Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think | Hacker News Reader

Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

konichivalue.com

283 pointskonichi-value225 comments

The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city. If we look at the numbers for Tokyo 23 wards[1] (what would traditionally be called "the city"), we can see they are virtually half than those from Paris or London:

16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that falls in the median (50%) for Tokyo 23 wards[1]. Only 30% of houses have the minimum recommended of 25sqm/person (so, 70% live UNDER in under 25sqm/person). If the other cities in the graph are correct, that makes Tokyo median size around half of the average of those other cities[2].

So yes, definitely Tokyo housing is tiny. I know it since I live here and talk with people; when I invite someone who is not in tech to my place they all comment on how big my 37 sqm "house" (studio/single room) is, to which I can only agree and laugh/cry inside. I'm happy because I am well for living in Tokyo, but it's still a tiny place compared to my hometown where everyone lives like kings.

[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-sp...

[2] I believe I'm using median/average correctly here, but happy for corrections! I check "at what sizes it's 50% of the # of households" and then took that measure. Sorry for mixing medians and averages, but I cannot calculate averages with the numbers I found.

I don't know about NY or Paris, but the comparison against London seems fair enough. They seem to be using a Tokyo metropolitan area of about 2000 km^2, and comparing it with Greater London at 1572 km^2.

And indeed, people throughout Greater London are entirely used to living in small, damp, shared boxes.

The geography of the "cities" is very different though (look at the density of population maps provided), where "Tokyo Metropolitan" is one third pure mountains, then one third low-density living (think L.A.) and then one third what people normally thinks of the city of Tokyo, all of these in a sausage-like shape, while "Greater London" grows in a circle and so it's a circle-ish area.

See this image with the labels, we should compare the green one instead of the 3 of them. Ideally "Tokyo" would be something more like the purple one, but the purple one is nothing. So we have "23 wards" (green), or Tokyo Metropolitan (the 3 together), neither of which is the best comparison, but def the green one vs London is much better than all of them (the purple dashes are how I think London would look like approx):

https://imgur.com/a/nCmkE80

And even for the "green" area, a good part of it is not that dense. I mean, it is still packed, but most of it is made of small 2 story houses rather than large apartment complexes and high rise buildings.

The real dense part that looks like the pictures of Tokyo you have most likely seen is around the Yamanote line, a train line that circles an area that is about 1/10 of the green area.

I see it everyday since I live here, no need for pics :)

But yeah I agree, one of the first things that surprised me is that you can walk for 20 mins (in the right direction) from any major train station and find yourself in a tiny 1-2 stories houses area.

If you want to take a more principled approach to size here, you should use a metric that corresponds to how humans interact with the region. Pick a point to call the center and find all the points with a round trip time less than some number.

To complement your post: To be clear, no one with a deep understanding of Tokyo area considers anything outside the "23 ku's" as Tokyo. Really, Okutama, Tokyo (two hours west of world's busiest train station: Shinjuku) is comically rural -- literally, there are big mountains and small family farms that grow wasabi (delicious!). Yes, the province of Tokyo is enormous and includes lots of protected nature (and lovely hiking trails!), but when most people say "Tokyo" they mean the central 23 cities ("ku's"). If you want to get more specific, Tokyoites sometimes discriminiate between inside and outside the loop train line called Yamanote line. It is definitely the sense of urban and ex-urban in Tokyo.

Yeah, every "city" has a point at which you're clearly "outside the city" but what you count changes depending on who you talk to.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Okutama,+Nishitama+Distric...

The "gray areas" on a map like this might be a decent "rule of thumb" but even those can be misleading. The best way to determine it is talk to a local.

The other amusing thing is that if some city is famous tons of areas around it will often claim it in name if not address; you'll find "New York Shop" in New Jersey from time to time, especially if doing mail-order business.

Thanks for the additional info, I found it a rather terrible article. Even taking its numbers at face value, it makes me sad for non-Americans. The difference between the NY average of 43 sqm vs the rest is essentially an extra room.

> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience

I have friend living in Tokyo paying <10万円 in rent for a (very small) single unit. A couple other friends share a larger unit and pay similar per person. All are in the 23 wards. This is unimaginable for other friends living in Paris (one of the 20 Arrondissements) and New York (one of the 5 boroughs), regardless of size. I have no anecdata on London.

Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a small western apartment, or trying to save by bulk buying ingredients when you don't have the space to store it.

So I think the title of the article is half right (rent is cheaper than you'd think), missing some key info (wages are also cheaper than you'd think), half of it is roughly incorrect (housing is not any more spacious than you'd think), and the article itself doesn't back it up well.

Yes, the numbers are a bit skewed by the fact that more people live alone in Tokyo than Paris or NYC, but it's definitely true that you get more square meters per $ in Tokyo. Also, it is true that people on Tokyo on average earn less than NYC, London and Paris, but they also spend a smaller percentage of their total income on housing, so housing is cheaper in PPP terms too. I'll dig out the exact numbers tomorrow if anyone is interested, but now I'm out in one of Tokyo's extremely cheap bar districts having skewers and beers for less than $10

Do you know numbers about how much housing is sponsored by the companies in Japan? Maybe that's what is making the difference since it's not counted neither as salary, nor as the price of the house? I know some large companies sponsor partially or totally the housing of thousands of their employees, again skewing prices greatly.

For example if Tanaka's salary is $500 lower because the company is partially paying for their place, that means on paper his salary is lower, the price of the place is MUCH lower, and the ratio of housing/salary is also lower, than if he received those $500 and then used it to pay for the house.

They aren't from my experience working in two major Japanese companies. Sometimes they'll pay your network bill if WFH is allowed, but that's basically it. Not sure about smaller companies, but honestly, I'd be surprised.

They definitely do, I was paid for it working at a Japanese company, and I know multiple personal cases where that happened as well (one was a dormitory, another full housing, and another partial housing). The internet is full of evidence that it happens, so my question is "how often?".

e.g. https://www.gtalent.jp/blog/japanwork-en/social-insurance-we... or https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/54fjgf/how_much_...

One of the apartments that I used to rent was owned by a large Japanese firm, specifically for the purpose of renting out at a substantial discount to its employees.

Maybe it's a thing in foreign company and foreign employees. Plus, note that reddit thread is 6y old and already plenty of answers say are getting nothing from the company. I've never heard of Japanese company paying Japanese employee for rent, even partially. Nor I would expect it to be a common thing. As said, though, I just worked in two companies and just have a bunch of friends, which makes it purely anecdotal.

I specified Japanese company for a reason... I've worked in 3 Japanese companies, 2 being "foreigner" (where they did not offer that) and one traditional Japanese (where they offered that).

I know 3 Japanese people (nothing to do with foreigners or foreign companies) that had their house paid by the company totally or partially, and they told me it was common in their company/industry. And those were large industries (train company, hospital, manufacturing).

Mine is anecdotal, but from how they described it it's an anecdote involving hundreds to thousands of people indirectly, so I'm very confident that it's not an isolated thing.

In Tokyo, you can work as a part time janitor and make enough to live in a 500 square foot place within a 30 minute commute by train

No, you can’t.

50sqm is a large apartment for a single person. Without checking, I’d guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 man per month.

A part time janitor would gross half that.

That's weird then, since I know someone in that boat. You can easily get out into Setagaya-ku from Shinjuku with less than a 30 minute commute, and there are plenty of cheap places to live out there

I paid 13 man/month for a 47m^2 apartment, and that was in a pretty nice area (Mitaka) and without searching particularly hard.

Our place is two floors, 54 square meters, desirable area, ¥150000/month, within the 23 wards (inside the Yamanote line as well). We started renting it two years ago.

My place in an extremely desirable area in Setagaya ku (56m2, 5 mins from Shimokita by foot) is 25man, same size in a equally centrally located part of Suginami ku (Koenji) would be around 15man, bump it out to Mitaka and you’re looking even cheaper, go 10-15 mins from the station instead of 5 and it’s dirt cheap.

There's a tax savings thing that companies do, where the lease is done in their name, and your rent is deducted from your paycheck. It's beneficial for both you and the employer, so it's pretty common.

I don't think it's extremely common to live in actual employer provided housing.

I lived in 250sqft with a shared bathroom in NYC for 2 years and loved it. Loved in 800 sqft in suburban America for 4 months and couldn’t handle it. In a big city with affordable Third Spaces you can simply live outside of your apartment.

The thing is that you’re not living in your apt. You live in the city with all the buzz.

In the suburbs you’ll have to get that buzz in your house somehow

Generally you move to the suburbs to get away from the buzz.

In my experience if you hate people the city is actually the best place to live. Yes you're surrounded by a million people but they all ignore you. In rural areas nobody has a personal bubble and you're supposed to do small talk and give a shit. Folks gossip. They know you. The horror...

Who said anything about hating people?

Cities are busy and noisy, suburbs are slower and quieter, and rural areas even slower and even quieter.

You have to interact with people at some point, even if it's just when you get groceries. In rural areas, everyone knows everyone: you can't stay anonymous. In a big city, you probably don't even know your neighbors, and you choose your own friends.

I never mentioned anything about prices though :)

550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo.

I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1 of London and "Yamanote area" in Tokyo, while New York 5 boroughs is a lot bigger and more comparable with 23 Wards. But anyway let's go with it, since at least it's much better than comparing it with Tokyo Metropolitan. With Airbnb (which is usually a lot more expensive than long-term rental) I can find a bunch of places for under 1k USD:

https://imgur.com/a/FIODYlo

For London I could literally not find any, and for Tokyo also a bunch of places (you might notice that these are way further from the center than the area of Paris, but hey I said that was fair):

https://imgur.com/a/0XEvBcT

So it seems that London is particularly expensive, similar to Tokyo's Yamanote; while Paris 20 Arrondissements are at a similar place as Tokyo 23 wards.

C'mon mate you can't be for real, you can't just look at Airbnb data and make any conclusions about rent from that. They literally target different audiences.

People living in Tokyo don't check AirBNB to find apartments to rent

Unfortunately, the sites they DO use are entirely in Japanese, so you're not going to be able to get usfeful infographic data in a few minutes

Yes, my 550sqft (was a very rough size approximation, 5 yrs ago from memory) was certainly not in Tokyo, and the 4万 (plus utilities) that I paid for rent was seen as expensive. I was just using it as a basis to show that straight space comparisons between japan residences and north american residences aren't reasonable, as everything is geared to smaller living.

AirBNB is extremely unpopular in Japan, it's not a good comparison for anything. Searching on Suumo I can see over 100,000 apartments over 50m^2 listed (which doesn't prove much of anything, but gives an idea).

Run SUUMO or Homes through Google translate and you’ll probably get a good idea of the rent level

I live in a 95sqm apartment in the city for 26万/m, and I'm in an expensive area. When I was looking for apartments, I found lots of 60+sqm apartments for <20万/m even in some of the pricer areas. For standalone houses, you can find plenty of 70+sqm houses for purchase at ~5000万, which would have a mortgage of around 15万 a month.

It's important to note that you can get a mortgage at a rate somewhere between 0.6-1.6%, which means that even for seemingly high prices, you can buy something and have a surprisingly low mortgage cost.

10万円 = 100,000 yen, which is about:

USD 675.18

EURO 683.40

GBP 588.43

For anyone who is interested but too lazy to search

We need a disclaimer since from ~last month FX has gone crazy, whether we are using old or new numbers. For me I'm still thinking 10万円 is:

USD ~1000 (a bit less, but just insignificant)

EUR 800~900

And virtually all articles you find today regarding real estate, USD vs JPY, etc. will be talking with old numbers. It's important to talk about the new numbers, but I'd wait a bit for them to stabilize before being "acktually the yen now is" in articles (I'm not saying parent comment is doing that, just warning that those people are everywhere).

Note that the JPY lost about 30% of value this year, while rent (nor wages, nor cost of living) haven't caught up to those figures. For the past few years, the JPY/USD rate was around 110.

In terms of costs of living and salary percentage, 100,000 yen feels like it's around $1000 or so.

For context, a new grad will probably end up making around 200,000 - 250,000 yen (before taxes) a month at a lot of places.

To be clear, in the last one year, the Japanese yen vs US dollar has declined by about 23%: 148 JPY/USD vs 114 JPY/USD. As a result, "dollarised" Tokyo real estate suddenly looks very cheap. For foreign investors / foreign captial, yes, this is true. For local residents / local investors, there is still almost zero inflation here. As a result, local real estate prices are mostly unaffected by USD/JPY FX rates.

When looking at real estate expenses from perspective of local residents, it is always best to look at local currency median income. If median income or real estate prices are unchanged relative to local currency median income, who cares(!). The rest is just an article in a financial newspaper!

I lived 3 mins from Asagaya station (10 mins to Shinjuku) with my wife in a 23m2 apartment for 70k yen ($475) and loved it, very sunny apartment in a bustling neighborhood, tons of great street life, with everything I needed arranged very compactly. It requires an adjustment that location, not space, is the luxury (don’t invite friends over, go places with them). Probably part of why there are always so many people on the streets everywhere.

I'm sure you've researched this and sure some apartments in Tokyo are small. I'd like to touch upon the big-house comment, though. It may be that your Japanese friends say that simply because it is polite, and very common, thing to say when you visit someone's house for the first time.

> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city.

Yep. In that case half of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey etc. should count as well.

I’ve had the good fortune to visit Tokyo several times, and visited a few apartments of friends who have regular middle class jobs: animators, cooks, tailors. Every apartment was tiny. Like less than half the size of any apartment I've ever lived in at any point of my life living in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

I’ve stayed many times with a friend whose father is a well-known Japanese movie actor and even they live in a house which would be modest by any US suburban standard, in a quiet part of a nice neighborhood (kichijoji) but still an 8-10 minute walk to trains and very bustling, active parts of town.

The thing I’ve found remarkable with Tokyo is how walkable it is and how, despite how crowded and dense it can seem, the street level experience can feel very accessible and not at all overwhelming. Many good parks, walking paths and general accommodations for people not in cars.

If they are considering Tokyo Metropolis, they might be including Ogasawara, which is 1000km from downtown Tokyo.

When I thought I was going to be living in Tokyo for work for a couple of years, I had started to spend some significant time looking for places to rent, and yeah - I had to go out to Saitama or Chiba to find anything that I would be comfortable living in without paying absurd prices.

