UR Ogikubo

Unfinished courtyard

Japanese apartment complexes often have pretentious, unwieldy names that are meant to add a touch of cosmopolitanism to otherwise nondescript residences; something you might expect from an industry that managed to convince people to adopt the English word “mansion” for condominiums. Earlier this week when we went over to Ogikubo in Tokyo’s western Suginami Ward to inspect the new UR apartments that are starting to accept applications for tenants I couldn’t quite make out the name, which sounded French, and I neglected to write down the romaji iteration after we got there, though I do remember is started with a “C” and had an “X” and some consecutive combination of “E” and “I.” Maybe a “U,” too; but whatever it was I couldn’t pronounce it on sight. Having returned home I see it rendered in katakana as シャレール. So let’s just drop the whole thing and call them the Ogikubo UR apartments.

Thanks for nothing

One of the Aso administration’s economic initiatives that was retained by the Democratic Party of Japan when it took over the government last year was an allowance for people who had lost their housing as a direct result of having lost their jobs, because, in most cases, the place they were living in was either owned or subsidized by their employers. The DPJ plan originally earmarked ¥70 billion for this allowance, with an additional ¥30 billion for it in the new supplemental budget.

Older and smaller

Six of the ten elderly people who died in a fire in a Gunma Prefecture nursing care facility last March had been sent to the facility by the Sumida Ward welfare office. Since the fire, the press has talked a lot about this practice of sending poor old people out of cities, where they can’t afford public facilities, to rural areas where the land values and thus the facilities themselves are cheaper. The Tokyo government has carried out an investigation into how to solve this problem, and they’ve come up with an idea.

The Tokyo government wants to increase the number of single rooms in so-called “care houses” by 2,400. Care houses are privately run housing complexes where single seniors–meaning people over 60 years of age–live by themselves. The facilities have baths and serve meals. The Tokyo government has found that rent for these care houses is prohibitively expensive since land agency regulations state that each room of a care house must be at least 20 square meters. The Tokyo government estimates that a 20 square meter room costs about ¥180,000, which is beyond the means of the government itself if it is footing the bill for indigent seniors. So they have asked the land ministry to reduce the minimum standard to 7 square meters, which is the size of a 4.5-tatami room. This, the government estimates, would cost about ¥100,000. In other words, you pay about half for a room that is only one-third as big.

As of 2007 there were only 259 care houses in all of Japan comprising 86,000 resident seniors. Fifty were in Tokyo.

Oldies are goodies

According to the government, new housing starts in 2009 were the lowest they’ve been in 45 years. At 788,410 units, it was also the first time since 1967 that the number of new housing starts fell below a million, and the 27.9 percent year-on-year drop was the highest since 1974.

Meanwhile, the used housing and reform markets are doing quite well. The used housing sales company Livita, a subsidiary of Tokyo Electric, recently told Asahi Shimbun that about a year ago they noticed a large spike of interest in older homes that has only increased since then. Part of Livita’s business is to buy company housing complexes that are not longer occupied and convert them for sale. A potential buyer chooses a unit and then instructs the company as to how he or she wants it to be remodeled.

Absence makes the heart grow more litigious

On Jan. 26 the Supreme Court decided in favor of a condominium management association that wanted to charge a nominal fee to non-resident owners of units in a large complex in Osaka. The decision overturned a lower court ruling that had supported the owners, who refused to pay the fee by saying that it was unfair. The judges in the higher court said “no,” the fee was perfectly legal and proper.

Retreat

On Jan. 22 the land ministry announced that inspection criteria for construction of new homes and condominiums would be simplified starting sometime in June. At present it takes about 70 days for new construction to be approved after the proper documents are submitted, and the ministry wants to cut this period in half so as to stimulate new home construction, which is sluggish.

Criteria for inspection of documents was made stricter after the 2005 scandal that exposed how some architects and builders were forging documents regarding the strength of materials used in construction of new buildings. As a result a number of hotels and condominiums had to be rebuilt in order to meet earthquake standards. In 2006 the land ministry tightened inspection procedures of these documents and since then the number of new housing starts had declined.

Of course, the ministry acknowledges that the main reason for this decline is the subsequent recession and the population shrinkage that will continue in the future. Housing starts, after all, have been declining since they peaked in 1990 at 1.7 million units. Between Jan. and Nov. of last year, only 719,000 units were built. Does this mean business will be back to normal, with all the negative connotations that cliche carries?

