Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches

Counter intuitive

Last week the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) finally released its latest survey of the Japanese housing situation. We say “finally” because the survey is conducted every five years and the last one came out in 2018, so we’d been waiting for it since last fall. The big news is that the number of vacant houses, or akiya, has grown to more than 9 million, or 13 percent of all homes in Japan, a statistic that’s earned headlines all over the world, though the last time the survey was published the number was already way over 8 million, so it’s not as if it’s a surprise. Still, given the global housing situation vis-a-vis inflation and other economic pressures, it’s a mighty powerful indicator of something that few people have explained satisfactorily. We think we know the reason, and we’ve discussed it for years on this blog, but that’s not our concern today. What we want to talk about is the real mystery surrounding the survey, which is how it’s conducted.

For the most part, nobody questions the MIC’s methodology, but given the sheer scale of the akiya situation, one would naturally wonder how the field staff who carry out the survey could possibly count every single vacant home. And, of course, they can’t, so they use the common statistical technique known as extrapolation, which means inferring the unknown based on the known. Specifically, it means taking a scientifically derived sample of a population and then using those results to draw a conclusion about the larger picture. So the real question is: How do they choose a sample?

In 2016, the real estate investment website, Rakumachi, published an article about how the akiya survey was conducted based on questions it had submitted to the MIC. The first point was how the ministry defined a vacant home, and, as it turns out, it has five categories, which are:

1. “Second homes,” meaning vacation properties that are used only on weekends and/or holidays; no year-round occupancy.

2. “Other” second homes, such as residences that are used only for work purposes and occasional overnight stays.

3. Vacant properties that are for rent, regardless of age.

4. Vacant properties that are listed for sale, new or used.

5. “All others,” including homes owned by people who are not occupying them at the time due to work transfers or extended hospital stays, homes that are being “prepared for demolition or rebuilding,” and homes that are vacant but to which none of the above criteria apply.

We assume that “abandoned homes” (hochi akiya) are included in category 5, and in the latest survey they total 4 million, which is quite substantial. Nevertheless, it also means that most of the residences described in the survey are still in use to some extent, so the term “vacant” needs to be qualified.

When Rakumachi asks how the akiya statistic is estimated, the MIC gives a fairly detailed answer. A vacant home is defined as a residence that is not occupied “on a daily basis,” and an evaluation is reached without necessarily interacting with the owners of the residences in question. The field surveyors “make an effort” to talk to the owner/titleholder of a property several times. But mainly they inspect the exterior of the property and question neighbors or, if the property is collective housing, like an apartment building or a condominium, they try to talk to the manager. They collect all this information for a sample of a given area and, using other information specific to the locality, extrapolate. The MIC stresses that collective housing is more difficult for different reasons, the most obvious one being that field surveyors usually cannot enter the building to interact with residents.

So already there is guesswork involved in compiling the information that will form the basis for the akiya statistic. In January 2021, Nikkei Business ran a story that questioned this methodology with the headline, “Is the 10 percent vacancy rate in Tokyo true?” Nikkei ran off the most recent vacancy statistics: 8.49 million akiya out of a total of 62.4 million residential units in Japan; more than 800,000 vacant properties in Tokyo out of a housing stock of 7.67 million. The reporter, Takeshi So, wondered about these statistics because he rarely sees what he would describe as an akiya, be it a single-family house or an apartment, in Tokyo. (For what it’s worth, we’ve seen quite a few, but we are sensitive to that sort of thing.) And when So looked carefully at the MIC’s methodology he was struck by one thing, namely the discrepancies between the MIC’s numbers and those reported by local governments.

Not what they paid for

Posted on 9 Days Ago by catforehead

In December, the Chiba city office of East Japan Railways (JR East) announced a change in the timetable for the Keiyo Line that would start in March. The Keiyo runs from Tokyo Station parallel to the Tokyo Bay shoreline south to Soga Station in Chiba city. It is the train line that services Tokyo Disneyland and the Makuhari district of Chiba, which is the home of Makuhari Messe, one of the metro area’s biggest exhibition and convention facilities. The reason for the timetable change was the removal of the Commuter Express train, which does not make any stops between Shin Kiba Station in Tokyo and Soga, and which operated twice in the morning and twice in the evening. The Commuter Express would be replaced by local trains, which stop at every station on the line, but several Rapid Express trains would be added during off-peak hours in the daytime.

