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This is my random personal post: Last weekend, while riding my bicyle between Shinjuku station and Shinagawa station, I was stunned by the density of buildings on major roads. It felt like a one hour bicycle ride surounded by non-stop 10-story buildings... forever(!). My point: A 10-story building is not impressive, but 500 of them on the same road is incredible. The wall of concrete is hard to understand in Tokyo before you see it with your own eyes.

Dutchies/Belgies: Is anywhere similar where you live?

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 8,000-10,000 new home units per month, or 110,000 per year for a state of 39 million people. This has been (relatively) stable for quite a few years.

The sightline blog quotes WSJ which asserted that Tokyo city built 145,000 new homes in 2018. I was unable to find the source for the WSJ claims -- sightline.org claims that this is just the Tokyo City, not metropolitan, but WSJ makes no such distinction (conclusion is uncertain). However we do have some contextual numbers:

Japan added 942,000 housing starts in 2018 according to Statista[0], whose numbers for 2020 and 2021 perfect match Japanese government numbers[1]. So "Tokyo's" housing starts accounted for 15% of national housing starts. 11% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "city" and 29% of Japan's population lives in Tokyo "metro". Additionally, Tokyo "metro" ("National Capital Region" - 首都圏) added 327,128 homes in 2018[2], and this has also been relatively stable year-to-year. So "145,000" seems reasonable at least.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/667913/japan-dwellings-c...

1: https://www5.cao.go.jp/keizai3/getsurei-e/2022sep/4.pdf

2: https://www.lij.jp/pub_f/monthly_data/2019_11.pdf (p. 35, 4th column)

3: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B0kN

> 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 20 to 30 years. When the owner moves out the new owner often demolishes the old house and builds a new one on the lot.

That's much less common in the US.

To compare to new homes in the US you'd probably not want to count new houses in Japan that are replacements for a recently demolished 20 to 30 year old houses. You'd only want to count new houses that increase the available housing.

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.

>(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.

Good point. One small issues: I think your first sentence is missing a negative or you want to change "increased" to "decreased"

Thanks!

Even though everyone wants to live in Tokyo, the same is true for hit real estate markets in other countries that it is being compared to. We aren’t comparing Tokyo to Duluth.

Lack of building codes like must have central heat or must have bathroom also can bring housing prices down.

Do you actually think the comment you replied to was complaining about requirements like central heat or bathrooms? NIMBYs will trot out every excuse and misdirection to avoid addressing the dire shortage of housing. This anti-growth mindset is a philosophy of death. I suspect that deep down, many want the world to end with them and are actually sabotaging efforts to solve societal issues out of some sort of Freudian death-drive.

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 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). The lack of heat might be annoying to some people, and the insulation isn't going to be good enough to let your electric space heater work very well (so get used to using a kotatsu). Now, using a kotatsu isn't bad, but it isn't super convenient.

>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.

Tokyo's building codes do require bathrooms. Plus minimum sunshine for a room to count as a bedroom, along with shutters on all windows.

What caught my eye about your comment is central heating. Japan in fact penalizes central heating. Not just not requiring it but going so far as to increase property taxes slightly.

In Japan's case it is a desire to reduce energy intensity in a country dependent on energy imports.

> Tokyo's building codes do require bathrooms. Plus minimum sunshine for a room to count as a bedroom, along with shutters on all windows.

I'm actually interested to know if Melbourne has similar minimum standards. I'm mostly in favour of deregulating residential construction, but after seeing multiple shoddily built apartments with next to no sunlight in the Melbourne CBD, I shifted a bit closer to the "regulation" side of the spectrum.

You wrote: <<Japan in fact penalizes central heating>>

I belive it. Japan housing is so inefficient for a wealthly / highly industriaslied country: It is bizarre!

I tried to Google about this topic, but I did not find anything. Can you provide a hint about your source?

what do you mean by inefficient? japanese houses are remarkably energy-efficient for their climate. they are very breezy, which cuts down on AC use in the summer, and in winter you heat specific objects instead of the entire house

That really isn't true. A lot of older housing in Japan has really bad insulation, you are basically stuck with a kotatsu in the winter not by choice.

That’s on purpose, to avoid mold in the summer. And heating a kotatsu and a bed instead of an entire house is way more energy efficient

i took GP's comment of "heating specific objects" to mean an object like a kotatsu.

Hat tip for "Duluth". If anyone is not famaliar, it is north-central United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth,_Minnesota

Here's an archive of the FT piece to which the Vox article refers:

https://archive.ph/pVrex

Lots of additional detail.