Which, honestly, wasn't the worst. 40 minutes to an hour on the JR is 10-30 minutes more than my current commute, but I could have dealt with that in exchange for more space.

It is the price one has to pay for living in the city and being fashionable.

I see this in Amsterdam: rich expats who barely grasp that there is a country outside the city.

Should also be noted that Tokyo is one of the few major metropolises in the world where the price of housing has not meaningfully increased in real terms since 2000[1]. The Japanese constitution drastically limits zoning, building and land use restrictions. As a result the city of Tokyo builds more new housing than all of California or England.[2]

(And no, this isn't because of Japan's demographics. While Japan as a whole is stagnating, the population of Tokyo is still increasing as fast as London, New York or the Bay Area because of high rural to urban migration.)

Tokyo is very much proof that NIMBY reforms are the solution to the housing crisis in the West. Deregulating the ability of property developers to build new housing will incontrevirtibly increase supply, blunt runaway housing costs, and make dense cities with high economic opportunity affordable for the middle class.

[1]https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-... [2]https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-...

Even though everyone wants to live in Tokyo, the same is true for hit real estate markets in other countries that it is being compared to. We aren’t comparing Tokyo to Duluth.

Lack of building codes like must have central heat or must have bathroom also can bring housing prices down.

Tokyo's building codes do require bathrooms. Plus minimum sunshine for a room to count as a bedroom, along with shutters on all windows.

What caught my eye about your comment is central heating. Japan in fact penalizes central heating. Not just not requiring it but going so far as to increase property taxes slightly.

In Japan's case it is a desire to reduce energy intensity in a country dependent on energy imports.

You wrote: <<Japan in fact penalizes central heating>>

I belive it. Japan housing is so inefficient for a wealthly / highly industriaslied country: It is bizarre!

I tried to Google about this topic, but I did not find anything. Can you provide a hint about your source?

what do you mean by inefficient? japanese houses are remarkably energy-efficient for their climate. they are very breezy, which cuts down on AC use in the summer, and in winter you heat specific objects instead of the entire house

That really isn't true. A lot of older housing in Japan has really bad insulation, you are basically stuck with a kotatsu in the winter not by choice.

i took GP's comment of "heating specific objects" to mean an object like a kotatsu.

That’s on purpose, to avoid mold in the summer. And heating a kotatsu and a bed instead of an entire house is way more energy efficient

> Tokyo's building codes do require bathrooms. Plus minimum sunshine for a room to count as a bedroom, along with shutters on all windows.

I'm actually interested to know if Melbourne has similar minimum standards. I'm mostly in favour of deregulating residential construction, but after seeing multiple shoddily built apartments with next to no sunlight in the Melbourne CBD, I shifted a bit closer to the "regulation" side of the spectrum.

Do you actually think the comment you replied to was complaining about requirements like central heat or bathrooms? NIMBYs will trot out every excuse and misdirection to avoid addressing the dire shortage of housing. This anti-growth mindset is a philosophy of death. I suspect that deep down, many want the world to end with them and are actually sabotaging efforts to solve societal issues out of some sort of Freudian death-drive.

What in the -- Freudian death drive? I'd wager it's far more simple: run of the mill selfishness. NIMBYs want to keep the gravy train flowing while they're here. Increased housing stock threatens the currently astronomical prices and returns. NIMBYs are "anti-growth" because their pocketbook demands it.

This isn't it. On the one hand, people acknowledge that transit resources, clean environment, water, electricity, don't grow on trees (and that trees are also nice). On the other hand, anyone who wants to control development at all is labelled as a NIMBY. Some of that is accurate, some of that is not. But I get it: you want your cake and you want to eat it also.

Tokyo definitely has places without (a) toilets in your apartment (you have access to one in the same building though) and (b) places without showers in building (you'll have to use a bathhouse). The lack of heat might be annoying to some people, and the insulation isn't going to be good enough to let your electric space heater work very well (so get used to using a kotatsu). Now, using a kotatsu isn't bad, but it isn't super convenient.

>Tokyo definitely has places without (a) toilets in your apartment (you have access to one in the same building though) and (b) places without showers in building (you'll have to use a bathhouse).

These are really old buildings. No one is building new housing units like this.

This is like judging places in America based on trailer homes made in the 1960s.

Hat tip for "Duluth". If anyone is not famaliar, it is north-central United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth,_Minnesota

>(And no, this isn't because of Japan's demographics. While Japan as a whole is stagnating, the population of Tokyo is still increasing as fast as London, New York or the Bay Area because of high rural to urban migration.)

Tokyo had negative population growth in 2022 and is forecasted to continue decreasing in population. That said, these differences existed before Tokyo's population stagnated.

>Tokyo had negative population growth in 2022 and is forecasted to continue decreasing in population.

Any such forecasts you can take with a giant heap of salt. 2022 is this year, and isn't even over yet, and is on the tail end of a worldwide pandemic. Many people have moved away from urban cores because of the rise of WFH. Now, according to the news, many companies in the US at least are cracking down on this and demanding workers come back to the office, so it's anyone's guess what housing trends in cities, including Tokyo, will be in the next 5 years.

Good point. One small issues: I think your first sentence is missing a negative or you want to change "increased" to "decreased"

Thanks!

Here's an archive of the FT piece to which the Vox article refers:

https://archive.ph/pVrex

Lots of additional detail.

This is my random personal post: Last weekend, while riding my bicyle between Shinjuku station and Shinagawa station, I was stunned by the density of buildings on major roads. It felt like a one hour bicycle ride surounded by non-stop 10-story buildings... forever(!). My point: A 10-story building is not impressive, but 500 of them on the same road is incredible. The wall of concrete is hard to understand in Tokyo before you see it with your own eyes.

Dutchies/Belgies: Is anywhere similar where you live?

California: 1 new home per 354 citizens per year (confirmed using primary US government sources).

Tokyo "city": 1 new home per 96 citizens per year (unconfirmed but reasonable).

Tokyo "metro": 1 new home per 113 citizens per year (confirmed using primary Japanese government sources)

I figured it would compare best if we translated this to "per capita" form. Eyeballing the FRED source[3], looks like California permits 8,000-10,000 new home units per month, or 110,000 per year for a state of 39 million people. This has been (relatively) stable for quite a few years.

The sightline blog quotes WSJ which asserted that Tokyo city built 145,000 new homes in 2018. I was unable to find the source for the WSJ claims -- sightline.org claims that this is just the Tokyo City, not metropolitan, but WSJ makes no such distinction (conclusion is uncertain). However we do have some contextual numbers:

Japan added 942,000 housing starts in 2018 according to Statista[0], whose numbers for 2020 and 2021 perfect match Japanese government numbers[1]. So "Tokyo's" housing starts accounted for 15% of national housing starts. 11% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "city" and 29% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "metro". Additionally, Tokyo "metro" ("National Capital Region" - 首都圏) added 327,128 homes in 2018[2], and this has also been relatively stable year-to-year. So "145,000" seems reasonable at least.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/667913/japan-dwellings-c...

1: https://www5.cao.go.jp/keizai3/getsurei-e/2022sep/4.pdf

2: https://www.lij.jp/pub_f/monthly_data/2019_11.pdf (p. 35, 4th column)

3: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B0kN

> California: 1 new home per 354 citizens per year (confirmed using primary US government sources).

