Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Housing in Tokyo is cheaper and more spacious than people think

konichivalue.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 237 posts

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

#201

Post by lmm »

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…

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.

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

#202

Post by karaokeyoga »

donw wrote: post #186
Firmwarrior wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#203

Post by wst_ »

franciscop wrote: post #137
wst_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#204

Post by presentation »

SECProto wrote: post #99
franciscop wrote: post #35

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…

> 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 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.

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

#205

Post by presentation »

lmm wrote: post #197
franciscop wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#206

Post by presentation »

donw wrote: post #186
Firmwarrior wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#207

Post by midoridensha »

tzs wrote: post #200
runnerup wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#208

Post by midoridensha »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #190
goostavos wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

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

#209

Post by midoridensha »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #102
dcolkitt wrote: post #74

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…

>(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.

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

#210

Post by midoridensha »

AtreidesTyrant wrote: post #88

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.
Post reply on HN