at the time, but most of them I looked at needed a ton of work and there weren't many shopping areas and other amenities nearby. I ended up buying an older condo just outside of Tokyo and fixing that up instead. It cost more, but it works for me.

Mind sharing what you had to spend? This would be fascinating to do, but would be great to know the actual costs involved.

Also, would you share, more in depth, the experience as a whole: Do you speak Japanese, married to a Japanese citizen/are one? What was the biggest unexpected etc...

Basically, a blog post about such an endeavor would be great reading...

THanks

Sure. I'm an American, I'm fluent in Japanese, and I'm married to a Japanese citizen. However, I think it would be easy enough to find an English-speaking guide to go around with you and look at houses. I could suggest some people, if you're interested.

Regarding the houses, there were different requirements depending on the city we looked at. For example, in Sadogashima the cost was about $20,000 for a house, but then the city would pay you $10,000 to $15,000 just to move there because their population is dwindeling, so the house would only end up being $5,000 to $10,000 dollars. The only requirement for the deal in Sadogashima was that you had to commit to live there for at least a year or two. Other areas we looked were between Tokyo and Sendai. The costs were about the same everywhere we looked, but some areas would only sell these abandoned homes to people with young children, or between childbearing ages, because they wanted their kids to settle in those towns as well.

I think the most unexpected thing was the zoning laws in some of the areas. For example, in a few cases, the house was in the middle of the block and the only way to access it was via a narrow alley between two other houses. Zoning laws allowed the existing house to be there, but prohibited it from being torn down and rebuilt, and some of them were in desperate need of being rebuilt. If you do decide to look at these free/cheap houses in Japan, make sure to do your due diligence so you don't get stuck with crap heap that you cannot do anything with.

We ended up buying an old condo just outside of Tokyo for about $100,000. It was cheap because it had been neglected and was in bad shape and somebody had died there. I put another $30,000 into it to gut and remodel it. It cost more, but I figured I'd have to get a Japanese drivers' license, buy a car, register it, and insure the car if I lived in a rural area, whereas I could get by with just a bicycle and the trains if I live around Tokyo. I opted for a higher immediate cost and a lower long-term cost by buying where I wouldn't need a car. There's a lot more to do around Tokyo as well. So far, I've been happy with the decicion.

I thoroughly enjoyed traveling around rural Japan for three weeks, talking to people and looking at houses. I'd do it again just for the experience.

Thanks for this. I'm Canadian and married to a Japanese. We're starting to think long term about something like this, as I really want the life experience living in Japan and she's not super comfortable where we are now.

Do deals like this happen often? What do you do for work? I'm a sysadmin so I'm worried about work options, but that's a different conversation.

Here's a blog from somebody who built a new house in Tokyo; you might find it interesting.[0]

[0]http://lundman.net/wiki/index.php/Tokyo_house

> Simulated pee splashback test

The attention to detail in Japanese engineering always amazes me.

The site opens with a message that probably violates GDPR. In that access requires agreement to third-party tracking by US firms. So here's an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20181128233021/https://www.trave...

Isn't it prohibitively hard to reside in Japan as an outsider? How can they expect to move up to 8mm houses unless predominantly to existing Japanese? Am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing that foreigners are not the target of these deals. Also it's not terribly complicated to get a visa to come here: you basically need at least a bachelor degree and to find a job. Given how the job market is starving for employees, it is not really hard. I know a half-dozen people of my country and my age that did it.

> Given how the job market is starving for employees

Japanese companies in general have an abhorrent work culture.

Let me hand wave cultural relativism for a second - sure, fine, it works great for the Japanese, or whatever, historical and cultural significance, fine. But I think I can make health arguments against it, let alone moral/value ones.

I wish they'd explore Visas for remote workers - partner and I are very interested in doing a spell in Japan, but we have absolutely no interest in participating in the still-majority work culture there. It'd be remote only, or a foreign company.

I started working for a Japanese tech investment company with this mindset. It's now outdated.

I was shocked to discover that Japanese employment law has changed dramatically vs the perception. Someone died a few years back apparently, so the Japanese government stepped in. They closely monitor logged overtime hours. Bosses whose employees persistently log long hours (I think it is 60+ hour weeks) get a warning, first from HR internally, then the government itself. It's a big deal.

They have a "no overtime Wednesday" every week, and a "Premium Friday" where workers are encourage to go home in the early afternoon.

I went in imagining people sleeping at their desks, etc, but it was the opposite..My Japanese co-workers are surprised at how much I worked! At this point, I wish the U.S. would adopt Japanese labor laws.

Not sure if it'd work for what your situation is, but there is up to 1yr visa possible if you have equivalent 30 million yen in savings. I don't know if they'd really care if you kept working remote as long as you had the money.

https://www.mofa.go.jp/ca/fna/page22e_000738.html

Aren't software engineers treated badly in Japan?

