People didn't think it was cheap at the time. The 70's had seen a boom in real estate prices, especially in California, due to the boomers moving into their home buying years. (And that was before Prop 13, which was a response to high home prices.)
> the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.
Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.
> Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.
Depends. If building housing were legal it would. Tokyo’s population has increased 50% over the last twenty years and property prices have been flat. If supply is allowed to rise to reach demand property prices don’t go up on a never ending spiral.
The housing market seems like one that is fucked up, especially here in the UK, because the government consists of and is run for homeowners, who have come to expect a continuous growth in their investment or freak the hell out, regardless of the actual value of housing on the market. So it's an artificially inflated market because they are incentivised to keep houses continuously more expensive or their base loses out.
That may contribute to affordability but if supply was constrained to stop it reaching demand prices would have risen, tiny apartments or no. See San Francisco where glorified closets are a lot more expensive than in Tokyo. Prices haven’t risen in Tokyo because supply has risen. They have in many, many cities all over the Anglosphere. That’s a policy choice. Not a law of nature.
Na issue is that with expansion distances increase. Thus you lose the benefit of being in the city (close to work, close to friends, close to cultural offerings, close to shops, close to ...) While Japan did a few things to help, like reliably working high speed railway, which allows commute over wide distance, while central places are crowded during rush hour and can't take much more.
Shinkansen (bullet train) commuting is a marginal phenomenon, with a few thousands doing it in a metropolis of 20M+. Highly reliable commuter railways with cheap express services are the backbone (and genesis) of Tokyo's sprawl.
> Thus you lose the benefit of being in the city (close to work, close to friends, close to cultural offerings, close to shops, close to ...)
This is the “Brooklyn is boring” problem. It’s temporary. The old city centre (Manhattan) is unlikely to decline rapidly in relative importance but cultural and economic life will happily extend itself from central areas to less central ones given the population and the money to make it worthwhile. Good transport links help enormously too.
Tokyo doesn't really radiate from a single center anyway. It's really an agglomeration of centers of activity. This is also true of NYC to some degree (but in a different way). "Downtown," i.e. Wall Street, isn't the cultural and social center.
Yes, though there is still room in the Tokyo metro area for even more growth, both vertically and horizontally. Even though Japan's population is declining, Tokyo Prefecture and its neighboring prefectures were still growing pre-pandemic (although I remember reading that since the COVID-19 pandemic struck there's a growing interest in living in more rural parts of Japan.) Regarding horizontal growth, there is still plenty of agricultural land in the Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures east of Tokyo that can be developed. In fact, when I take the Narita Express from the Narita International Airport to Tokyo, I pass by plenty of agricultural areas before reaching the easternmost fringes of the Tokyo metro area's urban sprawl. Another area where urban sprawl could occur is the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture just south of Mt. Fuji, where the beach resort town of Atami is located.
Regarding horizontal growth, there are plenty of places in the Tokyo metro area being redeveloped horizontally, such as the Musashi-Kosugi area of Kawasaki, which is just a 20 minute train ride on regular commuter trains like the Tokyu Toyoko Line and the JR Shonan-Shinjuku Line to Shibuya, a major hub in Tokyo. Over the past 15 years there has been a lot of development of high-rise residences in the area. Futako-tamagawa is another area of Tokyo that has seen much horizontal growth, starting with the Rise shopping center and nearby high-rise residences that opened around 2011. Rakuten moved its headquarters from Shinagawa to Futako-tamagawa sometime in the late 2010s, which has further boosted the desirability of Futako-tamagawa and neighboring areas such as Mizonokuchi just across the river in Kawasaki.
Disclaimer: I live near Silicon Valley but I travel to Japan roughly once every other year.
