The blog of a Japanese real estate listing site, publishing guides on housing costs, rents, commutes and apartment layouts in Japan.
HN commenters use it as a source for Japanese commute times and home affordability, and debate how its figures compare with other countries.
I do hope you're not considering the highway system as a short-term, disconnected system. Last I checked, it's been a pretty good long-term, networked infrastructure project.
How would HSR differ from traditional rail infrastructure in the modern age? Rail was phenomenal pre-affordable automobiles. I get that it was the cornerstone of America's rise to power in the 19th century. But even back in its heyday, it crumbled, pre-automobile. The over development of rail was a massive problem for the American economy due to its limitations. It's expensive to lay rail. It's expensive to maintain. It can't go in all the places roads can. Rail is niche in transportation and does what it does well, mass heavy cargo transpo to far distances, like 1k mile distances. Shorter than that, it's not really that economical. This is why you see lumber, coal, gypsum and other raw materials normally moved on rail. Or slow container goods from coast to coast. It's not used for as many goods as people think. If we, as an economy, dropped just-in-time-inventory practices, yes, rail would come back. Absolutely. But we moved to lean/just-in-time-inventory styles of production. That requires nimble transpo on accessible and prevalent paths to final destinations. Unloading train cars isn't efficient whether it's conexed or binned in small quantities. You better have ordered a few train cars worth of materials in one go to make it worth it. There's a good reason why in many industrial areas the rails are…
> Parasitic implies one party (implied the employee?) is left worse off than otherwise. If these jobs are being accepted normally it's because the local offers are worse and the developer is not good/doesn't want to deal with the international business side (inc. finding clients, negotiating, etc). So it seems that in a free-ish market, this relationship would be strongly symbiotic, right?
It's hard to guarantee that the labor side wouldn't have been able to land the contract without the labor re-seller, so it's up to your own personal bias to see this as a service or as predatory. Could go either way but on a case by case basis this is subjective in my opinion.
There's not much magic here (well if there is, it can vary greatly), the contracting agencies are middlemen reselling labor that is in various states of compatibility to the company purchasing the labor. Perfectly compatible market actors could be using middlemen when they don't need to, and middlemen are incentivized to make this the case.
The usual questions of whether middlemen are good or bad apply and it's not as simple as it being strongly parasitic or strongly symbiotic in any case, it's more like a spectrum which is why I described it as such.
A bit of anecdata: I know someone who worked for a contracting firm in NYC that hired Japanese developers (and relocated them) to work in the American market and paid them Japanese wages to work at American companies. The Japanese developers were always happy at…
That sounds like a lot, but 32x is probably less than the differential in the US between downtown manhattan and suburban Jersey or Delaware, and of course there's a whole rural level in the US far below that as well.
That said, the whole "tokyo is just turbo-expensive!" thing is, in the broad strokes, generally false. Buying land in high-density commercial districts is going to be expensive, just like if you wanted to build a detached single-family home in downtown manhattan, but to put some hard numbers to it:
In September 2020, the average listing price for a newly constructed detached wooden house in Tokyo of between 100-sqm and 300-sqm (1,076 sqft and 3,229 sqft) was:
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/news/how-much-does-it-cost-to-buy-a-house-in-tokyo-october-2020-update/
> Greater Tokyo Area: ¥36,850,000 ($354,000)
> Tokyo (23 Wards + Western Suburbs): ¥42,880,000 ($412,000)
> Tokyo 23 Wards: ¥59,410,000 ($570,000)
> Tokyo western suburbs: ¥40,110,000 ($385,000)
--
> For July to September 2020, the average sales price for a previously owned detached house in Tokyo was:
> Tokyo (23 Wards + Western Suburbs): ¥46,150,000 ($443,000)
-This was a year-on-year increase of 5.5% and an increase of 14.6% compared to the April to June period, when sales dropped sharply due to coronavirus social distancing measures.
-This was also the highest average sales price since the July to September (3rd quarter) 2018 period of ¥47,020,000.
> Tokyo 23 Wards: ¥57,170,000…
The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city. If we look at the numbers for Tokyo 23 wards[1] (what would traditionally be called "the city"), we can see they are virtually half than those from Paris or London:
16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that falls in the median (50%) for Tokyo 23 wards[1]. Only 30% of houses have the minimum recommended of 25sqm/person (so, 70% live UNDER in under 25sqm/person). If the other cities in the graph are correct, that makes Tokyo median size around half of the average of those other cities[2].
So yes, definitely Tokyo housing is tiny. I know it since I live here and talk with people; when I invite someone who is not in tech to my place they all comment on how big my 37 sqm "house" (studio/single room) is, to which I can only agree and laugh/cry inside. I'm happy because I am well for living in Tokyo, but it's still a tiny place compared to my hometown where everyone lives like kings.
[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-space-does-the-average-household-have-in-japan/
[2] I believe I'm using median/average correctly here, but happy for corrections! I check "at what sizes it's 50% of the # of households" and then took that measure. Sorry for mixing medians and averages, but I cannot calculate averages with the numbers I found.
You won't have brand new homes in $300k in SV because the land itself is worth more than that due to the heavy demand for housing in what is a comparatively small area, though you might get $300k condos in multi-story buildings if the zoning issues in the Bay Area are addressed.
Tokyo isn't a good comparison. The average price for a new home in Tokyo is $600k+ and in the suburbs was almost $400k.(https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/how-much-does-it-cost-to-buy-a-new-house-in-tokyo/)
Houston isn't a good example either. Houston has almost no zoning or building regulations, which was on ample display when entire neighborhoods flooded because developers weren't prevented from building houses in flood basins. (CA allows the construction of residential properties in floodplains, which are flat areas that might get flooded if flood control mechanisms fail. In Houston, houses were built in the flood control mechanism.)
There are also plenty of places in California where houses and residential units are being built. In LA, for example, several ten thousands of new residential units were built in the downtown/downtown-adjacent units in the past few years. In San Bernardino/Riverside counties, they still have housing stock available from the last building boom. It's not that the people of California pulled that ladder up; it's simply basic market forces: too many people want to live in the nice parts of California.
I did do my research.
"The median home sale price in New York City as of Quarter 2 was $767K, a 0% change year-over-year. A total of 11489 homes traded, a mere -1% difference compared to the same month last year. In Quarter 2, the median price per square foot was $979, a 6% YoY change. The median home sale price in Manhattan was $1.2M."
https://www.propertyshark.com/mason/market-trends/residential/nyc-all
"A survey conducted by Recruit of people who bought newly constructed detached houses in the Tokyo metropolitan area in 2021 found that the average purchase price was ¥43.3 million, the highest level since the survey began in 2014."
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01311/#:~:text=A%20survey%20conducted%20by%20Recruit,the%20survey%20began%20in%202014.
"In September 2020, the average listing price for a newly constructed detached wooden house in Tokyo of between 100-sqm and 300-sqm (1,076 sqft and 3,229 sqft) was:
Greater Tokyo Area: ¥36,850,000 ($354,000)
Tokyo (23 Wards + Western Suburbs): ¥42,880,000 ($412,000)
Tokyo 23 Wards: ¥59,410,000 ($570,000)
Tokyo western suburbs: ¥40,110,000 ($385,000)"
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/news/how-much-does-it-cost-to-buy-a-house-in-tokyo-october-2020-update/