well first of all, many stay for the winter, why do you think there are so many Mexican Cantinas in Denver? Manufacturing still provides a good middle class income. But not manufacturing T shirts Tennis shoes and even computers.
Ann Coulter On Trump
- Thread starter AAAintheBeltway
- Start date
I saw a documentary recently about the following.
Without New migrants, the demand of new (additional/incremental) houses, cars, appliances, schools, teachers, hospitals, nurses, veges, fruits, movies, sports, etc, etc. could be gradually diminishing.
Perhaps some Smart countries like the US and Germany would need more New migrants, strategically!
Otherwise ...
Q http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-show-holes-in-abe-s-push-for-housing-growth
Ghost Towns
About 20 percent of residential areas in Japan will become ghost towns -- devoid of population -- by 2050, according to a land ministry forecast. Once an area reaches a tipping point of 20 percent home vacancy, it quickly turns into a ghost town as remaining residents flee seeking improved access to services and shops that inevitably close, Nomura Research’s Sakakibara said. Inariyato is about to reach it.
“The social impact of vacant homes is huge,” he said. “Local areas will lose their vitality as more and more homes become empty.”
In the U.K., just 2.3 percent of dwellings are vacant, according to the Department for Communities and Local Government in London, and 11 percent of homes in the U.S, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Just 2.6 percent of Japanese homes were vacant in 1963, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
Bath Distress
Yoshie Okada, 64, remembers those days. In Inariyato, Okada runs the public bath her grandfather acquired just after World War II. Sitting at a high-rise wooden counter in the middle of the separate bath entrances for men and women, collecting 450-yen fees, Okada said the number of bathers has halved in recent years.
“We don’t see many young people here,” said Okada, who looks two decades younger than her age, as beads of sweat ran down her neck in the heat. “We don’t know how long we can continue our business, as the majority of our visitors are elderly.”
The public bath, called Kame No Yu, which means bath for turtles, a symbol of longevity in Japanese culture, is one of two that are left in the area out of about five, she said.
Increasing Elderly
The number of elderly in this area of Yokosuka, on the other side of the train tracks from the U.S. Navy base, have more than doubled in the last three decades from 1983, while residents younger than 15 have dropped by half, according to a survey by Yokosuka’s city government in 2011. The city’s population has fallen 3.5 percent over the past two decades, according to its planning material. People 65 and older account for more than a quarter of Yokosuka’s population of 418,325, according to Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
Businesses have closed. Saikaya Co., a 62-year-old department store, shuttered one of its three Yokosuka locations in 2010 after filing for bankruptcy because of declining sales, according to statements released by the company.
The 2,600-square-meter (27,987-square-foot) store was sold to Ichijo Co., a Tokyo-based condominium developer, which later canceled its plan for a 23-story apartment building and is turning the space into a parking lot.
“The construction of more new housing only leads to more vacant homes,” said Noriyuki Shima, chief examiner of Yokosuka’s planning commission who is in charge of luring home buyers to the city, including the Inariyato area. “It’s best to put a stop to this.”
Prices Halved
Residential land prices in Japan are still half what they were after the peak of the bubble economy in the 1980s. Prices for residential land sites in Tokyo have declined for each of the past 22 years except in 2007 and 2008, while the prices for land sites in regional areas have dropped for 21 years, land ministry data show.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications conducts a national housing and land survey every five years. The next one is scheduled for later this year, with results to be announced next year.
Abe has promised to loosen business regulations and increase government support to help Japan’s industry as part of the “third arrow” of a three-pronged strategy to end decades of deflation and achieve a 2 percent inflation rate with fiscal and monetary stimulus. Government officials have also said they may consider relaxing development rules in certain zones to meet demand for office buildings and residential space in metropolitan areas.
UQ
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Q A 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?_r=1
By JONATHAN SOBLE
AUG. 23, 2015
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.
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.
Yokosuka is on the front lines. Within commuting distance of Tokyo and close to naval bases and automobile factories, it attracted thousands of young job-seekers in the era of roaring economic growth that followed World War II. Land was scarce and expensive, so the newcomers built small, simple homes wherever they could.
Today the boom is relentlessly reversing itself. The young workers of the postwar years are now retirees, and few people, their children included, want to take over their homes. “Their kids are in modern high-rises in central Tokyo,” Mr. Makino said. “To them, the family home is a burden, not an asset.”
Japan’s birthrate has been stuck below the level needed to maintain the population since the 1970s, as young people postpone marriage and many women put off having children as they enter the work force.
Photo
The front door that is covered by weeds of an abandoned house in the Yokosuka area. Credit Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times
The city of Yokosuka is trying to change that, by encouraging owners of abandoned houses to tidy them up and put them on the market. It has established an online “vacant home bank” to showcase houses that commercial real estate agents will not touch. Land prices in Yokosuka are down by 70 percent since their peak at the end of the 1980s.