> Tokyo "city": 1 new home per 96 citizens per year (unconfirmed but reasonable).

Are those using the same definition of new home?

According to comments on previous discussions here about housing in Japan, which a bit of Googling seems to corroborate, houses in Japan tend to depreciate with houses becoming worthless in 20 to 30 years. When the owner moves out the new owner often demolishes the old house and builds a new one on the lot.

That's much less common in the US.

To compare to new homes in the US you'd probably not want to count new houses in Japan that are replacements for a recently demolished 20 to 30 year old houses. You'd only want to count new houses that increase the available housing.

Not that many people in Tokyo live in single-family homes; towers and other multi-unit buildings are very common. It's very common to see older buildings torn down and replaced with taller buildings, so even though they're losing the units in the demolished building, there's a significant net gain in units.

And these days, I don't think anyone is demolishing a house after only 20 years. 40-50 years certainly; those structures are unsafe because they don't meet modern buildings codes. Anything built before ~1981 is considered generally unsafe.

The article makes a major mistake: it uses Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to, basically "Tokyo State", area 2,194.07 km2) for comparisons, not central Tokyo (23-ku, aka the former Tokyo City, area 619 km2). So it's basically the same as saying houses in New York are much larger than those in Paris, because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.

> Even more striking is that more people in Tokyo live in detached houses compared to apartments (30%) than in New York (16.3%) and Paris (12.3%).

I'm pretty sure this "striking" fact is an artifact of including a whole lotta suburbs, exurbs and farms in the Tokyo stats. Very few people live in detached houses within the 23-ku.

TL;DR: Housing in greater Tokyo is indeed affordable, but as anyone who's seen a "one-room mansion" (read: tiny studio) can attest, it's rarely spacious.

Okutama, Tokyo is part of "Tokyo Metropolis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okutama,_Tokyo . The furthest I've been is Hachioji, which was about 1 hour by train from 23-ku. Hachioji is roughly half as far as Okutama. In New York City terms, getting to Hicksville, NY takes about 1 hour by train. For Bay Area folks, both Dublin / Pleasanton and Bay Point / Pittsburg ... or even Antioch are about an hour away by BART.

Is 1 hour by train a reasonable metric to use given the differences in trains

yes, because we are measuring how satisfied the people will be with their living arrangements not how fast the trains are. As a person I don't care if the train is fast or slow I care how long it takes me to get home - if it takes me 1 hour to get home with a slow train or 1 hour with a fast train it is the same to me - I live 1 hour from work.

Almost. Take reliability of trains into account too. If you are physically closer you have backup options (buses, other trains, bicycle perhaps!). Sydney has such slow transport that if you need to make connections it can be quicker to cycle the same distance. The UK people live not just in suburbs but entirely different cities to commute to London, but using trains that if they go wrong - and they will - it’ll be long and/or expensive commute that day.

> Take reliability of trains into account too.

I think it's fair to say that Japan is the country in the world with the most reliable trains

Switzerland, but Japan is up there indeed!

> Sydney has such slow transport that if you need to make connections it can be quicker to cycle the same distance.

I believe that would come under the time to get home calculation. Aside from that all these other points would seem to be to Japan's benefit.

I'd say yes, an hour to work - while long - is pretty acceptable to most. Many caveats here such as reliability of transport etc but it does come down to time.

I think there’s an adage of urban planning that the median commute is always 30 minutes independent of how much transport infrastructure you build.

An hour commute to work is most definitely not acceptable to most, especially post-pandemic. Median commute in the US is about 26 minutes and many people are now used to working from home some or all of the time. Hour-long commutes are outliers for a relatively small percentage of people in a small number of cities.

Fair enough, my point of view may be skewed by living here for quite awhile

Possibly. But close to an hour commute (or more) is probably the reality most places if you work downtown in a city and don’t live within the city limits. Even within NYC getting to the financial district from Brooklyn or Staten Island is probably hitting close to that.

Average commutes in the US are brought down by urbanites who live close to the office and suburbanites who live a modest drive away from an office park.

The data does not support your statement. For example: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute/

Sure, if you cherry pick the worst possible commutes in the worst commuting cities you're going to find pockets of ~1hr commuters, but the broader claim simply isn't true and is perpetuated by people who are themselves trying to justify their overly long commutes. The large majority of people value their time too much to put up with commutes over about 40 minutes.

That data for people commuting into cities seems pretty consistent with what I said. A minority have a less than 30 minute commute. A significant majority aren’t more than an hour. I certainly agree that more than an hour isn’t common though 10-15% isn’t nothing. I did that part-time for about 18 months and it really isn’t sustainable.

Also presumably the number goes up if you exclude people who live within the metro whereas I specifically excluded that group.

1 hour is a fair measure in my opinion, the average commute time is about 30 minutes in the US:

> In 2019, the average one-way commute in the United States increased to a new high of 27.6 minutes [27.6]

Which would mean the reasonable "maximum" is going to be about an hour one-way. Some will commute further but it'll drop off very fast. You can actually see it in action if you graph house prices on a map around an urban area; once you are outside commuting distance from the center prices start going down. People will still commute to the edges of the metro, but the numbers who want to decreases.

And a train can create "pockets" further away by mileage.

[27.6] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

Not fair comparison, Okutama is literally in the middle of a mountain range with no much around, but you can get there combining a bunch of express trains in a very straightforward combination, which seems pretty hand-picked. Hicksville to NYC is 56km by car. Okutama from Tokyo Station is 96km.

I actually compared train-to-train distance to Hachioji, not Okutama.

Aren’t the backstreets of the less central ku filled with houses? I mean Setagaya, Ota, Edogawa, Adachi, Suginami, etc.

I used to pick stations at random to arrive at and explore, and what I always saw was endless houses. Only the areas closer to bigger stations had manshon.

I think you might be conflating Shibuya/Roppongi/Shinjuku with less central parts of the 23 special wards.

even in Shinjuku there are cheap houses if you look. My friend rents an old house with renovated interior in Shimoochiai for what I thought was surprisingly cheap

Those are huge wards by themselves. There are plenty of busy as well as residential places. For example, Setagaya-ku - stations like Sangenjaya, Jiyugaoka or Futakotamagawa are far cry from the quiet residential areas. There's a lot of any kind of housing there - bigger, smaller, houses and mansions alike.

Agreed, this article is basing it's numbers off of this (linked) study: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/airdrive-images/wp-conten...

If you view page 6 and 7, you'll see why these numbers are largely irrelevant since the boundaries for all the "cities" except NYC (which is the 5 boroughs) include the large swathes of suburbs/exurbs around the city.

A study looking at 23-wards vs Inner London vs City of Paris would be a lot more informative.

BTW, the writer of the article seems to simply be using these numbers to push his view that real estate prices will continue to go up in Tokyo. Housing Japan, a Japanese real estate agency that caters to foreign investors shows pricing for apartments in the 23 wards have been on a pretty crazy upwards trajectory [1], but 1) this is denominated in JPY pricing, and the exchange rate has tanked by 35% vs USD this past year, and of course, I'd be much more interested in seeing that post revisited in 2023...

[1] https://housingjapan.com/blog/tokyo-residential-real-estate-...