According to the transportation-oriented website Impress Watch, the announcement was met with opposition from local governments affected by the Keiyo Line, including Chiba city’s and Chiba Prefecture’s. In addition, the major media covered the matter with an eye as to how the changes would affect commuters, many of whom demanded that JR East reinstate the Commuter Express. As a compromise, the company added two Rapid Express trains to the morning peak and two to the evening peak, which was highly unusual. Once a railway company changes a timetable they almost never change it back, even partially. However, the compromise may not be enough for commuters who rely on the Keiyo Line to get to their jobs in the capital. In fact, many probably bought their homes on the Chiba peninsula because of the Keiyo Commuter Express, which is why many real estate companies and residential housing developers are nervous about the timetable changes.

JR East told NHK that the number of passengers on the line has decreased by up to 30 percent during peak periods compared to before the pandemic. There are a total of 18 stations on the Keiyo Line, of which 7 are not serviced by the Commuter Express and the Rapid Express. The company thinks that people who live near these stations are inconvenienced by the former express train timetables, and wanted to give them more opportunities to use the line. In addition, local trains have to wait at certain stations along the line for Commuter Express and Rapid Express trains to pass, thus further inconveniencing local train users. Though JR East emphasizes that they’re thinking about local line users, it’s their own bottom line that’s really at issue. Those who use the various express trains to get to work are already locked in as customers, so the strategy of the timetable change is to add passengers by increasing local runs and making them more “efficient” for those passengers. And on paper, at least, the difference in time doesn’t seem that bad. During peak hours, the local train from Soga to Tokyo, and vice versa, takes only 19 more minutes than the Commuter Express.

Make mine maglev (5)

Posted on April 3 by catforehead

At the end of March, JR Tokai admitted something that we have been writing about for a number of years, which is that the inaugural Shinagawa-Nagoya leg of the Chuo Shinkansen, more popularly known as the linear motorcar in Japanese and the maglev in English, will not open in 2027 as originally planned. JR Tokai, the railway company in charge of the project (often referred to as JR Central in English), had already submitted a notification to the transport ministry in December saying that the maglev wouldn’t open until “after 2027,” but didn’t announce the revision publicly until March 28. Some reporters and at least one major media outlet, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), have been suggesting for years that, given the unprecedented scale of the project, there was no way JR Tokai was going to open the line, which will zip passengers between Tokyo and Nagoya in 40 minutes, by 2027.

The company was going to have to deliver the bad news eventually and needed a convenient scapegoat. They already had one in the form of Shizuoka Prefecture Governor Heita Kawakatsu, who had been a thorn in the side of the project for more than a decade (though the prefecture’s beef with JR Tokai extends back to before his administration). JR Tokai is now blaming Kawakatsu almost exclusively for the delay. As we’ve explained in the past, the governor, who professes to be in favor of the maglev, had refused to grant the company permission to carry out tunnel construction in his prefecture until it could guarantee that the Oi River, which is in the vicinity of the construction work, would not lose any water as a result. Tens of thousands of residents rely on the river as a water source, and JR Tokai’s own impact study projected that tunnel construction would result in a significant loss. The problem has been a matter of debate between the prefecture and the railway since 2014.

According to Nikkei, the transport ministry called a meeting at the end of March where the water problem was discussed within a framework of environmental conservation related to the maglev construction, and at the start of the meeting JR Tokai President Shunsuke Niwa said that, due to Shizuoka’s intransigence, he could no longer project when the Shinagawa-Nagoya leg would open. Another JR Tokai official explained that the original construction period of 17 years “could not be shortened,” and since it would have taken ten years to complete the line after construction of the Shizuoka section started, even if they did so this year they wouldn’t be able to finish the 8.9 kilometers of tunnel that passes through the prefecture until 2034. This is a big problem for JR Tokai since local governments and businesses located along the maglev line have been carrying out infrastructure construction and redevelopment in anticipation of a 2027 opening, and the delay could cost them money and, more significantly, public trust.

Then, on April 2, Kawakatsu announced he would resign in June, one year before his fourth term is up, for something that had nothing to do with the maglev or JR Tokai. During a speech to welcome new prefectural employees, the governor made a stupid remark belittling vegetable sellers and other occupations. All the media reports on the resignation mentioned that JR Tokai had blamed Kawakatsu for the fact that the maglev wouldn’t open in 2027, and while the ostensible reason for Kawakatsu’s standing down is the remark, he told reporters, perhaps passive-aggressively, that he wanted to remove himself as an obstacle to the tunnel construction.