The houses are a steal for the rare souls who will have them. But just one has been sold through the home bank so far, a 60-year-old single-story wooden home with a patch of garden that was listed for 660,000 yen, or $5,400. Places farther up the hill can be had for the equivalent of just a few hundred dollars. Four have been rented, including one to students in a nursing-care program at a nearby college who receive a discount in return for checking up on elderly people in the area.
Other towns have tried their own creative solutions, including offering cash payments to outsiders who move in and buy unoccupied homes. A few have succeeded in attracting pockets of artists and freelance workers, who stay tethered by the Internet to their urban clients.
There is even a sprawling art project, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, which has taken unoccupied buildings in a cluster of towns northwest of Tokyo and turned them into contemporary artworks. Visitors can spend the night in a “Dream House” designed by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, with coffin-like beds and tinted lights designed to elicit dreams, or tour other buildings that have been intricately carved, painted or filled with sculptural installations.
“They may not be used for their original purpose anymore, but preserving them physically is important,” said the project’s founder, Fram Kitagawa. “The key is to preserve them in a positive way.”
Raw numbers suggest there is a limit to how many homes can be rescued through reuse, however. Japan’s population of 127 million is expected to drop by a million a year in the coming decades. Efforts to increase its low birthrate have been only modestly successful, and the public has shown no appetite for mass immigration. “We have too much infrastructure,” said Takashi Onishi, an urban planning professor and the president of the Science Council of Japan. The government, he believes, will eventually have to cut services like water and road and bridge maintenance in the most depopulated areas. “We can’t maintain it all. We’ll have to make those hard choices.”
The most blunt solution for abandoned houses is to tear them down before they become hazards or their neighborhoods earn an irreversible reputation for blight. But owners can be hard to track down, and are often reluctant to pay demolition costs.
The house that Ms. Haneda tends is owned by the family of Mioko Utagawa, 74, who lives a 10-minute walk down the hill. Ms. Utagawa’s husband bought it for an aunt in the 1970s after she divorced and moved here from Tokyo. Now she is in a nursing home. The family has been paying her modest property taxes but has otherwise left the house alone. The interior is a musty wreck; a small addition that once housed the bath has been ripped out, and the bathtub sits upturned on the faithfully manicured lawn.
“Even if we fixed it up nobody would want it,” Ms. Utagawa said.
The Utagawas recently agreed to have the house demolished, after the city offered to subsidize the estimated 3 million yen cost, under a municipal program introduced last year to deal with hazardous or hopelessly unsellable homes. It is scheduled for destruction this fall. Noriyuki Shima, the director of the city’s planning department, said cost considerations meant the city was targeting only the worst-affected neighborhoods.
“Giving public money to demolish a private house isn’t something we can do lightly,” he said.
The new national law, which came into effect in May, could help more municipalities cull their vacant houses. Among other changes, it removed a perverse incentive that has contributed to the problem. A tax break introduced decades ago to encourage home construction sets property tax rates on vacant lots at six times the level of those on built-up land. That means that if an owner demolishes a home, the tax rate soars — a big reason many let even crumbling houses stand.
Now the government can revoke the preferential tax treatment for houses whose absentee owners are letting them fall apart. But some critics say Japan needs a more fundamental shift in its approach to housing, which has long prioritized new construction over reuse.
Hidetaka Yoneyama, a housing specialist at the Fujitsu Research Institute, a think tank, said that until recently, homes in Japan were built to last only about 30 years, when they were then expected to be torn down and rebuilt. Building quality is improving, but the market for secondhand homes remains tiny. Developers are still building more than 800,000 new homes and condominiums a year, despite the glut of vacancies.
“In the high-growth era, everyone was happy with this arrangement,” Mr. Yoneyama said. But in 20 years, he calculated, more than one-quarter of Japanese houses could be empty. “Now the tables are turned. The population is declining and no one wants to live in these old houses.”
UQ
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/world/a-sprawl-of-abandoned-homes-in-tokyo-suburbs.html?_r=1
By JONATHAN SOBLE
AUG. 23, 2015
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.
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.
Yokosuka is on the front lines. Within commuting distance of Tokyo and close to naval bases and automobile factories, it attracted thousands of young job-seekers in the era of roaring economic growth that followed World War II. Land was scarce and expensive, so the newcomers built small, simple homes wherever they could.
Today the boom is relentlessly reversing itself. The young workers of the postwar years are now retirees, and few people, their children included, want to take over their homes. “Their kids are in modern high-rises in central Tokyo,” Mr. Makino said. “To them, the family home is a burden, not an asset.”