JPY is poised for an astronomical fall. The government cannot both keep servicing debt and buoying the currency . Those houses will appreciate in value JPY denominated and crater in terms of USD.

So....living in Japan with a USD income we should actually wait longer to pull the trigger on buying real estate? I was already sizing up properties across the country, putting together a plan for my family to buy properties for rental income because they are already cheap...

New York "metro" is always tricky. All of New Jersey, southern Connecticut, Staten Island, the Bronx, outer Brooklyn, outer Queens: Who the hell cares. Yes, I will be down-voted for this comment! My point: Defining inner city NYC that is wealthy requires some care and consideration. All the interesting "real estate action" happens in a very small radius from midtown Manhattan.

And the apartment as a comparison to houses doesn't help much, as Japanese houses tend to be smaller than western. Source is me, I've been living in Japan for over 10 years now.

Western being what exactly? Houses are rarely spacious in a lot of what qualifies as 'west'. You can't compare The Netherlands and Belgium with Germany, let alone the US.

Sorry I should have specified, I was referring to Aussie homes(my home country) or US. My bad.

But even then I'd probably guess Japanese are smaller. I have not looked at the numbers and will go look now though, I should have before commenting.

Edit: you're right(as I had assumed being familiar), Netherlands average from a quick search is roughly on par.

> because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.

But isn't the entire Tokyo Metropolis under an hour by mass transit? That's a far cry from Buffalo. Like, Buffalo cannot commute to NYC by anything other than private aircraft.

If you replace "Buffalo" with "an hour out of NYC" his point still stands.

Except that housing an hour out of NYC seems to be more expensive than the housing the article talks about.

I don't know - an hour out of Penn Station takes you as far as places like Wyandanch on Long Island with the LIRR, or Stamford, CT with the MNR.

I specifically looked at Stamford when I wrote that. Tokyo is in the 350-600sq ft range by the article. You can currently get a fairly spartan 600 sq ft in Stamford for the price listed (one vacancy). That's more than the average the article cites, but in the same range.

After all, you'd have to compare the outskirts of Stamford with the outsirkts of Tokyo.

Well, yeah, if you take the commuter rail line along the densely populated coastline.

If you take the Harlem Line up to the middle of nowhere, you can get to Katonah in an hour on the express trains during peak hours.

And in the other direction, an hour out of Penn Station can get you about halfway across northern NJ even with extensive train traffic.

The theoretical travel time might be an hour, but we can't realistically compare the travel time variances between MetroNorth and Japanese trains.

Going to Stamford is maybe like 1 hour, with frequent catastrophic delays and problems, such that we can maybe model it as like 1.5hr +/- 20 minutes, whereas an hour on a Japanese train is like 1.01hr +/- 30 seconds.

Wildly different user experiences.

OK sure, but if you want to talk about wildly different user experiences, you also need to consider the likelihood of being physically rammed into the carriage by the platform staff so the doors can close when riding a rush-hour train out of Shinjuku station or whatever.

New Jersey and Long Island are not more expensive than what the article talks about.

Technically NYC commuter rail goes out about 1.5hrs.

Technically Tokyo Metropolis includes some islands several hours by plane south of Tokyo, including Iwo Jima of WW2 fame. Their combined population is only a rounding error compared to the mainland though.

Japan also has a declining population, extremely low immigration, and minimal foreign housing purchases.

These are the opposite factors of what urban US is facing.

Even Tokyo metro area population has been in decline and is forecast to decline, as NYCs continues growing.

Tokyo housing-space-per-resident being higher is probably also an artifact of lower household formation / childrearing than western cities.

That said Tokyo has different zoning which allows for smaller apartment units than NYC/SF/etc and should be applauded for that.

I don't have numbers, but I doubt that 12.3% of people living in Paris proper (the 20 arrondissements) live in detached houses. Yes, there are villas in the city, but they're extremely rare. I don't see them housing more than 1 in 10 people.

So their numbers seem indeed dubious.

Edit: I found official stats (French only): https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2011101?geo=DEP-75#chif... Table "LOG T2". "maisons" = "house", "appartements" = "apartments"

In 2019, less than 1% of housing stock were "houses".

Your point that we have to be careful about the basis of comparison is well-taken, but your analogy is not sound. New York state is 141,000 km2, it's over 1/3 the size of all of Japan.

> it uses Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to, basically "Tokyo State", area 2,194.07 km2) for comparisons, not central Tokyo (23-ku, aka the former Tokyo City, area 619 km2). So it's basically the same as saying houses in New York are much larger than those in Paris, because you're comparing all of New York State including housing in Buffalo etc with the 20 arrondissements of central Paris.

As others have said, difference between NYC and NYS is much much larger than that...

But for reference, Ottawa, Canada, is one of the largest cities in Canada by area at 2778 km^2. But the Greater Toronto Area, what many call "Toronto", is ~7000km^2 and only has ~6 million people...

Toronto proper is only 630km^2, with 3 million people. The scale here is reasonable, Tokyo has excellent transportation options that make it realistic to live anywhere in that region.

I paid $1,500 for furnished 2 bedroom:

Can confirm. Three years ago I spent 2 months in a furnished two bedroom apartment two stops away from Shinjuku - paid $1,500 / month. Had three different subway stations within ~7 min walk each. Great location, very inexpensive.

The company I used is Fontana - English speaking, they set up gas/electric/water and all I had to do was pay for them at the convenience store nearby (7 Eleven). The only requirement is a 2-month minimum stay. Will do again.

Paris, London and New York - the key points of comparison - aren’t exactly known for their spacious housing.

One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more than you can say for New York) but clearly nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside. And I’ve never seen more miserable public parks in a developed country.

I have to agree and disagree :)

First, it's not clean, it's just different way of unclean and only during certain periods of the day. But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.

On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.

"Nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside" => completely agree, my pet peeve here is that one of the best towns geographically speaking of Japan is probably the ugliest town I've seen in my life in a 1st world country (Kawaguchiko, with the beautiful lake, lush forest and Fuji San nearby).

"never seen more miserable public parks" again have to agree, the median local park is taken out of a horror movie. Though there are* a bunch of very, very beautiful ones!

> But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.

Apart from the worst parts of Roppongi on a Monday morning, I have never ever seen this.

Trash days 5~8am, normal days in any place with many restaurants 11pm~8am basically (Shibuya, Ebisu, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, etc).

That would be more attributed to the multiple day trash picking depending on which type, though right?

I mean Tuesday: burnable waste, wed cardboard, Thurs clothes and Fri other, will tend to have trash in the designated areas, on each of those days.

Edit:spelling (Note:days and trash types differ a lot per area, but it's a good generalisation based off of my location).

That's one thing for sure, but I attribute it most to the lack of dumpsters. I am not sure why they were banned, the trash cans supposedly because of terrorism, but the larger containers/dumpsters would make the city so much cleaner and better.

Tip: when there's a typhoon, restaurants close and there's no trash on the street, the rats invade nearby shops looking desperately for food:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkpV_fCeuIE

To be fair to Tokyo I doubt there's a major city in the world that doesn't have rats unless rats can't live in a super hot desert or frozen tundra.

It's a matter of how contained/controlled/visible they are.

Calgary and Edmonton.

Nice, ratatouille BTFO: https://www.alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx

> On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.

