STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 24 August 2015

[Demeter]

15. Sprawl of Ghost Homes in Aging Tokyo Suburbs

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/world/a-sprawl-of-abandoned-homes-in-tokyo-suburbs.html

YOKOSUKA, Japan — Ever since her elderly neighbor moved a decade ago, Yoriko Haneda has done what she can to keep the empty house she left behind from becoming an eyesore. Ms. Haneda regularly trims its shrubs and clips its narrow strip of grass, maintaining its perfect view of the sea. The volunteer yard work has not extended to the house two doors down, however. That one is vacant, too, and overgrown with bamboo. In fact, dozens of houses in this hillside neighborhood about an hour’s drive from Tokyo are abandoned.

“There are empty houses everywhere, places where nobody’s lived for 20 years, and more are cropping up all the time,” said Ms. Haneda, 77, complaining that thieves had broken into her neighbor’s house twice and that a typhoon had damaged the roof of the one next to it. Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes are spreading across Japan like a blight in a garden. Long-term vacancy rates have climbed significantly higher than in the United States or Europe, and some eight million dwellings are now unoccupied, according to a government count. Nearly half of them have been forsaken completely — neither for sale nor for rent, they simply sit there, in varying states of disrepair.

SOUNDS LIKE DETROIT--HOW FITTING! THEY DESTROYED US AUTO INDUSTRY, AND NOW THEY DESTROY THEMSELVES.

These ghost homes are the most visible sign of human retreat in a country where the population peaked a half-decade ago and is forecast to fall by a third over the next 50 years. The demographic pressure has weighed on the Japanese economy, as a smaller work force struggles to support a growing proportion of the old, and has prompted intense debate over long-term proposals to boost immigration or encourage women to have more children...For now, though, after decades in which it struggled with overcrowding, Japan is confronting the opposite problem: When a society shrinks, what should be done with the buildings it no longer needs? Many of Japan’s vacant houses have been inherited by people who have no use for them and yet are unable to sell, because of a shortage of interested buyers. But demolishing them involves tactful questions about property rights, and about who should pay the costs. The government passed a law this year to promote demolition of the most dilapidated homes, but experts say the tide of newly emptied ones will be hard to stop.

“Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits,” said Tomohiko Makino, a real estate expert who has studied the vacant-house phenomenon. Once limited mostly to remote rural communities, it is now spreading through regional cities and the suburbs of major metropolises. Even in the bustling capital, the ratio of unoccupied houses is rising.


I CAN SEE DETROIT'S EVICTED GOING TO JAPAN TO "GENTRIFY" THE PLACE....