Tokyo's suburban housing became vast ghettoes for the old

> ... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income.

The goal was to make public housing a safety net for elderly, low-income and socially vulnerable people. The effect, however, has been to make social housing off-limits for most people: eligibility fell from 80% of households in 1951 to 25% after 1996.

And it has turned public housing into a kind of ghetto for poor and elderly people who rely on pensions and can’t afford private rents.

In Canada it is often controversial when upper middle class people are found to be living in affordable coops and anti-poverty activists, in an understandable effort to create as much low income housing as possible, often call for wholly low income housing projects instead of having buildings with mixed incomes. This article suggests at the flawed outcome from overly means testing benefits.

We tend to view suburbs as these static places that serve a particular purpose for primarily families and where nothing changes. But in fact suburbs are starting to transform into de facto retirement communities as boomers exit the workforce, due in large part to incentives from certain laws that keep them there and prevent development (no comment on who created those laws). One clear example is schools in Cupertino are closing due to declining enrollment - something that certainly doesn't fit the conception of a suburb being a place where families are raised.

Have fun living in the car dependent sprawling suburbs when you're 80 and not legally allowed to drive anymore.

I guess one can hope that autonomous cars will finally appear to bail one out of this predicament, but I'll personally be setting myself up to retire in a place where everything I need is a short walk or wheelchair roll away.

I lived in Taiwan, which also has a stagnant birth rate (only 181,606 births last year, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3611847) and a decades-long trend for young people to migrate to the large cities, or go to China to try their fortunes there.

But there is also a strong tradition of multi-generational households and traditions/holidays that emphasize family relations or filial piety, Lunar New Year being the most obvious. Certainly, family strife exists (and can be exacerbated if people are forced to live together) and many seniors live alone, but I think because of the cultural emphasis on familial contact, there is also a level of contact and awareness that can mitigate the extreme situations described in the article. Being smaller also helps (most cities on the island are no more than two or three hours away by high-speed rail).

In recent decades, there has also been a trend to legally allow foreign caregivers (mostly Filipinos and Indonesians) for people aged 85 and up, and tacitly allow for foreign caregivers for younger seniors and wealthy families. I am not sure how Taiwan's national health system covers those costs, or if the elderly poor can afford them.

Does Japan have any similar system of allowing foreign caregivers?

In the U.S., in contrast, this kind of problem wouldn’t even come up- because everyone involved would be living on the street, and no one in a position of civic authority would consider it their responsibility.

At least Japan can maintain that housing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan