How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home

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Strong rec bane · 2020-04 · on “An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month”

Decent family houses in Tokyo are definitely more expensive than this, but not hugely (also Kyoto surprisingly). There's some interesting things about the Japanese housing market, for example, many homes become "worthless" after the end of the mortgage -- so they depreciate and are more like buying cars. Tokyo is also an absolutely enormous city with even more massive metro area. There's very few examples on the planet that come close. Tokyo is sometimes called "the infinite city" for good reason. This means that yes, you can pay huge money for a coffin in some areas, and little money for an entire house elsewhere in the same city. New York is kind of the same way in that respect, but is act

Recommends monkeypizza · 2018-01 · on “Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build?”

Check out this video explaining why you can buy new detached homes in Tokyo for about 300k usd. [this video] * Land owners have an absolute right to develop their own land - neighbors can't block you. * You can build a 60 m^2 x 3 floor house on 100m^2 of land, or more. So basically they build way denser, and reduce opportunities to block/rentseek.

Recommends seanmcdirmid · 2022-01 · on “The history of the end of poverty has just begun”

Here is a nice video explaining housing affordability in Tokyo: [this video] Notes: * No one thinks of residential housing as an investment, so there is no speculation. * Building codes are such that residential can be built almost anywhere. Japan has zoning, it is just really simplified. * There is no resistance to rebuilding, so it is done a lot (why houses last only 30 years, the market demands new housing). * Housing can be built on really small lots, only 2 meters of clearance is required. * A $300k low end house is around 6-700 SQF, which might not make sense from an American context.

Cites bane · 2017-05 · on “Japan Shows the Way to Affordable Megacities (2014)”

When I was young I remember reading about "Tokyo, the city of $11 hot dogs"...this was when a normal hot dog in the states was a buck or two. I never really stopped to figure that maybe it was just foreign stuff that was crazy expensive. One of the really eye opening things I've learned in the last few years is how relatively affordable housing can be...even within the Tokyo city limits. [this video] -- older homes can be much much cheaper. Here's a $1600/mo house [LINK] This needs to be considered against local incomes of course, so they're a bit less tempting to locals than to American foreigners from ultra expensive coastal cities. Part of this seems to be the particular Japanese combination o

Cites maxsilver · 2017-06 · on “The Unaffordable Urban Paradise”

> (single family homes with reasonable space) they make those cities unaffordable, they can't possibly scale, they are more hostile to walking, biking, and transit. None of that is actually true. [this video] and [LINK] Apartments are great for those who want them, but there's nothing wrong or anti-urban about family housing. You can easily give everyone (edit: everyone who wants one) their own single-family detached housing (with privacy, and parking), inside a major city, for really cheap. It would still be 100% supportive of walking, biking, and transit, and can scale for at least the next 100 years. I can state this as a simple fact, because it is, it already exists on Earth today. Wealthier

Cites patio11 · 2018-03 · on “California should emulate Tokyo, where housing stayed ahead of population growth”

Pay ~$300k for a house in Tokyo, which will cost you +/- $10k down [+] and ~$1k a month for a mortgage. Japanese underwriting standards would consider this doable at a household income of approximately $2.8k a month or so. c.f. [this video] [+] I realize that number is surprising, and I would have found it surprising up until ~3 weeks ago, but I can assure you that this product is presently commercially available in Tokyo, including to people who do not exactly smash Japanese banks' definition of "desirable client."

Cites manfredo · 2019-05 · on “California bill to add more housing in single-family neighborhoods blocked”

I think a lot of it boils down to an ingrained belief that real estate should be an investment. Everyone buys a house with the expectation that its value will go up. This means that homeowners are extremely adverse to policies that might reduce home prices (like building more housing). Contrast this with houses in Japan, where it's expected that a home is a depreciating asset. Houses in the Special Wards of Tokyo can be bought for $300-400k: [this video]

Cites manfredo · 2019-09 · on “California Approves Statewide Rent Control”

Housing cannot be both affordable and and a good investment. The definition of a good investment is a piece of property that has a price that increases over time. The nature of exponential growth means that eventually housing will become unaffordable if it is perpetually a good investment. Society's expectation that housing is a good investment results in people taking on significant debt to buy increasingly expensive homes. The consequence is that homeowners have a huge incentive to suppress the construction of additional housing, to inflate the values of their homes. And when housing prices do fall, people's financial lives are ruined. Contrast metros like SF, Portland, and Seattle with pl