Condo, heal thyself

Posted on March 4 by catforehead

One of the fees that condominium owners have to pay every month is called shuzenhi, which are contributions to a fund that will go toward large-scale repairs of common property in the overall structure, such as exterior walls and some plumbing shared by all the residents. This fee is separate from the management fee, which goes toward operation of the building and more immediate maintenance, including mandatory elevator inspections. Ideally, large-scale repairs should be carried out every dozen years or so, but they usually aren’t owing to difficulty in gaining approval from the needed majority of owners. As a result, many buildings fall into disrepair after several decades, but even when the homeowners get it together and vote for necessary work, there usually isn’t enough money in the fund to cover what has to be done. That’s because developers purposely set the monthly fees for the repair fund low so as to make it easier to sell units when they are first put on the market. We’ve read of cases where homeowners in some condominium buildings had to pay tens of millions of yen each on top of the money they’d contributed to the fund in order to get repair work done. Most condo operations are run by outside management companies, which may or may not be related to the original developers, and one of their tasks is to raise the shuzenhi gradually over the years so that there is enough money for the repairs, but, again, they need to gain the approval of the mandated portion of owners to do it, and that can be hard.

In response to this problem the construction ministry last month assembled a panel of experts to study a system, first implemented in 2022, for local governments to certify whether condo owners associations are operating properly. According to a ministry survey the amount of funds needed for long-term repairs is, on average, 3.6 times the amount collected using the original contribution calculation, but this real amount can go as high as 10 times the originally collected fund. Another survey conducted in 2018 found that 35 percent of condos nationwide have insufficient repair funds, which is likely a low estimate. According to a Feb. 23 article in the Asahi Shimbun, the ministry is trying to come up with better ways to persuade condo owners associations to increase their repair funds by adopting a savings plan based on long-term estimates of exactly how much money will be needed. Usually, when developers set the monthly contributions no such estimates have been made. The amount of the contribution is set arbitrarily based mainly on market considerations.

The revised plan that the ministry has submitted to the expert panel for study says that the amount needed for long-term repairs should be calculated and then divided into the number of owners and number of months remaining between the start of the fund and the proposed repairs. The ministry recommends that the actual monthly contribution be no less than 60 percent of the estimate and no more than 110 percent. However, if the fee is set at less than what is needed for the eventual repairs, the association can increase it over time by up to 80 percent. This means that if the full monthly contribution for long-term repairs is calculated to be ¥20,000 based on what the cost of repairs will be in the long run, the developer or whoever makes such a decision can set the actual contribution as low as ¥12,000, but then can increase it over time to ¥22,000.

Such a plan would be included in the management authorization system that local governments use to certify condo owners associations. Certification is based on whether the association has a long-term repair scheme. If the local government grants certification, the association is entitled to borrow money for large-scale repairs at a lower interest rate.

In a followup report on Feb. 27, the Asahi looked at a condominium in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward that contains 28 units and was built in 2008. Three years ago, the owners association increased the repair savings fund contribution 3.5-fold. The 45-year-old head of the association said that when he took over the position in 2017 he realized that the fund was about ¥20 million short of what it should have contained according to the initial savings plan. The reason for the shortage was that previous association heads did not carry out contribution increases every three years in accordance with the initial plan. The current head invited an expert to talk to other members of the association about what they needed to do, saying that if they didn’t carry out these needed repairs, the building itself would need even more expensive work down the line just to keep it working. Though the owners approved the new contribution plan, it took two years and 8 months to convince them.

The purpose of the ministry’s certification system is to avoid this kind of delay because increases in contributions would be incorporated into a plan, but as the Adachi example shows, even when such a plan exists it doesn’t mean the owners association will stick to it. The certification system is an incentive, but it is not mandated by law. For that reason, in addition to being eligible for lower interest rates to borrow money for repairs, the panel has suggested that associations who devise a plan and stick to it could have their property taxes lowered. As of the end of February, only 481 condo associations nationwide have been certified. The panel believes that the guidelines for the system should provide more of an incentive if such certification doesn’t have the force of law behind it.

