Aging Japan Grapples with 8 Million Empty Homes and Stashed Cash
Thariq Ridha
This article covers another issue stemming from Japan's aging population: empty residences. A record 13.6% of housing stands empty nationwide. 8.46 million residences were unoccupied in 2018. This increase is said to come largely from a building boom that defies the shrinking population. Developers continue to construct new homes, which lowers demand for the older, vacant buildings.
Vacany rates were highest in Yamanashi prefecture, at 21.3 percent. Wakayama and Nagano Prefectures followed at 20.3 percent and 19.5 percent, respectively. These areas mostly consist of rural areas, which seems to be where the problem is most serious. Another article discusses how the combination of Japan's aging population and the attraction of urban lifestyle to younger people has left rural regions with a much older population and more abandoned homes. Kensaku Fueki, a resident in a small town in the mountains, says that he "remembers a time when many of the houses weren’t abandoned, when more people farmed the land and children roamed the streets."
One cause for this issue stated by an article is that jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and there is not much opportunity for employment in the countryside. One resident in a small city said, "They graduate high school, they go to university in Tokyo, they start working in Tokyo, and they set up their lives in Tokyo and never come back."
In terms of what is being done to circumvent this issue, some municipalities around the country have urged owners to repair or demolish 708 properties, and took action on 118 of these cases. As owners are responsible for demolition costs, it is sometimes difficult to track them down, and the process of demolition is costly and time-consuming. Some solutions done include making a park out of the lot following a demolition, doing renovations for reselling, or re-purposing the building as cafes, guesthouses, or Airbnbs.
While the population-decline in Japan may not seem an inherently bad thing, there are a lot of economic difficulties as the overall population becomes more elderly. As we saw in a previous class discussion, the problems with an increasingly elder population include a smaller workforce that cannot push the economy enough to sustain-ably support the entire population. We see here that this also leads to issues with abandoned homes, which is also affected by rising urban concentration.
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