Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

For anyone in Japan or with domain knowledge, what are the logistics for acquiring and taking up residence in an abandoned village (assuming you can legally reside in Japan of course)?

EDIT: Thank you all for the replies!

View on HN

From an earlier post, copying my answer which seems relevant to your query

> Being a Japanese resident (PR) now, I did look up this option for a summer home in the woods (Akita, Aichi-ken etc). This is what I learnt:

* Akiya houses come with an agreement to reside. Not just be a summer home. Their goal is to repopulate the countryside.

* You have to cultivate any farmland that comes with the deed. You cannot sell it without special permission. There is a whole lot of paperwork to deal with such situations.

* Most old Akiya will have strong regulation not to change the frontage significantly. It isn't permitted. Architecturally these changes have to be consistent with the older house and rest of the community. Building permits are very stringent. (Basically, you can't build a sprawling European villa in a Japanese countryside for e.g., even if land wasn't a concern.)

* Land tax is levied the day from purchase - not from the day of moving in. (This could pinch given that time to renovate can be 1-2 years in remote places, and taxes aren't cheap necessarily)

* Residents have to contribute to local development funds which take care of Matsuris etc. You like it or not, local government will knock on your door with a bill.

* Connectivity is poor. Cell reception outside NTT can be spotty. Internet is even harder.

* Language proficiency is a must. No one speaks English. Not even the local government officials.

* House will need a significant amount of renovation. With the stringent restrictions - anywhere between 100 & 200 grand (depending on the disrepair)

That seems like a very "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" setup on the part of the local municipalities. 'No summer homes' seems like an easy way for many of them to get no people at all, especially since the country as a whole has very good housing policy and so doesn't have the same kind of home affordability crisis as the US.

It looks like their order of preferences is:

Repopulate by old standards > take the L > become vacation community

I don't think it's "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" so much as it being the same as sometimes I want something done but not if it costs too much. In that case, having it not done is better than paying too much for it.

Vacation homes might bring occasional injection of cash, but they do not really support local community and local services for most of the year. So it is understandable that unless community is build on that type of industry they do not want it and instead focus on those that bring more revenue.

I mean, you pay property tax whether you live there or not. I don't know how this works in other states or other countries, but at least in New York a primary residence has tax advantages.

That said, I'm not sure what you do with a rich municipality that has no residents. You probably want the corner store to be open when you go out there for the winter for some reason, and with no customers, that's not an economic reality.

"Paying property tax" does not fund the local business revenue needs.

Tax dollars can be used for pretty much anything. "We'll write you a check every month if you keep your store open," for example.

I think infrastructure needs to come before people will come. "Induced demand" basically.

tax valuation is almost zero.

This is not correct. The house is worth zero, but the land has value. This will generate tax revenue.

Rural land isn't technically zero tax value, but it's too minor as a revenue.

What? How else does local (rural) gov't generate revenue? It's land tax or nothing. In Japan, sales tax (VAT) is national.

Land tax would be based on value of the land. If land has very low value then the tax would have to be extremely high to generate meaningful revenue. In worst case it could be more than value of the land.

Of all the things Japan has been doing, skimping on infrastructure is not one of them.

Money is fungible you know

No income tax is paid. The central government is less likely to pay services. No economic activity happen, let's say barbers with enough users year round. And so on.

Taxes still work if you have a summer house.

Not really. Their goal is for the local community first and foremost. You know what you are getting into if you trying to buy this kind property.

My point is that for a lot of these places, unless they can figure out some way to be more appealing, there will be no local community before all that long.

Japan is in population decline and people are moving to the city. There is no reversal of this trend. Compromise would not solve the problem anyway.

Making sure the the current crops of the residents are part of the local community is a good goal. They are not gonna win, might as well preserve what they have temporarily.

> They are not gonna win, might as well preserve what they have temporarily

So they are betting on slow death. Thats a hell of a plan

How is selling vocation homes to the outsiders who refuses to comply with local communities not a slow death anyway? You conveniently ignored the bigger picture that so many ppl mentioned: ppl are moving to the cities. If the local economy is gonna gonna die, might as well die gracefully

Thats just an excuse not to try to do anything. If you have more tax money you have more options than zero.

> refusing to comply

You are always free to change the stupid rules

This may be true, but doesn't mean that all other options are better in the view of the community. They may prefer to roll the whole thing up compared to some models.

The alternative is doing what Newfoundland is doing. They're "buying out" whole communities. Residents get a substantial amount of money and all public services are permanently withdrawn. It's basically like living in the woods.

That’s always an option I suppose . Canada is huge, and its population isn’t. As a result there are unincorporated billages/whatever you want to call them, where you are on your own for services. I suppose it’s not a bad arrangement if you are up for it

Newfoundland has historically been broke as shit, and poor money management is why they ended up joining Canada instead of remaining an independent crown colony.

No? Its their land? YOU just want an ez cheap house.

Welp, those are empty houses for a reason.

Home affordability is stil an issue, people working in the metro area while being homeless is a thing, but they still probably end up better than being jobless in the emptying and infra less countryside.