Last time I visited Tokyo in 2016 there was clearly an encampment at the Ueno park. And that wasn’t the first time I saw an encampment in Japan (visiting Tokyo in 2008 I saw a few in Tokyo and Osaka). However, Japanese homeless encampments are always very clean and well organized. It’s a completely different feel from the states (even if they definitely exist).

That's why I said virtually; in Tokyo you know where you saw one at some point as a curiosity. In many European cities just walking around aimlessly you have high chances of seeing some homeless people. In SF I had to literally jump over homeless' people stuff to walk down multiple streets in my last visit.

I wasn't looking for encampments in Japan but found them anyways. Ueno train station and the park behind it is obviously a high traffic destination. And in Osaka, we were just walking around randomly. Homelessness is common and visible enough that to say it virtually doesn't exist is not really accurate.

"Tokyo Ueno Station" is a well-received novel written about the homeless population in the adjacent park. https://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Ueno-Station-Yu-Miri/dp/0593187...

Not just Tokyo, but the whole of Japan. I live in Aomori, I have traveled quite a bit around the country, and I haven't seen yet a single city that wasn't extremely ugly. I have asked many Japanese people, and they just don't care.

I live in and love Japan, and after many years have also gotten used to the general ugliness and just enjoy the beautiful parts when I can, but turning off the Japanese filter I’ve developed, good god this is so true.

Can you post examples of this ugliness? I’ve never been to Japan and am curious. I had never heard of this.

Pick a random spot in any suburb of Tokyo in Google Maps Street View and start exploring. Here's one:

亀戸中央通り商店街 https://maps.app.goo.gl/9yY4Ncb5oM3hXqLY6

It's not particularly hideous by Tokyo (or world) standards, it's just exactly what was described earlier, a random mishmash of houses and shops in various states of repair.

I’ve been to Tokyo and other cities in Japan, and I would gladly trade what you consider ugly for their cleanliness.

I live in Barcelona and not even Gaudi’s architecture can distract you from the amount of dog feces and piss that are rampant in this city, plus a considerably lack of cleaning in recent years for some reason.

>I live in Barcelona and not even Gaudi’s architecture can distract you from the amount of dog feces and piss that are rampant in this city

That's become extremely common in American cities too, in the past 2 years or so.

Here in Tokyo, I never see dog feces on the ground. Dogs are always on a leash, and their owners always clean up after them. I guess it's a cultural difference: dog owners outside Japan (and maybe Germany) think they're entitled to let their dogs run wild and crap wherever they want.

I don't think it's pretty, but I somewhat enjoy this sort of look.

It reminds me a bit of a compressed version of older, less affluent northeastern towns, where buildings are a mish mash of styles and designs. It's an overused term, but it gives a sense of character or that it's a discrete place with it's own history. This building is a good example.

https://goo.gl/maps/4ExAzUnFJmez6EPa7

You've just linked to a small, walkable street with slow traffic that has multiple food and shopping options mixed with medium density residential. Zooming out it looks like a quick walk to a metro station and multiple parks nearby. Not to mention how safe these areas are.

The random mishmash of houses and shops is exactly the type of place that makes walking viable negating the need for a car (and the expense and waste of space storing one).

I wish I could find neighbourhoods like those found in many Japanese and Korean cities; they're very small and hard to find even in Toronto and SF (and not really comparable anyway).

Not disagreeing with any of that but it’s still incredibly ugly.

Just a planter box or two would be a massive improvement!

for me it's the cables and similiar visible infrastructure. Most european cities I know have most or all of that stuff underground.

Having the powerlines underground would improve it a lot. Other than that I wouldn't call it particularly ugly.

Interesting, I find it, while not beautiful, quite pleasant, and in fact enjoy walking or biking on such streets.

OTOH, while I heard that Paris is considered beautiful by some people, I didn't like it at all, and no longer visit there even if I happen to be going to other parts of France.

Similarly, I would never voluntarily spend a day in SF and several other famous US cities.

I guess the idea of "ugly" is quite subjective.

I’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983 and am as much of a Tokyo fan as they get, and I readily acknowledge how ugly Japanese cities are in general. But after buying a house here twenty-three years ago, and comparing my experience with those of houseowners I know in the U.S., I have started to see some beauty in that ugliness.

Many of the people I know in the U.S. live in attractive neighborhoods full of nice-looking houses and well-kept front yards. While some of that niceness is due to the owners’ own initiative, much is the result of zoning restrictions, homeowner association rules, and the like.

The only zoning restrictions on my house in Yokohama are limits on total floorspace and land coverage and fire and earthquake rules covering building design and materials. I can paint my house any color I want, pile whatever junk I want in my (tiny) yard, and hang whatever laundry I want from the balconies, and no one can or will say anything about it.

As a result of this tolerant, low-regulation regime, the neighborhood I live in is, like most neighborhoods here, an unattractive mish-mash of mismatched houses and apartments in many styles and states of upkeep. If that’s the price of (relative) freedom, I’m happy to pay it.

You folks ought to spend some time in Taiwan. I'm in Tokyo now, was in TW for a couple of years prior. Tokyo is extremely beautiful in comparison. (I'm Taiwanese Canadian)

Ugliness is subjective. Tokyo is varied but to me that's generally nicer and more interesting than uniformity. I don't think there's any part of Tokyo that looks as bad as the Barbican or the Brunswick, and to me the endless rows of identical beach-hut-style houses in San Francisco were far grimmer than Tokyo. YMMV I guess.

I'm not a huge fan of the look of the gravel parks, but every kid having a nearby park that they actually use beats a handful of parks that look nice, IMO. And it's not like Tokyo doesn't have big beautiful parks as well.

> how extraordinarily ugly the place is

First impression as well, but it's an aquired taste.

As someone being in Tokyo right now chatting with locals about this topic it's just not generally true or comparable to other cities.

Sure there are parts of Tokyo that are cheaper, but Tokyo is gigantic. All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.

I live in fujisawa, takes me about 30 minutes to get to Yokohama which is pretty damn major.

House prices here are quite reasonable, nice distance to the ocean for the weekends. I'm considering buying and building a house in the next year or two.

> locals about this topic

Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners. The cheaper accommodations are not going to be available especially if tenant isn't fluent in the language.

> All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.

I live 3 minutes commute to Shibuya, and my rent is half my rent in an outer borough of NYC. Brand new lofty unit designed by a famous architect. Space efficiency-wise, it's equal if not greater. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison to just look at floorspace, since Japan has lots of infrastructure such as actually convenient stores which means people don't need to own as much household items.

How much do you have to pay in monthly housing costs with the inclusion of utilities and amenities?

Then why doesn't everyone just live in Tokyo? You just got your answer.

Everyone does just live in Tokyo. It's the most populous city in the world, the nicest place to live, and anyone with any sense moves here.

I just checked, and I see a lot of people not living in Tokyo

> Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners.

Yes, you need to bring someone who is fluent to sign papers, but if you have residence with a visa that's greater than 2 years, there's no real difference. Most foreigners have their company, or their school do the actual paperwork, as well.

If your visa is less than two (and in some cases three) years, then yeah, you're going to need a gaijin apartment, and they're a lot more expensive.

I'm 3 minutes from the Chidoya line, and 10 minutes from the Yamanote. I live in a 95sqm apartment, with a private garden, and it's cheaper than the rent controlled apartment that I had in SF (which was roughly the same size, and I had rent control for 10 years).

