16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that falls in the median (50%) for Tokyo 23 wards[1]. Only 30% of houses have the minimum recommended of 25sqm/person (so, 70% live UNDER in under 25sqm/person). If the other cities in the graph are correct, that makes Tokyo median size around half of the average of those other cities[2].
So yes, definitely Tokyo housing is tiny. I know it since I live here and talk with people; when I invite someone who is not in tech to my place they all comment on how big my 37 sqm "house" (studio/single room) is, to which I can only agree and laugh/cry inside. I'm happy because I am well for living in Tokyo, but it's still a tiny place compared to my hometown where everyone lives like kings.
[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-sp...
[2] I believe I'm using median/average correctly here, but happy for corrections! I check "at what sizes it's 50% of the # of households" and then took that measure. Sorry for mixing medians and averages, but I cannot calculate averages with the numbers I found.
I have friend living in Tokyo paying <10万円 in rent for a (very small) single unit. A couple other friends share a larger unit and pay similar per person. All are in the 23 wards. This is unimaginable for other friends living in Paris (one of the 20 Arrondissements) and New York (one of the 5 boroughs), regardless of size. I have no anecdata on London.
Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a small western apartment, or trying to save by bulk buying ingredients when you don't have the space to store it.
So I think the title of the article is half right (rent is cheaper than you'd think), missing some key info (wages are also cheaper than you'd think), half of it is roughly incorrect (housing is not any more spacious than you'd think), and the article itself doesn't back it up well.
550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo.
I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1 of London and "Yamanote area" in Tokyo, while New York 5 boroughs is a lot bigger and more comparable with 23 Wards. But anyway let's go with it, since at least it's much better than comparing it with Tokyo Metropolitan. With Airbnb (which is usually a lot more expensive than long-term rental) I can find a bunch of places for under 1k USD:
For London I could literally not find any, and for Tokyo also a bunch of places (you might notice that these are way further from the center than the area of Paris, but hey I said that was fair):
So it seems that London is particularly expensive, similar to Tokyo's Yamanote; while Paris 20 Arrondissements are at a similar place as Tokyo 23 wards.
USD 675.18
EURO 683.40
GBP 588.43
For anyone who is interested but too lazy to search
And indeed, people throughout Greater London are entirely used to living in small, damp, shared boxes.
See this image with the labels, we should compare the green one instead of the 3 of them. Ideally "Tokyo" would be something more like the purple one, but the purple one is nothing. So we have "23 wards" (green), or Tokyo Metropolitan (the 3 together), neither of which is the best comparison, but def the green one vs London is much better than all of them (the purple dashes are how I think London would look like approx):
I’ve stayed many times with a friend whose father is a well-known Japanese movie actor and even they live in a house which would be modest by any US suburban standard, in a quiet part of a nice neighborhood (kichijoji) but still an 8-10 minute walk to trains and very bustling, active parts of town.
The thing I’ve found remarkable with Tokyo is how walkable it is and how, despite how crowded and dense it can seem, the street level experience can feel very accessible and not at all overwhelming. Many good parks, walking paths and general accommodations for people not in cars.
Which, honestly, wasn't the worst. 40 minutes to an hour on the JR is 10-30 minutes more than my current commute, but I could have dealt with that in exchange for more space.
Yep. In that case half of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey etc. should count as well.
I see this in Amsterdam: rich expats who barely grasp that there is a country outside the city.
(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 is very much proof that NIMBY reforms are the solution to the housing crisis in the West. Deregulating the ability of property developers to build new housing will incontrevirtibly increase supply, blunt runaway housing costs, and make dense cities with high economic opportunity affordable for the middle class.
[1]https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-... [2]https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-...
Dutchies/Belgies: Is anywhere similar where you live?
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
Lack of building codes like must have central heat or must have bathroom also can bring housing prices down.
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.
Lots of additional detail.
> Even more striking is that more people in Tokyo live in detached houses compared to apartments (30%) than in New York (16.3%) and Paris (12.3%).
I'm pretty sure this "striking" fact is an artifact of including a whole lotta suburbs, exurbs and farms in the Tokyo stats. Very few people live in detached houses within the 23-ku.
TL;DR: Housing in greater Tokyo is indeed affordable, but as anyone who's seen a "one-room mansion" (read: tiny studio) can attest, it's rarely spacious.
If you view page 6 and 7, you'll see why these numbers are largely irrelevant since the boundaries for all the "cities" except NYC (which is the 5 boroughs) include the large swathes of suburbs/exurbs around the city.
A study looking at 23-wards vs Inner London vs City of Paris would be a lot more informative.
BTW, the writer of the article seems to simply be using these numbers to push his view that real estate prices will continue to go up in Tokyo. Housing Japan, a Japanese real estate agency that caters to foreign investors shows pricing for apartments in the 23 wards have been on a pretty crazy upwards trajectory [1], but 1) this is denominated in JPY pricing, and the exchange rate has tanked by 35% vs USD this past year, and of course, I'd be much more interested in seeing that post revisited in 2023...