Oh the horror stories I have heard from Japanese colleagues when working alongside Japanese companies.

That being said it's not just software developers, it's practically everyone. Oh the horror stories I hear about my sisters-in-law.

All workers are. It’s practically indentured servitude, based on what I’ve read. It is also exceedingly difficult to be an entrepreneur there. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a beautiful country to visit.

Work culture in general is harsher, but a lot of professional jobs include benefits like housing (usually not too far from full rent) and full commute expenses in their compensation. These are perks usually added to your base salary, which is one of the things foreigners ignore when bringing up stories of lower salaries and harsh work culture. You take your pick which is more important to you when thinking about whether or not to live in Japan.

There's a stronger social contract in place than in other places. Work culture is harsher in terms of hours expected in the office than elsewhere, but there is a stronger respect for workers' material conditions as well.

Japan is actually quite a cheap country to live in, especially outside Tokyo. But even, in the city, costs for food and daily living are reasonable.

Well I'm east Asian so I wont stick out like a white person. But no, you wont have any hard time. Whether you will be accepted as Japanese is another story.

Homes in Japan are generally depreciating assets with a roughly 20-30 year lifespan. Some of these homes being given away are older, but when you take ownership, you’re basically getting land value. Whether or not the land is an appreciating asset is unknown, but the fact that no one wants it today says a lot. On the other hand, satoyama lifestyle is pretty special and amazing. I wonder if that culture can survive without a continuous lineage?

This is just one of the many initiatives by the government or a local body to give away houses. The population in remote areas of Japan (aside from tourism) is declining quite fast.

I've had friends who have bought houses for as cheap as $600 in remote areas of Japan. [1]

If you are interested in owning a house in Japan then Okutama (a town close to Tokyo) is giving away houses with certain conditions. [2]

There are at least five other programs scattered around the Kyushu island and around the Tohoku region. You may want to check areas affected by natural / man-made disasters such as Rikuzentakata, which are "reviving" its cities or towns.

If you are a tourist you'll get accommodation and travel tickets to these "reviving" towns (free of charge) as well (just need to know where to look). [3]

[1] https://imgur.com/74zVNlE

[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/11/04/national/social...

[3] https://www.detouur.com/rikuzentakatamain/

> If you are a tourist you'll get accommodation and travel tickets to these "reviving" towns (free of charge) as well. https://www.detouur.com/rikuzentakatamain/

This particular example you gave, while probably cheap, is not free (~$225/day)

oh wow, didn't see that charge added there. We took the trip for free but that was six months ago.

These houses look incredibly depressing and pretty old [1]. Not sure anyone would want to live in the middle of anything in a house that looks even worse than some places in Detroit.

1 - https://inakanoseikatsu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/sagis...

Not free, but I ran a search for nearby used homes and this is the cheapest one that came up:

https://www.rakusumu.com/sale/detail/00088-200291

That's about $7000 USD, and while I am sure there are many issues, it looks livable at least. It's also a decent enough location, close to the beach, shopping, a train station, schools, etc. It's not for me, but for someone looking to eliminate rent/mortgage payments from their life it could be an option.

Or if you're willing to step up considerably you could do something like this:

https://www.rakusumu.com/sale/detail/00007-200159

That's about $95k USD... and with no down payment and a 35 year fixed loan at 2.05% [1], your mortgage payments would be about $320/mo. Much cheaper than I suspect many HN readers pay in rent and you would own a fairly large and newly renovated house. Note however that to get a loan as a foreigner in Japan you would probably need to be a permanent resident. Also... I cringe a bit to think of how cold that house must be in winter.

Anyway - my point is not to disagree with you because I think you're right about probably not wanting to live in any house you can get for free. Rather just to point out that if anyone is really interested in moving to Japan, there are lots of affordable housing options to be found at number of different price points.

[1] https://www.shinseibank.com/english/housing/loan_kinri.pdf

> If this continues, at some point it may be necessary to consider limiting new construction. But that would have a substantial impact on the economy.

Lots of housing no one wants, but, we still need to keep building other housing that people do want.

Reminds me of the US labor market. Lots of people companies don't want to hire so we gotta bring in other people that companies do want to hire.

But, what should the US do with those unwanted people?

What the article is missing are the restrictions being imposed on age and size of family. They hope young families will come into the rural areas and reinvigorate these towns. Here is another article with more specific details.

https://www.rethinktokyo.com/free-houses-japan-countryside

Late comment, but I have a relative in Japan and I asked about this:

"The empty houses are caused by two factors. Aging population with younger people moving to the cities and the the way property taxes work. Empty lots have much higher taxes than ones with houses on them. So if a house becomes empty because of people dying off, it’s cheaper to just let an old house be abandoned and wait until you are ready to rebuild than to tear it down and pay high taxes. Houses aren’t worth much in Japan. Average houses aren’t built to last as earthquakes and humidity tend to cause deterioration. However the government will take the property if the taxes aren’t paid on it for a certain period. The free houses isn’t really a thing."