On the other hand, roughly $50-100/night gets you a clean, though tiny, place to stay at a business hotel in the Tokyo metro area. (For those of you unfamiliar with Japan, a business hotel is a type of hotel that offers rooms primarily for people on domestic business trips. The rooms are tiny [think the size of a college dorm room, sometimes even smaller], but at the hotels I've stayed at, the service is friendly and the staff does a great job with cleanliness.) By comparison, there are parts of the United States where you have to pay more than $100 per night for a dodgy motel in an unsafe area. I generally stay at business hotels whenever I take a trip to Japan, whether it is for business or for vacation.
Talking about the size of living space in a discussion of free marking housing costs is irrelevant. The only fact that matters is cost per unit area, the free market will decide how much area people are willing to pay for (assuming, of course, that there is a free market that is able to construct smaller or larger living spaces. Japan has one of these, whereas the United States typically does not thanks to most municipalities' zoning law)
In Tokyo, land is extraordinarily expensive but living space is only ordinarily expensive (and not nearly as expensive as many US cities). As a consequence, a quick google search[0] suggests that a new single family home in Tokyo's 23 wards will cost you $600,000 with about 1051 square feet of living space, or roughly $600 per square foot, and in the distant suburbs (with long train commutes, an hour minimum but maybe 90 minutes or more to shinjuku. would be fine for a remote worker though) you can get a house for around $400,000 although this article regrettably does not mention if these houses are the same size on average or not (so $400 per square foot or less, not quite sure).
In terms of the urban form of the streetscape, expensive land coupled with the fact that you can legally subdivide your land, means that houses are very crammed together with almost no space in between in major cities, and especially in Tokyo. That said it's a free market - there are larger lots you can buy, and if you really want a big property I'm sure you could buy neighboring lots and combine them somehow (demolition of existing properties is normal anyways - if you really want a buffer from your neighbors, build a house that's smaller than your lot size!). In contrast, most municipalities in the US mandate a certain space between houses and/or require getting special zoning board approval to subdivide your lot, which means that there's essentially a "minimum" lot size, which turns into a minimum house cost of (minimum lot size * land price).
Additionally there will always be concerns about standard of living. IMO Japanese homes are, in some ways better, but in many ways worse, standard of living than American homes. For example, my impression is that the HVAC situation is typically much worse than the standard american home (although where I live in boston the "AC" is usually nonexistant since most homes are 100+ years old, but atleast the heating is good). On the other hand, Japanese bathrooms are a godsend, if you haven't experienced it you don't know. The biggest concern to me is the sound insulation, which can be poor in many cheap wood-framed Japanese homes (true in many cheap new construction American homes too, as well as some older American constructions. It always depends I suppose! But atleast in sprawling american suburbs you don't hear your neighbor as often through those walls because houses are spread out enough.)
Finally, as a note, while all the above is talking about Tokyo and it's suburbs, there are other big booming cities in Japan (Osaka is popular) which are often 30% or more cheaper but with many of the same big-city amenities like transit, walkability, restaurants and culture, and so on. In terms of price, Tokyo really is like the NYC of Japan, but it's actually affordable for the average family, albeit with either a small home or a long commute.
TL;DR : in Tokyo, land is really expensive, living space is moderately expensive, the free market has converged to fairly small living spaces relative to the US. In the rest of Japan (and distant suburbs to Tokyo), land is moderately expensive and living space is fairly cheap.
Addendum: to someone interested in suburban/rural housing in Japan, there's a youtube channel TokyoLlama with a series on his purchasing one of those abandoned houses in a distant tokyo suburb, about 50 minutes out of the city by train. It's an old, beautiful, artisan wood house. At some point in the series he covers all the costs associated with buying the house, as well as various costs and effort to renovate it and make it livable.[1]
You could confiscate the homes of everyone over 60, distribute them for free to young people, and the market prices of the homes would remain the same.
I sometimes feel we're not living in the fully realized cyberpunk dystopia we were promised without a bunch of ramshackle buildings piled on top of each other and stolen data flowing through it all.
People didn't think it was cheap at the time. The 70's had seen a boom in real estate prices, especially in California, due to the boomers moving into their home buying years. (And that was before Prop 13, which was a response to high home prices.)
> the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.
Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.