The graph with many countries is ABSOLUTELY WRONG.

It says with $1500 rent you can get a 140m2 or 1500 sqft apartment in Berlin. HAHA! MAYBE IN THE 90s.

Not to mention that I'm willing to bet that less of 5% of housing in Berlin is 140m2 or higher. (might be 1% or less even)

These often use average rents paid today. They tend to be much lower than average rents if you rent a home today.

One of the main reasons why older people seem to think millennials are complaining about nothing: they locked in their rental rates back in the last millennia, and the laws generally only allow low-single-digit increases per year

I think measuring per person is pretty misleading.

A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped.

A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.

So if you look at living space per person, then societies with smaller household sizes will appear to have more living space per person.

so if you measure that, you also have to compare how many people are in households as well.

Yeah, a more accurate measurement would be "baseline + X" - you don't really need to go above the average household size, but you can fit people in way denser than 25m^2 (270 sq ft) if they share common areas. The average dorm room is 230 sq ft (with a roommate!) but the dorm provides common areas and other amenities.

Another thing to consider when comparing countries is what is considered "living space" and what is not - some areas have large porches that are not considered "living space" even though they serve similar functions to what a living room might in other parts of the world.

It depends on how you measure those 25m^2; I lived in a studio in Copenhagen for a while and my 25m^2 included the common areas / roof garden etc. Private space was around 16-20m^2, and I am being generous here.

Yeah, so many things go into it that it's hard to just compare numbers, you really have to live it to compare.

Agree - I moved from 40m2 alone to 60m2 with my wife, and the experience is much better. We still have one sink, one toilet, one bathtub, one washing machine. Her space takes up maybe 10m2. The free walking-around space probably went from 5m2 to 25m2.

> A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.

depends on your perspective, I guess! that sounds horribly cramped to me.

It's not about perspective. Both average to 25m2 per person, but they are vastly, unambiguously different.

In a 100m2 home: 3x15m2 bedrooms, 25m2 living room, 10m2 kitchen and you still got 20m2 left.

It's no comparison to a single 25m2 apartment where all these functions have to fit.

Well, to a point. If I live alone in a big city I don't necessarily need a kitchen at all. However, cooking scales more efficiently than eating out so I'll definitely want one for my family.

In that sense, I guess a 100cm2 apartment is "pretty spacious" compared to a 25cm2 one. My point was that a family of four living in a 100m2 apartment is going to feel cramped.

We're a family of 5 living in 104m^2 and it doesn't feel cramped at all. Granted, we don't have a big "master bedroom" and we don't have an office or a laundry room. We also have to keep the place tidy, because it does feel cramped when there's a mess.

But it really depends on expectations. When people who live in the city visit us, they say "woah, that's a big apartment". When people who live on the countryside visit us, they say "how can you live in this tiny space".

My comment really was about how talking about "area per person" is not a good metric, because how spacious an apartment feels does not scale linearly with household size.

> A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped. > A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.

I would argue very much the opposite!

  - 1 person in 25m² (270 ft²) is comfortable enough in a city, and if your hobbies are small
  - 4 people in 100m² (1076 ft²) can definitely be cramped

The 4 person example has a lot more usable space though, since you're sharing common space. You're not adding 3 more kitchens. Or 3 more laundry areas. Or 3 more bathrooms (maybe 1). Or 3 more living rooms.

The 270 ft² space might have 100 ft² usable area, but the 1076 ft² could have 700 ft² usable.

This make sense numerically -- but having lived in both, I'll argue that that is not the determining measure.

It seems to depend on how common the common space, and the people occupying it, are.

Flatmates (and offspring) can have a low quotient of space utilization compatibility.

There's a lot of space needed in an apartment for "overhead" stuff: kitchen sink/counter, refrigerator, toilet, tub/shower, powder room sink, washing machine, entryway, etc. Going from a tiny 1DK to a massive 3LDK doesn't change the overhead requirements much; those extra 75 m^2 are mostly usable space.

Offtopic, but

> the tallest building in Tokyo is only 255 meters

There is a hotel in this tower (called Andaz) and it has a proper swimming pool on the 37th floor. Quite an jaw-dropping experience on its own, but doubly so during an earthquake.

You barely feel it during an earthquake, because the building has multiple stabilising mechanisms.

Yep, but you do feel it, because something is... off.

Ah, yes, It’s super freaky. I worked from a hotel room at the Yokohama Landmark Tower for a month, and I had some freak outs. Your balance feels off, even if you don’t feel the shakes.

https://youtu.be/lJ8cv4t2tT8

Why these people think I will subscribe to their mailing list before I even read the third sentence?

This is a follow up article to a lot of questions on this thread: How Tokyo Avoided the Affordable Housing Crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894963

A peculiarity of renting in Japan (not mentioned in the article): you often need to advance a substantial amount of money upon starting a lease. It varies but a rule of thumb is about 5 months of rent. Part of it is advanced rent, but some is non-recoverable (key money, brokerage fee, insurance, cleaning fee...). Contracts are often two years, and at the end of it you typically have a renewal fee as well, at around a month of rent.

When did paying 30% of your paycheck in rent become "very affordable?"

What else do you need to spend lots of money on?

In the US you might need to plan for health care expenses and higher-education.

30% of your paycheck seems to be the general rule for housing. At least in the states.

Better than New York, Paris and London is a low bar

It is a big modern industrious city, what should it be compared to?

Outside of either aggressive capitalist desire to continuously lower wages or some groups wanting to destroy Japanese culture, I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.

A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.

We see in the animal kingdom the predator-prey cycle that population takes care of itself. When there's too many rabbits or deer, there's no cause for concern: the plentiful food supply means that wolves and foxes will be able to reproduce more and take care of the situation. When there's too many wolves/foxes and the situation reverses, the scarce food supply means that the predators aren't able to flourish and the rabbits and deer are able to reproduce more.

I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.

GDP can’t go up without strong reproduction and/or immigration. The economy stagnates and government debt becomes massive, which is what you see with Japan.

The scary thing is that this is something the USA and lots of other countries are headed towards as well.

https://dailyinfographic.com/government-debt-by-country

GDP can grow with a stable population if your Real gross domestic product per capita is growing which it has been for the USA [0]. Japans has barely grown for the past 30 years which is their big problem [1].

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDJPN

What do you think the cause is for the differences? I strongly feel that a lot of that latter “strength” for the USA chart after 2009 was made up of money printing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

https://inflationchart.com/gdp-in-m3

I guess we will see if USA can continue up only. I have my doubts. Fertility rate needs to be 2.1 to remain stable and we dipped below 2.0 around 2010 and are at 1.64 now (Japan is 1.34). The previous US administration clown show also drastically cut immigration.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/global-decline-of-fer...

> The previous US administration clown show also drastically cut immigration.

What if restricting immigration for a time is what is needed to start to stabilize the birth rate which ultimately takes care of the economy?

Many Americans aren't focusing on making babies because they're hopeless about their future and ever having a home so they put off thinking about having a family until as late as possible. What if a more modest amount of immigration (lowering demand for housing) helps put home ownership and hope for the future into more peoples' reach? A little reduction in real-estate prices might piss off some boomers who have a lot of wealth locked into their home, but these aren't the people who are going to be reproducing.