Insulation blues

Posted on February 18 by catforehead

We use storage heaters in the winter, and they do a good job of keeping our two-story house uniformly warm, but the technology was partially based on the idea of off-peak electricity, meaning the ceramic bricks inside the storage units are heated in the middle of the night when electricity is cheaper and we’re asleep. Unfortunately, when our utility raised rates more than a year ago it also did away with off-peak discounts and last winter our electricity bills almost doubled. This year it’s been a bit better owing to government intervention, but anyone who lives in Japan, especially if they grew up in Europe or North America, understands how poorly Japanese homes retain heat. For one thing, central heating is not common in Japan, which means each room needs to have its own heat source, be it electric, gas, or kerosene. But the main reason for Japan’s cold houses is poor insulation due to lack of proper design standards that are mandatory in other countries. Even China and South Korea have strict insulation standards they adopted to address energy conservation needs and lower carbon emission targets.

Japan does have standards for insulation, and they were last upgraded in 1999. At the time, these standards were called “next generation energy conservation protocols,” but, in truth, they aren’t even mandatory, thus making Japan unique in that regard among G7 countries. They are simply guidelines, and while most builders adhere to them, the fact that the authorities don’t force them to indicates a curious lack of will that is difficult to explain, but a recent article in Shukan Playboy News made an attempt by comparing Japan’s insulation standards to those of Germany, which has the strictest in the world.

An engineering professor tells the magazine that maintaining a certain temperature for 100 square meters of interior floor area in a house built to Japanese insulation standards requires seven times as much kerosene as maintaining the same temperature for the same floor area in a house built to German standards. And that’s using the 1999 standards, which only apply to 10 percent of all homes in Japan as of 2023. About 70 percent of Japanese homes were built using insulation standards implemented in 1980, which, of course, are less stringent than the ones implemented in 1999. Then there are still homes standing that have no insulation at all.

That’s why Japanese houses are “naturally” cold, says the engineer, a situation that is actually illegal in many other countries. In the UK, for instance, a landlord is prohibited from renting out a residence if the uniform interior temperature falls below 18C. Also, in many countries landlords cover utilities, so it’s in their interest to maintain high energy efficiency. In Japan, it’s up to the tenant.

So why doesn’t Japan have stricter insulation standards? One reason is the commonly held prejudice that Japan is a hot country, so traditionally homes were built to maximize ventilation for hot, humid summers. Because of the draftiness of old Japanese homes, heating in the winter was done on a room-to-room basis. Nowadays, few Japanese live in traditionally styled houses, but the idea of cooling or heating individual rooms still holds, only now people use stand-alone heating units and wall-mounted air conditioners.

Capital means

Posted on January 6 by catforehead

One more 2023 story about living in Tokyo, mainly from a Tokyo Shimbun article published on Dec. 14. Counter-intuitively (if you read some of the more recent posts on this blog), statistics show that the number of households with children is rapidly increasing in the city’s 23 wards, and that more than half of these households have annual incomes that exceed ¥10 million. More to the point, between 2017 and 2022, the number of households in the 23 wards where the breadwinner(s) is in their 30s increased by 20 percent, with median income being ¥9.86 million. The main reason for the increase is the improved daycare situation. Remember some years ago when the main story about living in Tokyo was the dire shortage of slots in daycare centers? With the rapid rise of double income households, daycare became a make-or-break consideration for living in the capital, because there weren’t enough services or the services that were available were inconvenient. That problm has all but been solved. According to a 5-year survey conducted by the interior ministry, since 2017 the household income of married couples with children has increased, with couples in their 30s showing the largest increase, and those living in the 23 wards saying their incomes have increased the most. The median income nationwide of households whose breadwinners are in their 30s is now ¥6.86 million, which represents a 13.2 percent increase from 2017 to 2022. However, the increase for the same demographic in the 23 wards was 23.4 percent.

The main change over time is the predominance of double-income households with kids (as opposed to the derided demographic DINKS: double income with no kids). In the past, single-income households were the norm in the 23 wards, and it has been the availability of convenient daycare in central Tokyo that has attracted more double income households, which, as a block, has lifted the median income level in Tokyo. In 2017, 20 percent of all households nationwide that were waiting for a daycare opening were in Tokyo, accounting for 5,665 children. In 2022 the number of children in Tokyo on waiting lists had dropped to 32. According to one research company, income has increased on average for households with parents in their 30s at a much greater rate than for previous generations, owing to this combination of double incomes and available daycare. But at the same time the cost of living, especially in the 23 wards, has skyrocketed. Young persons with stable employment who desire to live in Tokyo and raise a family find that they are being priced out of their dream and alter their plans accordingly, with ¥10 million being the level that determines their choices. They think that anything less will make having a family in Tokyo impossible. Tokyo Shimbun’s conclusion is that, unless employers “give up their idea of how to compensate their labor” there is no way that the birth rate will ever be increased. This is probably a simplistic way of looking at the issue, but it sounds logical.