No place like home-stay

A foundation called AFS, which arranges for student exchange programs in Japan, recently released some startling news with regard to the number of home-stay students in Japan. Apparently, there is a huge gap between the number of foreign high school students who want to come to Japan and study and the number of Japanese families willing to put them up for at least six months. In Tokyo, where most foreign students want to stay, only 17 families are presently on the list to accept them. And throughout Japan, the number is only 295.

The number of willing host families has remained more or less constant over the years while the number of exchange students has increased. In 2007, 1,114 students came to Japan, a threefold increase from 1998. However, the pickings has become even slimmer. Next year, 354 students from Thailand alone want to come to Japan, and so far only 20 have found places to live.

You can blame this circumstance on two things; or one thing if you make the logical connection. Japanese families aren’t normally comfortable bringing strangers into their homes to stay. This reluctance is a combination of  natural reticence and an acknowledgement that Japanese homes are not designed for guests in the first place. People know that and they probably think that foreign students, even fellow Asians who often live in homes that are just as cramped, wouldn’t be comfortable here.

This land is not your land

We get a lot of flyers in our mailbox for condominium and new house sales in the vicinity. One caught my eye yesterday. It was for a small housing development near Machiya station on the Chiyoda subway line and the going prices were between ¥29 and ¥32 million for single family houses of about 100 square meters, which is pretty chaep for that area of Tokyo.

The fine print revealed why: that’s only for the structure. The land on which the structures will stand (they haven’t been built yet) will be rented. This isn’t particularly unusual. A lot of people own houses and even condominiums but not the land under them. However, the fine print also said something about a “20-year law.” My experience has told me that leases for land in this sort of circumstance are usually about 50 years, but these houses haven’t even been built yet. Does that mean the potential home owner only gets a 20-year lease? It doesn’t sound very secure and, in fact, makes no sense considering that the ad also points out that potential buyers are eligible for the government’s Flat 35 mortgage guarantee program.

No place like homeless

As with last year’s impromptu tent city in Hibiya Park, this New Years saw another attempt to give the newly destitute a chance to get through the holidays in one piece, though in this case the government actually initiated the plan. The national government, that is, which let 831 homeless, jobless men stay at the National Olympics Memorial Youth Center in Sendagaya from Dec. 29 to Jan. 4, during which the tenants were supposed to receive job counseling. About a half dozen actually left with references, according to reports.

It was no skin off the nose of the facility, since it is officially closed during the holidays. And while the charitable gesture was paid for by the federal government (Prime Minister Hatoyama even showed up for a sympathetic show of commiseration), the place had to be staffed by municipal employees. After everyone was kicked out on the 4th and some were moved to other facilities, Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara commented that the prime minister shouldn’t have visited. “I wouldn’t have gone,” he said. Apparently, he was pissed that the government had strong-armed Tokyo into participating in what he saw as a useless and ill-advised PR gambit.

The lowdown on resort condos

Some of the surest bargains on the real estate market are so-called besso manshon, or resort condos. When most people in Tokyo think of second homes or weekend homes, they think of Karuizawa or the Izu peninsula or maybe the five lakes area around Mt. Fuji, where prices tend to be uniformly expensive. The thing is, second homes almost anywhere else are quite affordable, and I often check resort-net.com, which is run by Recruit, to see what’s available, and one of the most intriguing areas is actually the Boso peninsula, meaning Chiba Prefecture. A few weeks ago on the site I found 73 properties on the Boso peninsula that were priced at less than 5 million. Though Chiba has a reputation as a bedroom region it’s got lots of hills and forests and Kujukuri sea coast is cleaner and less crowded than the stretch of beach that leads from Shonan in Kanagawa to the tip of Izu. In fact, diehard surfers say Kujukuri has the best waves on the Pacific side of Honshu. More significantly, it’s cooler than Tokyo in the summer and warmer in the winter, sometimes by as much as three degrees.

Consequently, there are a lot of second homes and resort condos on sale in seaside towns like Onjuku and Katsuura for as little as 2 million yen for about 40 square meters. These two resort towns are quaint but large enough to supply all the amenities you’d want in walking distance to wherever you happen to live. Many of the resort condos are close to the main train stations, and both towns are less than 90 minutes from central Tokyo by express. If you don’t have a car this is important, since most second homes tend to be far from central business area and train lines.