Japan’s birthrate has been stuck below the level needed to maintain the population since the 1970s, as young people postpone marriage and many women put off having children as they enter the work force.
Photo
The front door that is covered by weeds of an abandoned house in the Yokosuka area. Credit Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times
The city of Yokosuka is trying to change that, by encouraging owners of abandoned houses to tidy them up and put them on the market. It has established an online “vacant home bank” to showcase houses that commercial real estate agents will not touch. Land prices in Yokosuka are down by 70 percent since their peak at the end of the 1980s.
The houses are a steal for the rare souls who will have them. But just one has been sold through the home bank so far, a 60-year-old single-story wooden home with a patch of garden that was listed for 660,000 yen, or $5,400. Places farther up the hill can be had for the equivalent of just a few hundred dollars. Four have been rented, including one to students in a nursing-care program at a nearby college who receive a discount in return for checking up on elderly people in the area.
Other towns have tried their own creative solutions, including offering cash payments to outsiders who move in and buy unoccupied homes. A few have succeeded in attracting pockets of artists and freelance workers, who stay tethered by the Internet to their urban clients.
There is even a sprawling art project, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, which has taken unoccupied buildings in a cluster of towns northwest of Tokyo and turned them into contemporary artworks. Visitors can spend the night in a “Dream House” designed by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, with coffin-like beds and tinted lights designed to elicit dreams, or tour other buildings that have been intricately carved, painted or filled with sculptural installations.
“They may not be used for their original purpose anymore, but preserving them physically is important,” said the project’s founder, Fram Kitagawa. “The key is to preserve them in a positive way.”
Raw numbers suggest there is a limit to how many homes can be rescued through reuse, however. Japan’s population of 127 million is expected to drop by a million a year in the coming decades. Efforts to increase its low birthrate have been only modestly successful, and the public has shown no appetite for mass immigration. “We have too much infrastructure,” said Takashi Onishi, an urban planning professor and the president of the Science Council of Japan. The government, he believes, will eventually have to cut services like water and road and bridge maintenance in the most depopulated areas. “We can’t maintain it all. We’ll have to make those hard choices.”
The most blunt solution for abandoned houses is to tear them down before they become hazards or their neighborhoods earn an irreversible reputation for blight. But owners can be hard to track down, and are often reluctant to pay demolition costs.
The house that Ms. Haneda tends is owned by the family of Mioko Utagawa, 74, who lives a 10-minute walk down the hill. Ms. Utagawa’s husband bought it for an aunt in the 1970s after she divorced and moved here from Tokyo. Now she is in a nursing home. The family has been paying her modest property taxes but has otherwise left the house alone. The interior is a musty wreck; a small addition that once housed the bath has been ripped out, and the bathtub sits upturned on the faithfully manicured lawn.
“Even if we fixed it up nobody would want it,” Ms. Utagawa said.
The Utagawas recently agreed to have the house demolished, after the city offered to subsidize the estimated 3 million yen cost, under a municipal program introduced last year to deal with hazardous or hopelessly unsellable homes. It is scheduled for destruction this fall. Noriyuki Shima, the director of the city’s planning department, said cost considerations meant the city was targeting only the worst-affected neighborhoods.
“Giving public money to demolish a private house isn’t something we can do lightly,” he said.
The new national law, which came into effect in May, could help more municipalities cull their vacant houses. Among other changes, it removed a perverse incentive that has contributed to the problem. A tax break introduced decades ago to encourage home construction sets property tax rates on vacant lots at six times the level of those on built-up land. That means that if an owner demolishes a home, the tax rate soars — a big reason many let even crumbling houses stand.
Now the government can revoke the preferential tax treatment for houses whose absentee owners are letting them fall apart. But some critics say Japan needs a more fundamental shift in its approach to housing, which has long prioritized new construction over reuse.
Hidetaka Yoneyama, a housing specialist at the Fujitsu Research Institute, a think tank, said that until recently, homes in Japan were built to last only about 30 years, when they were then expected to be torn down and rebuilt. Building quality is improving, but the market for secondhand homes remains tiny. Developers are still building more than 800,000 new homes and condominiums a year, despite the glut of vacancies.
“In the high-growth era, everyone was happy with this arrangement,” Mr. Yoneyama said. But in 20 years, he calculated, more than one-quarter of Japanese houses could be empty. “Now the tables are turned. The population is declining and no one wants to live in these old houses.”
UQ
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I'm well past the spanking monkey to pin-ups stage, so probably not. But it would be easier to listen to her vitriol if she were easier to look at, and I wasn't tempted to yell "By the Power of GraySkull!" each time she came on.
COulter is pretty good.
For instance? What is she "too smart to really believe"?