161–170 of 237 posts
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.
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 fall…
Yep. In that case half of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey etc. should count as well.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 fall…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience I have friend living in Tokyo paying 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 sma…
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…
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…
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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 pric…
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 p…
>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.
Housing in Tokyo or Seoul no longer looked expensive in my eyes.