YOKOSUKA, Japan– Since her senior next-door neighbor relocated a years back, Yoriko Haneda has actually done exactly what she could to maintain the vacant residence she left from ending up being an eye sore. Ms. Haneda frequently cuts its bushes as well as clips|clips as well as bushes its slim strip of turf, preserving its ideal sight of the sea.

The volunteer backyard job has actually not reached your home 2 doorways down, nevertheless.|The volunteer backyard job has actually not prolonged to the residence 2 doorways down. That is uninhabited, as well, as well as disordered with bamboo. As a matter of fact, lots of homes in this hill community regarding a hr’s drive from Tokyo are deserted.

Lots of residences in this hill community regarding a hr’s drive from Tokyo are deserted.

“There are vacant residences all over, locations where no one’s lived for Twenty Years, as well as much more are appearing regularly,” stated Ms. Haneda, 77, grumbling that burglars had actually gotten into her next-door neighbor’s home two times which a tropical cyclone had actually destroyed the roofing of the one beside it.

In spite of a deeply rooted nationwide hostility to waste, disposed of homes are spreading out throughout Japan like a curse in a yard. Long-lasting job prices have actually climbed up considerably more than in the Usa or Europe, as well as some 8 million houses are currently vacant, baseding on a federal government matter. Almost fifty percent of them have actually been abandoned totally– neither available for sale neither for lease, they just rest there, in differing states of disrepair.

Map| Yokosuka, Japan

These ghost homes are one of the most noticeable indication of human hideaway in a nation where the populace came to a head a half-decade back as well as is anticipated to drop by a 3rd over the following HALF A CENTURY. The market stress has actually evaluated on the Japanese economic climate, as a smaller sized labor force has a hard time to sustain an expanding percentage of the aged, as well as has actually motivated extreme argument over long-lasting propositions to improve migration or motivate ladies to have even more kids.

For now, though, after decades in which it struggled with overcrowding, Japan is confronting the opposite problem: When a society shrinks, what should be done with the buildings it no longer needs?

Many of Japan’s vacant houses have been inherited by people who have no use for them and yet are unable to sell, because of a shortage of interested buyers. But demolishing them involves tactful questions about property rights, and about who should pay the costs. The government passed a law this year to promote demolition of the most dilapidated homes, but experts say the tide of newly emptied ones will be hard to stop.

“Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits,” said Tomohiko Makino, a real estate expert who has studied the vacant-house phenomenon. Once limited mostly to remote rural communities, it is now spreading through regional cities and the suburbs of major metropolises. Even in the bustling capital, the ratio of unoccupied houses is rising.

Yokosuka is on the front lines. Within commuting distance of Tokyo and close to naval bases and automobile factories, it attracted thousands of young job-seekers in the era of roaring economic growth that followed World War II. Land was scarce and expensive, so the newcomers built small, simple homes wherever they could.

Today the boom is relentlessly reversing itself. The young workers of the postwar years are now retirees, and few people, their children included, want to take over their homes. “Their kids are in modern high-rises in central Tokyo,” Mr. Makino said. “To them, the family home is a burden, not an asset.”

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Japan’s birthrate has been stuck below the level needed to maintain the population since the 1970s, as young people postpone marriage and many women put off having children as they enter the work force.

The city of Yokosuka is trying to change that, by encouraging owners of abandoned houses to tidy them up and put them on the market. It has established an online “vacant home bank” to showcase houses that commercial real estate agents will not touch. Land prices in Yokosuka are down by 70 percent since their peak at the end of the 1980s.

The houses are a steal for the rare souls who will have them. But just one has been sold through the home bank so far, a 60-year-old single-story wooden home with a patch of garden that was listed for 660,000 yen, or $5,400. Places farther up the hill can be had for the equivalent of just a few hundred dollars. Four have been rented, including one to students in a nursing-care program at a nearby college who receive a discount in return for checking up on elderly people in the area.

Other towns have tried their own creative solutions, including offering cash payments to outsiders who move in and buy unoccupied homes. A few have succeeded in attracting pockets of artists and freelance workers, who stay tethered by the Internet to their urban clients.

There is even a sprawling art project, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, which has taken unoccupied buildings in a cluster of towns northwest of Tokyo and turned them into contemporary artworks. Visitors can spend the night in a “Dream House” designed by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, with coffin-like beds and tinted lights designed to elicit dreams, or tour other buildings that have been intricately carved, painted or filled with sculptural installations.

“They may not be used for their original purpose anymore, but preserving them physically is important,” said the project’s founder, Fram Kitagawa. “The key is to preserve them in a positive way.”

Raw numbers suggest there is a limit to how many homes can be rescued through reuse, however. Japan’s population of 127 million is expected to drop by a million a year in the coming decades. Efforts to increase its low birthrate have been only modestly successful, and the public has shown no appetite for mass immigration. “We have too much infrastructure,” said Takashi Onishi, an urban planning professor and the president of the Science Council of Japan. The government, he believes, will eventually have to cut services like water and road and bridge maintenance in the most depopulated areas. “We can’t maintain it all. We’ll have to make those hard choices.”