Too much of not enough

Posted on December 13 by catforehead

One of the prime purposes of this blog is to explain the paradox of Japan’s housing situation. The country’s residential real estate market is one of the liveliest in the world, and yet most homeowners can’t count on their properties being net assets in the long run. And then there’s those 8.5 million empty residences, which, despite the occasional media story about some foreigner swooping in and turning a derelict kominka into a dream home, will likely remain empty forever without a concerted effort on the part of the central and local goverments to either find a way to make them desirable or get rid of them.

A recent story that appeared on the financial magazine Toyo Keizai‘s web site reinforces this paradox. The writer, a real estate consultant named Yujin Oki, claims that there is a critical housing shortage in Japan. In a long article dense with statistics he doesn’t even mention the akiya (empty house) situation, probably because his focus is still on urban housing, and most abandoned homes are in the countryside or outlying suburbs (though there are also quite a few in Tokyo). The part of the paradox he does mention is the demographic angle: Japan’s population is declining, which means the available housing stock should be increasing, but it isn’t. He then endeavors to explain why.

Since 2013, he writes, the price of condominiums in Japan has increased by 70 percent. The main reason is Abenomics, or, more precisely, the monetary easing policy that was a core component of the late Shinzo Abe’s master plan to bring the Japanese economy back to its former glory. The Bank of Japan would print more money and give it to commercial banks at low interest rates. Most of this cash was loaned out to buy land, since it is the most secure investment, and that drove prices up. This always happens with monetary easing.

However, the situation was complicated by extraneous factors, namely the sudden increase in the price of construction materials and the more gradual decrease in the construction labor pool. Residential developers who borrowed all this available cash were faced with rising construction costs and delays in construction time due to lack of workers, thus driving the price of newly built homes higher. On top of the boost in land prices, new housing was more expensive, especially in places like Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs. Though he doesn’t specify exactly when, Oki says that the number of new condos in the Tokyo metropolitan area going on sale was once 90,000 a year, but this year the number has dropped to only 30,000. That’s why there is a shortage.

As we’ve often pointed out in this blog, almost all the writing about real estate trends focuses on Tokyo, and this article is no exception. Oki does make a point of saying that the shortage he’s talking about is in “places where people want to live,” but doesn’t interrogate that qualification any further. For instance, we can say for a fact that the suburb where we live, an hour from Nihonbashi by train, has seen a lot of new building in the last five years and many young families moving in, but this kind of growth seems to play no part in Oki’s calculations. New homes still seem to be affordable and plentiful for people with average incomes in our neck of the woods.

When in Tokyo

Posted on November 10 by catforehead

The most perplexing part of writing about housing in Japan is the mass media’s fixation on Tokyo. As we’ve said in this blog many times before, Tokyo is distinct from the rest of Japan when it comes to real estate, and while trends in the capital can often be extrapolated to cover Japan as a whole, many specific aspects don’t apply, the most obvious one being that people who own or are looking to buy property in Tokyo can expect at least some return on their investment, if not always an actual profit; whereas those who live in the rest of Japan, not counting certain regional urban centers, cannot. Even the akiya (vacant housing) probem is different in Tokyo. There are akiya there—quite a few, in fact—but they have not been completely abandoned, which is often the case in the suburbs and the countryside. Sometimes their owners are just waiting for the right opportunity to sell and sometimes there are financial obstacles involved, such as a failure to pay property taxes or inheritance issues. But the land will always be worth something, and that isn’t necessarily true elsewhere.

