Japan Is Giving Away 8M Abandoned Houses

As a heuristic, after looking myself for a couple decades for a residence that didn't participate in the global real estate mania we're still in the grips of, the MSA boundary works "good enough" as a starting point for median households setting up a search for a place to live that still follows a conventional 30% DTI ratio (or a safer 15-20% DTI to account for the greater income precarity for median US households today).

We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household.

A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity.

Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional.

YMMV of course.

My point is that there are many young Vietnamese hoteliers who would love to move to Japan and operate some of these abandoned houses as hotels. They will have to do all the renovations, cleaning etc. themselves, but they will earn much more money.

The largest obstacle will be Japanese regulation.

I'm seeing a lot of words here, but not the three that matter: "I was wrong."

If you wanted to say "real estate is cheaper in the rural area, but you'd have to drive everywhere", then you'd be right. But that's not what you said. What you said was, "Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service", and that is demonstrably false, and doesn't even pass even a cursory logical test, because for this to be true, then all the arable land and extractive natural resources would have be in cities, and if that was true, then where would the buildings be?

If you fail to understand what is going on in your basic assumptions, why should the rest of your argument even be considered?

I did notice, your phrase, "the higher education scam". That's interesting, since educational attainment has been shown time, and time, and time again, to be the biggest predictor of economic success. The long term viability and effects of shifting the cost of education in the past 25 years from state budgets to individuals, is certainly a concern and worthy of debate, but to refer to education as a "scam", makes me wonder about how well thought out your ideas on the educational debt crisis is as well.

I think you're bitter, and not nearly as smart as you think you are.

Never mind traditionally, this is still true, even in the most egalitarian countries (Scandinavian countries). Women have to choose between family and career, men don't really have to do that. The biggest driver behind the gender pay gap is the difference between women with children and women without. Somehow we haven't solved the issue that it's a cost borne primarily by women.

Sure... my spouse is a Japanese citizen, so that made getting a visa trivial in my case.

The company I work for has offices in the U.S. and Japan. They were able to transfer me to Japan and let me work remote with my team in the U.S. They probably would have been able to get me a work visa, too, though it wasn't necessary in my case since the spousal visa was much simpler to obtain. Since my company has a presence in Japan, all of typical payroll, benefits, insurance stuff is handled through the Japan HR dept.

For anyone looking to spend time living abroad, I think this approach of working for a large multinational and asking to be transferred is a viable option. Of course it requires that you have a tremendous level of trust with your manager, and you need to be senior enough that it is worth the hassle for them. Also - if there is no business justification for the transfer, don't expect them to help out with relocation costs, and if you are moving to an area with a lower cost of living they may give you a negative cost of living adjustment, too.

I should make it clear that this move wasn't easy to make by any means. It took years of planning and even a job change to find a team I was confident enough I could make it worth with. While getting the visa was simple enough in my case, actually moving to Japan and buying a house, opening up bank accounts, getting a drivers license, etc were all enormously time consuming and at times very frustrating.

So it can be done, and I feel it is worth it, but it does require a fairly large amount of effort.