In Detroit some people - actually, Bill Pulte - are razing dwellings with an eye on redevelopment.

https://www.theblightauthority.com/

There are only 49 million homes in Japan according to Google. 8 million abandoned homes means that almost one in six homes are abandoned. Is that possible?!

Yes, that's better than China (22% vacancy rate, without counting rural regions)

Not immediately seeing any information on whether foreigners can acquire these houses, or if it's limited to citizens or permanent residents etc.

There's no restriction, but these properties are really in a bad way. You might also want to look at Japan Real Estate: https://www.realestate.co.jp/en/

Is “Wolf Children” an accurate portrayal of what it will be like to renovate one of these houses? (minus the wolves)

So could any foreigner (non-Japanese national with no particular business in Japan) seize one of those up?

If something violent happened in a house.. and people believe that this is bad luck.. does this make those people more likely to commit violent acts against the next home-owner, like self fulfilling prophecy?

Sucks to be a current home owner in the general vicinity of these free homes.

I lived in one of these! My friend was married to a Japanese woman and they got a free 10 year lease on an abandoned house. It was very romantic, especially with the tanuki running around in the ceiling.

How would one actually go about purchasing one of these 'free' houses? It doesn't seem to be a very foreigner friendly website.

Solution to SF homelessness problem.

i don't know why this is being downvoted. the core idea is a good one. Start moving people away from expensive areas and have them populate areas like the rust belt where housing is much cheaper. Detroit is pretty cost effective as others have mentioned.

What exactly would these people do in a place like detroits dilapitated housing wasteland for prosperity, work and money?

You'd need to create a subsidized economy for some decade or such to build it up.

Here is an idea - if a company like Amazon wants to move into NYC, as an example, rather than paying them ~3B to do so, why not require large companies to pay to subsidize a revival city in detroit.

Where those resources will be made to build out the core infrastructure needed to support a city there.

Rather than spending $700 billion dollars a year on defense spending, spend $70 billion to rebuild/build-out a new detroit? Want a city based solely on self-driving cars, wifi only, with small-sized apartment/tiny-home housing and many micro-lot farms?

A bold attempt at building out something would be nice to try again in this country. We need it.

Yep. Dollar for dollar (taxpayer dollars, mind you), you get a lot more bang for the buck.

Solving homeless crisis doesn't necessarily have to mean that everybody has a right to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world at taxpayers expense...

Rust belt and Detroit get cold in the winter. Homeless people gravitate to places that will not kill them in their sleep. The climate (temperate/weather, government, and population) are what draw homeless to specific areas.

The parent is implying you'd buy them the property, not just move them and still have them sleep outside.

i think landlords would still buy some of these at a discount (but not nothing) just to gain market share. thats assuming they dont get taxed very much.

there are only 6 properties listed for free. 6 < 8M

Out of those 6:

- 4 have already been transferred, so it's only free if you have a time machine

- the other 2 are dead links

If you want to live in a off-grid area. Sure.

as soon as I sell my $5 Detroit homes :).

There's a reason they're being given for free...

I always felt like The Walking Dead was missing an opportunity to do some good.

Years ago I read about a movie production crew that got permission to demolish a rundown public building as part of filming in exchange for rebuilding it afterward.

For TWD you could use several of those abandoned Detroit neighborhoods for a sequence and then bulldoze the neighborhood to the foundations afterward, reducing the health and safety concerns.

Ha. The idea of using Detroit for TWD, or even perhaps it's own spinoff series, is pretty gold, tbh.

It's not about the location, but about the tax credits...

Probably too expensive to do the bulldozing consider asbestos etc..

Seriously, Can you give some addresses ( or Zillow web url links) of Detroit home addresses where the home prices are so cheap

There are a few auction sites online, I believe the city runs one or two of them. The thing people miss on these is their annual taxes, which are not forgiven, as well as the near instant requirements to meet livability standards (reno) lest they be fined. There's a lot to it that's over looked. As they say, no such thing as a free lunch.

Here's some that start at the 4k range.

https://www.point2homes.com/US/Cheap-Homes-For-Sale/MI/Detro...

Here are some below $10k https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Detroit-MI/17762_rid/0...

A lot of those ads seem to think that anyone would buy those homes to renovate them. Tearing them down seems to be the smart decision, if you could even consider buying abandoned Detroit homes smart. One of them has fire damage throughout the home, literally holes in the roof from the fire. Ad calls it a "handyman special".

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Detroit-MI/88117170_zp...

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