The most blunt solution for abandoned houses is to tear them down before they become hazards or their neighborhoods earn an irreversible reputation for blight. But owners can be hard to track down, and are often reluctant to pay demolition costs.

The house that Ms. Haneda tends is owned by the family of Mioko Utagawa, 74, who lives a 10-minute walk down the hill. Ms. Utagawa’s husband bought it for an aunt in the 1970s after she divorced and moved here from Tokyo. Now she is in a nursing home. The family has been paying her modest property taxes but has otherwise left the house alone. The interior is a musty wreck; a small addition that once housed the bath has been ripped out, and the bathtub sits upturned on the faithfully manicured lawn.

“Even if we fixed it up nobody would want it,” Ms. Utagawa said.

The Utagawas recently agreed to have the house demolished, after the city offered to subsidize the estimated 3 million yen cost, under a municipal program introduced last year to deal with hazardous or hopelessly unsellable homes. It is scheduled for destruction this fall. Noriyuki Shima, the director of the city’s planning department, said cost considerations meant the city was targeting only the worst-affected neighborhoods.

“Giving public money to demolish a private house isn’t something we can do lightly,” he said.

The new national law, which came into effect in May, could help more municipalities cull their vacant houses. Among other changes, it removed a perverse incentive that has contributed to the problem. A tax break introduced decades ago to encourage home construction sets property tax rates on vacant lots at six times the level of those on built-up land. That means that if an owner demolishes a home, the tax rate soars — a big reason many let even crumbling houses stand.

Now the government can revoke the preferential tax treatment for houses whose absentee owners are letting them fall apart. But some critics say Japan needs a more fundamental shift in its approach to housing, which has long prioritized new construction over reuse.

Hidetaka Yoneyama, a housing specialist at the Fujitsu Research Institute, a think tank, said that until recently, homes in Japan were built to last only about 30 years, when they were then expected to be torn down and rebuilt. Building quality is improving, but the market for secondhand homes remains tiny. Developers are still building more than 800,000 new homes and condominiums a year, despite the glut of vacancies.

“In the high-growth era, everyone was happy with this arrangement,” Mr. Yoneyama said. But in 20 years, he calculated, more than one-quarter of Japanese houses could be empty. “Now the tables are turned. The population is declining and no one wants to live in these old houses.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

Tokyo real estate prices plummet as ghost homes on outskirts of city lie abandoned and unsold

The World Today 

By North Asia correspondent Matthew Carney

Posted 10 Dec 2015, 5:51pm

PHOTO: The Chinese middle class are coming in for the cheap takings and buying up apartments in central Tokyo. (Flickr: xio_olx)

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It used to have the most expensive real estate in the world but prices in Tokyo have plummeted, withmillions of houses unable to be sold.

Chinese middle classes, mainly from Beijing and Shanghai, are coming in for the cheap takings and buying up apartments in central Tokyo.

But on the outskirts of Tokyo, in Yokosuka, houses lie abandoned all over the place.

Some look as if they have been deserted for years and others as if the inhabitants suddenly upped and left.

The Japanese call them ghost homes.

In the 1970s and 1980s people came to Yokosuka to buy affordable real estate and escape the boom time prices of central Tokyo.

Now 14 per cent of homes lie empty and across Japan a staggering eight million are unoccupied.

In Yokosuka the houses are lucky to sell for a few thousand dollars.

Local council planning worker Noriyuki Shima said real estate agents do not bother listing the houses — there are simply no buyers.

"Yokosuka once thrived as a port city," he said.

"There used to be a car industry here but mechanisation took over ... there's no jobs and young people don't want to live here."

The ghost homes are the most visible sign of human retreat in a country where the population is shrinking fast.

It is a remarkable turnaround for a city that a few decades ago was struggling with overcrowding and had the most expensive real estate in the world.

Chinese investors have tripled in past year

The Chinese are coming in great numbers for the cheap takings, and it is not the billionaires but the growing Chinese middle classes that are investing in sought after areas in central Tokyo.

One Chinese buyer, who wants to remain unidentified, says Tokyo is the best choice because of a weak Yen and high rental returns.

"The returns on the investment are high in Japan, I like that," the company executive said.

"There is the Olympics happening in 2020 — I expect even better conditions then."

Japanese real estate agent Yoshi Tanaka said investors from China have tripled in the past year, and they buy with cash, looking for small to medium sized apartments.

"Compared to domestic China like Shanghai, Japan has double the return," he said.

"The cheaper Yen over the past two years has led to good sales."

And like cities in Australia, the Chinese are pushing up prices.

In some areas of central Tokyo apartment prices have risen by 20 per cent — the first real increase for a couple of decades.