You see this from a foreign, money-centric view, which may work for some locals in US maybe?

For many Japanese local government, what they want is for the outsider, that includes people from other parts of the Japan, to come, and blend in to the community.

>* Most old Akiya will have strong regulation not to change the frontage. It isn't permitted. Architecturally these have to be consistent. Building permits are very stringent.

Interesting how at odds this is with land use rules in Tokyo.

I think it's mostly due to these specific localities.

Countryside with no specific preservation rules and more favorable arrangements are plenty. They will have better chance to see new people moving in, or have better land reuse policies, leaving few empty homes in the first place.

> Land tax is levied the day from purchase - not from the day of moving in.

Every time I've bought a house in the US it worked the same way.

> Akiya houses come with an agreement to reside. Not just be a summer home. Their goal is to repopulate the countryside

Such villages will be long dead before it happens. There is no point living there all year round.

> You have to cultivate any farmland that comes with the deed. You cannot sell it without special permission. There is a whole lot of paperwork to deal with such situations.

In the book How Asia Works, Studwell argues that the small-plot farms that the government of Japan seems to 'encourage' don't make sense and are a hinderance:

* https://www.gatesnotes.com/How-Asia-Works

They were fine initially as developing countries have an 'excess' of labour, and small farms need more workers, but once industrialization starts, labour is better used in factories and other high value chain parts of the economy, and it's better to mechanize/automate larger farms. Japan did move up the value chain, but farm-plot consolidation didn't really happen, so a large portion of farms are run by an aging population.

Buying one isn't hard. They are quite cheap. A completely broken house like the ones in the OP is probably begging to be sold. A 2k+ sqft livable house in the suburb of Tokyo is about $300k.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho... https://archive.is/BDCnm

But these are traditional Japanese houses so quite a lot of renovation is needed to bring it up to a Westerner's standards. Still, all in all, if you are fine with living in a backwater village with barely any modern conveniences then 200-300k for a big house is not too bad.

Assuming you can speak Japanese and don't mind the xenophobia...

FYI for those passing by, that New York Times article above is fantastic, I was about to post it as well.

It was discussed a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606413

So a 2k sqft house here, in my European country, would be considered quite a large one, and my understanding is Japanese standards for housing sizes trend even smaller than here. I realise it's commonplace in parts of the USA, but you're likely paying a premium for getting a house that the market considers "oversized". Wikipedia seems to indicate that 1000 sqft is the average in Tokyo.

Tokyo is extremely dense and land is very expensive. The mountainous rural backblocks that contain these abandoned properties is not, and land is essentially worthless or negative value: it has no productive use, but you still need to pay taxes.

This is in fact a big reason why Japan has a big problem with abandoned rural property: there is no incentive for next of kin to sort out the inheritance paperwork, and then it's left in limbo.

Especially due to inheritance tax in Japan being very high. It can sometimes be cheaper to abandon inheritances, than actually claim them. Even if you do claim the inheritance, large expensive things like houses tend to be sold because the tax makes it unaffordable.

The amount one can inherit before having to even pay any tax is roughly 36m yen (pretend that it's USD360k equivalent). Considering that we're talking about properties in abandoned rural villages, there's nothing of value of inherit.

People are abandoning their inheritance not because they can't pay for it, but because the hassle of inheriting a worthless property only to have to spend your own money trying to sell it for less than 0 doesn't make economic sense. It gets worse when said property belongs to some grand aunt/uncle you've never heard of and thus doesn't even have any sentimental value worth forking over for.

Huh, I thought it was 10% at 1,0000,0000 yen. 15% at 3,0000,0000 and 20% at 5,0000,0000 (and so on.) That was what I was told previously at least.

But yea, the calculus is:

Total taxable amount of inheritance tax - Basic inheritance tax exemption (¥30 million + ¥6 million x number of legal heirs) = Total taxable amount of inheritance for inheritance tax purposes

You can take a look at AkiyaBanks: https://www.akiyabanks.com/

It's a directory of municipality-specific sites and pages with lots of links to cheap akiyas, subsidy programs, and Google translations of pages for English readers. Many municipalities/prefectures have akiya matching programs where you send them what you want and they help find a house within your budget.

Getting one is really easy since there are millions of empty homes but the logistics of maintaining these houses is a whole other matter. Be prepared to do most of the work yourself because a lot of these akiyas are rarely in areas with plenty of craftsmen and construction workers.

While there are a fair share disposable/modern style abandoned houses, there are also these incredible traditional style properties.

While I understand some of the underlying reasons, I'm still shocked that they are just allowed to sit there falling apart. Part of me wants to spec out deconstruct/container/ship to the US for for rebuild.

Obviously it's not economically feasible, but some of them are that interesting.

I think it really comes to what is common in place and what is not. Like Detroit had plenty of homes. And many of them were left to rot. As they had no value or even negative value.

It is same all around the world in these dying communities. They might be exotic from outside, but there is just too many of them in those places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com