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Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

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Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#11

Post by bryanrasmussen »

oneoff786 wrote: post #9
diziet wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#12

Post by davidkuennen »

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.

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#13

Post by bluepizza »

rippercushions wrote: post #3

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. >…

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.

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#14

Post by bluepizza »

eps wrote: post #8

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.

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#15

Post by quickthrower2 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #11
oneoff786 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#16

Post by bluepizza »

franciscop wrote: post #7
rgmerk wrote: post #5

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 coun…

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 stree…

> 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.

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#17

Post by belter »

eps wrote: post #8

Offtopic, but > the tallest building in Tokyo is only 255 meters There is a hotel in this tower (called Andaz) and it has a proper swimming pool on the 37th floor . Quite an jaw-dropping experience on its own, but doubly so during an earthquake.

https://youtu.be/lJ8cv4t2tT8

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#18

Post by franciscop »

bluepizza wrote: post #16
franciscop wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stree…

> 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).

Re: Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

#19

Post by lhl »

rippercushions wrote: post #3

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. >…

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-...

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