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Why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years

17 points by daddy_drank 9y ago

senko 9y ago
The actually mostly talks about how this is beginning to change. The answer to the question from the title is hidden in a single paragraph: Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time, becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years. When someone moves out of a home or dies, the house, unlike the land it sits on, has no resale value and is typically demolished. This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for resale.
- GuiA 9y ago
  Using your comment as a jumping off point for the discussion of this aspect particularly - as long as the construction is done with fairly environmentally friendly materials, I don’t find that especially problematic. Maybe because I am typing this from a San Francisco building that appears to be mostly made of wood and nails, whose foundations do not seem to have been updated in almost a century, and seems ready to collapse/burst in flames at any moment’s notice, and for which I am paying the same price as the nice new modern building down the street that does seem in better shape in case of an earthquake or fire. I am also reminded of the house where a coworker just moved in with his entire family, of which most of the foundations are burnt due to a fire in the 90s. The house still stands up - for now - and the landlord has been renting it ever since because it would never sell in this shape. So in geographic regions with high risk for seismic activity, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, etc, it seems like building houses up to the latest code with cheap materials every 30 years is better than having very expensive tinderboxes around for a century or so.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Something similar happened to Detroit where they demolished existing homes for the same reason.
booleandilemma 9y ago
Meanwhile I’m living in NYC in a building from the 1920s with only have a handful of electrical outlets.
sus_007 9y ago
This article has already been discussed twice in HN. >DUPE 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734 >DUPE 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711338

17 points by daddy_drank 9y ago

The actually mostly talks about how this is beginning to change. The answer to the question from the title is hidden in a single paragraph: Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time, becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years. When someone moves out of a home or dies, the house, unlike the land it sits on, has no resale value and is typically demolished. This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for resale.

GuiA 9y ago
Using your comment as a jumping off point for the discussion of this aspect particularly - as long as the construction is done with fairly environmentally friendly materials, I don’t find that especially problematic. Maybe because I am typing this from a San Francisco building that appears to be mostly made of wood and nails, whose foundations do not seem to have been updated in almost a century, and seems ready to collapse/burst in flames at any moment’s notice, and for which I am paying the same price as the nice new modern building down the street that does seem in better shape in case of an earthquake or fire. I am also reminded of the house where a coworker just moved in with his entire family, of which most of the foundations are burnt due to a fire in the 90s. The house still stands up - for now - and the landlord has been renting it ever since because it would never sell in this shape. So in geographic regions with high risk for seismic activity, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, etc, it seems like building houses up to the latest code with cheap materials every 30 years is better than having very expensive tinderboxes around for a century or so.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Something similar happened to Detroit where they demolished existing homes for the same reason.

booleandilemma 9y ago

Meanwhile I’m living in NYC in a building from the 1920s with only have a handful of electrical outlets.

sus_007 9y ago

This article has already been discussed twice in HN. >DUPE 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734 >DUPE 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711338