Consequently, the big real estate news in recent months has been the skyrocketing value of Tokyo real estate, in particular, that of new condominiums. The average price of a condominium in the 23 wards has now breached the ¥100 million mark, thanks mainly to the fact that brand new condos at the high end of the price spectrum sell out almost immediately. According to the land ministry, if the average price index were set at 100 in 2010 for condos throughout Tokyo prefecture, it would be 190.1 as of April of this year. In contrast, new house prices in Tokyo would only be 125.6 as of April 2023. The main accelerant is the rash of ultra-luxury apartments that have gone on sale in the central wards. The average price of a condo in the newly opened 65-story Azubadai Hills is ¥2 billion, with the top price reaching ¥20 billion. And they’ve all been sold. According to one real estate research company, in July, 1,542 newly built condos went on sale in the 23 wards. The average price was ¥134 million, and only 20 percent of them could be had for less than ¥70 million. Moreover, 93 percent of the units priced above ¥100 million have been sold, but that’s true of only 64 percent of the units priced between ¥80 and ¥100 million.

Tokyo real estate values have always been supported by people of means, but it should be noted that the average income nationwide has not increased at all in the last 20 years. In fact, it’s now going down. The tax agency reported that the average income was ¥4.61 million in 2020. The following year it dropped to ¥4.43 million. This means the real estate gap in Tokyo is getting wider all the time, and pretty soon only very wealthy people will be able to live in the center of the city.

This intelligence is certainly newsworthy, but the amount of obsessive detail that has gone into the story in the mass media has precluded what such economic shifts mean for the rest of us who don’t live in Tokyo and don’t make even the average income cited. There is very little. One example of this kind of reporting is a Yahoo! News special report posted Nov. 4 about the Tokyo condo boom and how hard it has been on two-income households that make less than ¥15 million a year. It is not a schadenfreude-fueled piece, but rather a serious study of how the condo boom has adversely affected the fortunes of those who get by at the lower end of the upper middle class.

Stranded

Posted on November 3 by catforehead

Here is a link to our November column in the FCCJ’s Number 1 Shimbun, which is about how people without cars are finding it more and more difficult to access transportation options in Japan.

Price is right, for the moment

Posted on October 2 by catforehead

The news that land prices throughout Japan have risen 0.3 percent over last year’s prices was covered extensively by the media last month. Though 0.3 might sound negligible, it’s the first time in 30 years that the change was in the positive direction. Of course, land values in the three major metropolises have always gone up in a net fashion to a certain extent, but prices in what are called “regional areas,” meaning the countryside and smaller urban metropolises far from Tokyo, have either gone down or remained stagnant. The big news is that this increase has happened two years in a row, thus proving it isn’t just a fluke. According to the Asahi Shimbun, four regional capitals led the surge—Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. During the pandemic these cities saw land price increases of between 4 and 6 percent, but last year the change was plus 8.1 percent. As it happens, rural land continued to lose value during the pandemic, but on average last year it leveled off: prices in 27 of 38 prefectures surveyed went down as a whole, but the prices in the capitals of 20 of these prefectures either increased or remained the same, further proof that land value may finally be turning the corner, so to speak.

What this means, according to Asahi, is that people are moving into these regional cities in substantial numbers, thus boosting hiring and education, which in turn spurs redevelopment. So far the most publicized examples of this trend have been the introduction of semiconductor factories into areas where there was previoulsy little industrial development, namely Chitose in Hokkaido and Kikuyo in Kumamoto. In the former, the company Rapidus is building a factory that will open in 2027, employing about 1,000 people. Local realtors told Asahi that individuals and businesses are snatching up property near Chitose Station, the main train hub in the area, which is about 40 minutes from Sapporo. Some realtors claim that there is no more vacant land to be had around Chitose Station, and what is available slightly farther from the station is “very expensive.” By the same token, TSMC, the Taiwan semiconductor maker, plans a factory in Kikuyo, and the news has caused land prices in the area to skyrocket. One reason for the unusual increase is that a lot of people who own land in the area are not selling at the moment, but waiting for land values to increase even more before they put their properties on the market.

Another reason for regional increases is that retired people are selling their homes and moving into apartments and condominiums in regional cities, thus boosting property values in those cities. One developer told Asahi that in Yamagata City a new 70-unit condominium still under construction is almost sold out and cites the availability of services in the area as the main appeal: a ten-minute walk to Yamagata Station, and within a 5-minute walk 3 hospitals, a full range of public schools and a retail district. Even with prices going up, a unit in the new condo is very affordable, 3LDK for only ¥35 million, including tax. One 88-year-old woman told Asahi that she moved to an apartment in the area after selling her house and since then her life “has become easier because I don’t have to shovel snow.” Asahi notes that land prices in Yamagata Prefecture are still dropping, but prices in Yamagata City have increased for 9 years in a row.