Cause and effect are sometimes related in unexpected ways, but this chain of thinking about this problem seems entirely simple and rational.

I suspect that home prices and ownership rates don't explain birth rates. Who says you can't rent and have children? A large part of the world already does it.

Birth rates go down with economic development, and the growth of freedoms and opportunities for women. It's a tale seen everywhere. And all the other fun stuff and distractions available for young people today - dating apps, video games, pop culture, avocado toast, too many hobbies to name - competes with child-rearing for time, attention, and money. Even as a parent, I sometimes long for a more carefree life. I'm sure a lot of people see their peers with children and decide, rationally, to not pursue parenthood.

(This is without even getting into the climate crisis).

I think there a few flaws with your thoughts

> A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.

Population density is not homogenous. Excluding pandemic era, the trend has been decreasing population density in the countryside and smaller cities, while more population moves to the big cities. In general, population size need not correlate for the average persons lived population density.

> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.

This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.

> I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.

This is generally because the population is not stabilizing, it’s on the verge of collapsing. If fertility rate rises “naturally” in the future, as you suggest, then it’s obviously not an issue. But maintaining a 1.3 or lower fertility rate indefinitely will result in an exponential decay of population which could itself result in a decline of living standards. For example, if the population decreases too much to support a high speed rail system so these are abandoned as unprofitable.

>> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.

>This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.

In South Korea, young people are struggling to find affordable places to live, to the extent that many people live with their parents well into their 30ies. Coincidently, they also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

In my city, I see a lot of people who first build a house or buy an appartement, and then have kids, in their 30ies, because they can't afford a big enough place before that.

As housing prices rise everywhere, it takes longer and longer for people to be able to afford a place big enough for a family. Of course people then delay having kids, and many end up not having kids at all.

The birth rate is so low around the world that we may see peak population by 2060 (worst case) and then an exponential decline. Quality of life will decrease as the number of old people drastically out numbers the young people.

Recent and related:

How Tokyo avoided the affordable housing crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894963 - Sept 2022 (90 comments)

I dont know how accurate this report is, but i do wish western europe was as well organised and clean as japan. Many, if not all, west european capitals are a mess with poor living conditions with no signs of improvement.

Purely as a visitor, Zürich definitely felt cleaner and better organized than other cities in western Europe.

An outlier indeed. Still feels a bit boring, but it ticks all the marks in my initial comment. I think europe strayed far from its path. We should look at japan and east asia (singapore, south korea) and reflect on why they look so much more advanced and well maintained compared to our countries.

I think Switzerland in general is exceptional and not at all representative of the rest of western Europe.

I'm looking at buying next year. Unlike where I'm from (New Zealand) property in Tokyo is better quality (although that's not really difficult) and dare I say cheaper.

I've also heard it's rather easier for a foreigner to buy than to find a willing landlord...

That's a stretch and it is hard to get a home loan in your first years. It is true that when searching for a rental you will probably come across landlords that don't rent to foreigners, and more that won't rent to Chinese people. Many landlords also expect you to speak at least some Japanese.

That being said, it's competitive only for average sized/priced places. Both low end and above-average properties are easier to rent.

Just out of curiosity - is it largely just "I only speak Japanese and don't know how I'd deal with a foreigner" thing or do those kinds of landlords tend to think negatively of the foreigners?

As an immigrant I know it can be a bit fiddly to resolve some things when there's a language barrier, but as long as both sides are patient and willing to try things can go relatively smoothly

In my own experience it's very much about the language barrier. I was able to smooth over many issues getting into my current place by mentioning my wife was Japanese.

I've heard good things about New Zealand real estate. I'm guessing spiraling prices are why you'd want to leave?

For a data point: (admittedly, barely) inside Tokyo 23 wards, 15 min walk to nearest station, 70 sqm (753 sqft) 3LDK (3 bedrooms and a living-dining-kitchen). 140000 jpy / month. (945 usd at the current rate.) I think it's a reasonable deal. Less or similar than I would pay for a similar flat in my native Helsinki, Finland.

These statistics would be much more useful if the median had been used for prices and floor areas. These are both long tailed distributions, so the average is skewed. I would wager many of the “unexpected” results are due to this effect.

if you can't even tell where Tokyo and Osaka are on your maps, you probably shouldn't publish articles about Japan. Who knows what other numbers or diagrams are wrong there...

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2323:_Modeling_St...

Older cities have a lot of legacy issues that manifest in multiple ways. Housing is one of them. Solving the problem is hard since the cities can't be re-planned and rebuilt.

I spent a month in Tokyo in 29 Square meters it was painfully small, and expensive. It was the best I could find. These numbers are deeply suspicious.

The standard rental contract in Japan is not 1-year, but 2-years. For these engagements, as with employment, it's about consistency, predictability and long-term commitment.

One-month is ultra-short by Japanese standards. The rental inventory is distinct from regular apartments. This is effectively a hotel.

Kinda, it's 2 years but you can usually leave anytime after 6 months with no fee. After 2 years you need to sign a new contract, which means new fees etc

there is a maps-and-data company in Berkeley, California (urban planners) that maintains detailed and mostly-current information on occupancy for all of California; both renters and homes; unending policy battles behind-the-scenes about covid-19 and eviction very much at the fore. (trivia it is in the same physical building as the old After Dark screensaver company, so long ago)

I would love to stay there, but keeping western hours for your job would be very difficult. Not to mention the dislike of foreigners

The hours depends on your job, and the "dislike of foreigners" is mostly a myth. Tons of foreigners live here and love it.

32 square meters per person? That's 344 square feet. It's amazing to me people would choose to live in such a tiny space.

To be fair, in the US people live in a cardboard box on the street

That’s slightly larger that my very expensive apartment in Paris proper. I moved there from a bigger place when I broke up years ago and I’m surprised by how liveable it is. It’s not big but it’s mostly fine. For the time I spent there it seems like a good deal. Working from home was annoying when it was mandatory however.

Ever since experiencing sticker shock in Silicon Valley housing 7 years ago.

Housing in Tokyo or Seoul no longer looked expensive in my eyes.

Every time these articles come up I think about what a shafting people in Japan are taking on property and why western media want to write articles lying about it to the public. Japanese property is tiny by any metric compared to western property; maybe there are some rich people who would like to remove housing regulations and make more money selling crap tiny plastic homes to people at absurd valuations…

Tokyo and Osaka are reversed on the map

Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration? I've only been to Japan once, but I noticed how they're very formal compared to the various EU countries.

I keep meeting people who move to Appalachia and not register that the things that made it attractive (low crime etc) won't stay that way if people keep talking to me like I'm literally retarded.

(Every time someone tells me "I work in technology or whatever as I walk to get my espresso, I want to say "Great! Enjoy locking down your house like my South African neighbor told me they had to during apartheid, I've had too many of these conversations where the person was speaking in bad faith.")

> Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration?

Permanent Residency is helpful towards procuring a mortgage, but you don't need a visa to buy property in Japan. Non-resident cash buyers had no problem pushing up the real estate market in Vancouver, Canada.

People who think denser housing lowers rents haven't been to a big city.

Someone always mentions "But Tokyo...". That person never lives in Tokyo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com