[1] https://housingjapan.com/blog/tokyo-residential-real-estate-...
But isn't the entire Tokyo Metropolis under an hour by mass transit? That's a far cry from Buffalo. Like, Buffalo cannot commute to NYC by anything other than private aircraft.
So their numbers seem indeed dubious.
Edit: I found official stats (French only): https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2011101?geo=DEP-75#chif... Table "LOG T2". "maisons" = "house", "appartements" = "apartments"
In 2019, less than 1% of housing stock were "houses".
I used to pick stations at random to arrive at and explore, and what I always saw was endless houses. Only the areas closer to bigger stations had manshon.
I think you might be conflating Shibuya/Roppongi/Shinjuku with less central parts of the 23 special wards.
These are the opposite factors of what urban US is facing.
Even Tokyo metro area population has been in decline and is forecast to decline, as NYCs continues growing.
Tokyo housing-space-per-resident being higher is probably also an artifact of lower household formation / childrearing than western cities.
That said Tokyo has different zoning which allows for smaller apartment units than NYC/SF/etc and should be applauded for that.
As others have said, difference between NYC and NYS is much much larger than that...
But for reference, Ottawa, Canada, is one of the largest cities in Canada by area at 2778 km^2. But the Greater Toronto Area, what many call "Toronto", is ~7000km^2 and only has ~6 million people...
Toronto proper is only 630km^2, with 3 million people. The scale here is reasonable, Tokyo has excellent transportation options that make it realistic to live anywhere in that region.
Can confirm. Three years ago I spent 2 months in a furnished two bedroom apartment two stops away from Shinjuku - paid $1,500 / month. Had three different subway stations within ~7 min walk each. Great location, very inexpensive.
The company I used is Fontana - English speaking, they set up gas/electric/water and all I had to do was pay for them at the convenience store nearby (7 Eleven). The only requirement is a 2-month minimum stay. Will do again.
One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more than you can say for New York) but clearly nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside. And I’ve never seen more miserable public parks in a developed country.
Many of the people I know in the U.S. live in attractive neighborhoods full of nice-looking houses and well-kept front yards. While some of that niceness is due to the owners’ own initiative, much is the result of zoning restrictions, homeowner association rules, and the like.
The only zoning restrictions on my house in Yokohama are limits on total floorspace and land coverage and fire and earthquake rules covering building design and materials. I can paint my house any color I want, pile whatever junk I want in my (tiny) yard, and hang whatever laundry I want from the balconies, and no one can or will say anything about it.
As a result of this tolerant, low-regulation regime, the neighborhood I live in is, like most neighborhoods here, an unattractive mish-mash of mismatched houses and apartments in many styles and states of upkeep. If that’s the price of (relative) freedom, I’m happy to pay it.
First, it's not clean, it's just different way of unclean and only during certain periods of the day. But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.
On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
"Nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside" => completely agree, my pet peeve here is that one of the best towns geographically speaking of Japan is probably the ugliest town I've seen in my life in a 1st world country (Kawaguchiko, with the beautiful lake, lush forest and Fuji San nearby).
"never seen more miserable public parks" again have to agree, the median local park is taken out of a horror movie. Though there are* a bunch of very, very beautiful ones!
Last time I visited Tokyo in 2016 there was clearly an encampment at the Ueno park. And that wasn’t the first time I saw an encampment in Japan (visiting Tokyo in 2008 I saw a few in Tokyo and Osaka). However, Japanese homeless encampments are always very clean and well organized. It’s a completely different feel from the states (even if they definitely exist).
Apart from the worst parts of Roppongi on a Monday morning, I have never ever seen this.
I'm not a huge fan of the look of the gravel parks, but every kid having a nearby park that they actually use beats a handful of parks that look nice, IMO. And it's not like Tokyo doesn't have big beautiful parks as well.
First impression as well, but it's an aquired taste.
Sure there are parts of Tokyo that are cheaper, but Tokyo is gigantic. All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.
Are the locals foreigners or Japanese? The set of housing options are different between the two. There's an implicit price premium and threshold on the units with landlords receptive to foreigners. The cheaper accommodations are not going to be available especially if tenant isn't fluent in the language.
> All the places that "matter" with reasonably fast commute are very expensive and small.
I live 3 minutes commute to Shibuya, and my rent is half my rent in an outer borough of NYC. Brand new lofty unit designed by a famous architect. Space efficiency-wise, it's equal if not greater. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison to just look at floorspace, since Japan has lots of infrastructure such as actually convenient stores which means people don't need to own as much household items.
Yes, you need to bring someone who is fluent to sign papers, but if you have residence with a visa that's greater than 2 years, there's no real difference. Most foreigners have their company, or their school do the actual paperwork, as well.
