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Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

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Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#221

Post by inawarminister »

freetime2 wrote: post #187
pj_mukh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying? When you work from home, you wanna leave home often, where do you go if you're in the middle of nowhere? I work from home in the middle of a dense city, pay a premium for it! You leave home and there are about 100 places (cafes, theatres, museums, parks etc.) I can go to that are walking distance. Is that possible in say rural…

I work remotely from "rural" Japan. I am surrounded by rice fields and mountains, but also only a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bike/bus ride to the city center where there is shopping and night life. From there it's a couple hours to Tokyo by bullet train, which I visit a handful of times a year. There are old or abandoned houses nearby that can be had for very little money. I love being in the mountains. I get outdo…

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

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#223

Post by smsm42 »

jameslk wrote: post #218
iandanforth wrote: post #180

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

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

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

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

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#225

Post by sbilstein »

autokad wrote: post #160
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I have[1][2]. It's really not bad unless you drive yourself nuts worrying about things that will probably never happen to you. Yes, you see and hear the effects of crime everywhere but as long as your not know by your neighbors to be an ass, your house is harder to rob than most of the nearby ones and you don't associate with the wrong people you'll be fine. It's not like there's stray bullets coming through your…

murder is rare. assault, robbery, and burglary are not. I prefer those things not happen to me

As someone who lives in a really shitty part of SF, crime will affect you. Your apartments garage will get broken into, your packages will be stolen. People you don’t know will brazenly ask to buzz in at all times. If you are female, you will be harassed. If you are male, you may be harassed. It’s tolerable and my landlord has all kinds of fantastic security measures but it’s no breeze. Fights on the street can get pretty heated and you never know when something bad will go down. I balance all that with an apartment large enough to run my company from and entertain my dog but I’m totally down to move once I have enough capital to get a proper office and a nice place.

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#226

Post by smsm42 »

zik wrote: post #185
neic wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#227

Post by snowwrestler »

iandanforth wrote: post #180

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#228

Post by lenocinor »

jameslk wrote: post #218
iandanforth wrote: post #180

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

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

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

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#229

Post by innocentoldguy »

samstave wrote: post #178
innocentoldguy wrote: post #152

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

Mind sharing what you had to spend? This would be fascinating to do, but would be great to know the actual costs involved. Also, would you share, more in depth, the experience as a whole: Do you speak Japanese, married to a Japanese citizen/are one? What was the biggest unexpected etc... Basically, a blog post about such an endeavor would be great reading... THanks

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

#230

Post by wishinghand »

mettamage wrote: post #52

So wait, there are places where there are houses being given away (e.g. US, Japan and Italy as far as I know) and I'm a person that has the ability to work remotely. Am I missing something? Is this my ticket to cheap housing and a more stress free life? At what point am I going to be scammed and/or disappointed?

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