If your visa is less than two (and in some cases three) years, then yeah, you're going to need a gaijin apartment, and they're a lot more expensive.
House prices here are quite reasonable, nice distance to the ocean for the weekends. I'm considering buying and building a house in the next year or two.
It says with $1500 rent you can get a 140m2 or 1500 sqft apartment in Berlin. HAHA! MAYBE IN THE 90s.
Not to mention that I'm willing to bet that less of 5% of housing in Berlin is 140m2 or higher. (might be 1% or less even)
One of the main reasons why older people seem to think millennials are complaining about nothing: they locked in their rental rates back in the last millennia, and the laws generally only allow low-single-digit increases per year
A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped.
A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious.
So if you look at living space per person, then societies with smaller household sizes will appear to have more living space per person.
so if you measure that, you also have to compare how many people are in households as well.
Another thing to consider when comparing countries is what is considered "living space" and what is not - some areas have large porches that are not considered "living space" even though they serve similar functions to what a living room might in other parts of the world.
depends on your perspective, I guess! that sounds horribly cramped to me.
In a 100m2 home: 3x15m2 bedrooms, 25m2 living room, 10m2 kitchen and you still got 20m2 left.
It's no comparison to a single 25m2 apartment where all these functions have to fit.
I would argue very much the opposite!
- 1 person in 25m² (270 ft²) is comfortable enough in a city, and if your hobbies are small
- 4 people in 100m² (1076 ft²) can definitely be crampedThe 270 ft² space might have 100 ft² usable area, but the 1076 ft² could have 700 ft² usable.
> the tallest building in Tokyo is only 255 meters
There is a hotel in this tower (called Andaz) and it has a proper swimming pool on the 37th floor. Quite an jaw-dropping experience on its own, but doubly so during an earthquake.
A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.
We see in the animal kingdom the predator-prey cycle that population takes care of itself. When there's too many rabbits or deer, there's no cause for concern: the plentiful food supply means that wolves and foxes will be able to reproduce more and take care of the situation. When there's too many wolves/foxes and the situation reverses, the scarce food supply means that the predators aren't able to flourish and the rabbits and deer are able to reproduce more.
I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
> A stabilizing population on an island with limited space seems like a good thing. A little more space opens up for living and real-estate prices might become more favorable. Maybe there's room for more parks and other things that make life good. When conditions become more favorable, people will be able to reproduce more.
Population density is not homogenous. Excluding pandemic era, the trend has been decreasing population density in the countryside and smaller cities, while more population moves to the big cities. In general, population size need not correlate for the average persons lived population density.
> I'd say that the human desire for reproduction might work in the same way, only instead of prey, maybe real-estate prices and quality of life is the cyclical variable to note.
This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.
> I've never understood why there was such an extreme panic by some about Japan's lower birth rates to the point that they urged mass immigration there.
This is generally because the population is not stabilizing, it’s on the verge of collapsing. If fertility rate rises “naturally” in the future, as you suggest, then it’s obviously not an issue. But maintaining a 1.3 or lower fertility rate indefinitely will result in an exponential decay of population which could itself result in a decline of living standards. For example, if the population decreases too much to support a high speed rail system so these are abandoned as unprofitable.
>This is likely true on the extremes to some degree, but I haven’t seen much evidence that this is a driving force of population dynamics.
In South Korea, young people are struggling to find affordable places to live, to the extent that many people live with their parents well into their 30ies. Coincidently, they also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
In my city, I see a lot of people who first build a house or buy an appartement, and then have kids, in their 30ies, because they can't afford a big enough place before that.
As housing prices rise everywhere, it takes longer and longer for people to be able to afford a place big enough for a family. Of course people then delay having kids, and many end up not having kids at all.
The scary thing is that this is something the USA and lots of other countries are headed towards as well.
How Tokyo avoided the affordable housing crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894963 - Sept 2022 (90 comments)
That being said, it's competitive only for average sized/priced places. Both low end and above-average properties are easier to rent.
One-month is ultra-short by Japanese standards. The rental inventory is distinct from regular apartments. This is effectively a hotel.
Housing in Tokyo or Seoul no longer looked expensive in my eyes.
I keep meeting people who move to Appalachia and not register that the things that made it attractive (low crime etc) won't stay that way if people keep talking to me like I'm literally retarded.
(Every time someone tells me "I work in technology or whatever as I walk to get my espresso, I want to say "Great! Enjoy locking down your house like my South African neighbor told me they had to during apartheid, I've had too many of these conversations where the person was speaking in bad faith.")
Permanent Residency is helpful towards procuring a mortgage, but you don't need a visa to buy property in Japan. Non-resident cash buyers had no problem pushing up the real estate market in Vancouver, Canada.
Someone always mentions "But Tokyo...". That person never lives in Tokyo.