Tokyo's suburban housing became vast ghettoes for the old

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/11/how-tokyo-suburban-housing-blocks-became-ghettoes-for-the-old

109 76 7 years ago

So 500 die alone every year, let's give this number some perspective. Tokyo's population is 9.273 million, the highest of any city in the world, of which some 23% or roughly 2.1 million are aged 65 or over, and 500 of these are dying alone every year? So 0.005% of the general population or 0.023% of the elderly.

reustle2• 7 years ago

Tokyo Metropolis, which Tama Ward falls under, has roughly 14 million people. Greater Tokyo has 39 million.

Tiktaalik2• 7 years ago

The future of NA suburbs as well.

Have fun living in the car dependent sprawling suburbs when you're 80 and not legally allowed to drive anymore.

I guess one can hope that autonomous cars will finally appear to bail one out of this predicament, but I'll personally be setting myself up to retire in a place where everything I need is a short walk or wheelchair roll away.

paulcole• 7 years ago

Have fun living in the car dependent sprawling suburbs when you're 80 and not legally allowed to drive anymore.

You're describing Florida and they drive anyways.

reustle2• 7 years ago

They drive golf carts*

I've been to a couple golf cart communities in Florida and they are actually pretty cool for retirement

wlesieutre• 7 years ago

You say that like we take away people's drivers licenses if they're not capable of driving safely

ghaff3• 7 years ago

Cities are no panacea. Just a couple of months ago I was in Manhattan after a bad muscle sprain. I could walk a few blocks but it was hard.

I guess in a dense city it’s easier to just take an Uber everywhere but for some types of restricted mobility it’s actually much easier to be able to drive a car more or less door to door.

fooblitzky2• 7 years ago

Until you legally can't, as the parent comment mentioned.

codedokode• 7 years ago

By the way, today I saw old man and woman riding electric scooters with seats (they look like this [1]). I thought that it could be useful for senior people in the city. But our city is mostly flat, of course they won't help to climb those endless stairways in Japan.

[1] https://www.dhresource.com/0x0s/f2-albu-g6-M01-8B-09-rBVaSFt...

Noos• 7 years ago

There are senior care services that exist to help seniors with those issues. Also many live with children or in communities. Plus, it's a lot easier to drive to a walmart than it is to walk to the subway and use it, if you are older.

The city is pretty bad for anyone except the young and wealthy.

Tiktaalik2• 7 years ago

Really interesting article.

... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income.

The goal was to make public housing a safety net for elderly, low-income and socially vulnerable people. The effect, however, has been to make social housing off-limits for most people: eligibility fell from 80% of households in 1951 to 25% after 1996.

And it has turned public housing into a kind of ghetto for poor and elderly people who rely on pensions and can’t afford private rents.

In Canada it is often controversial when upper middle class people are found to be living in affordable coops and anti-poverty activists, in an understandable effort to create as much low income housing as possible, often call for wholly low income housing projects instead of having buildings with mixed incomes. This article suggests at the flawed outcome from overly means testing benefits.

dalbasal• 7 years ago

I increasingly think that for social safety nets to work well, they need to be universalized, if possible.

Otherwise we get welfare traps, ghettoisation or just poor quality (like buses in places where only the poor use em). It doesn't mean everyone has to use it, just that they can. This is common sense in services like health or education, where we're used to it.

xcklo• 7 years ago

That universalism leads to less social stratification is essentially the idea behind the social democratic welfare state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_...

smallnamespace• 7 years ago

We already have a good solution to avoid ghettoisation or traps called progressive taxation.

However, it doesn't go far enough because the tax rate doesn't take benefits into account, so even though you're getting >$0.80 of every dollar earned, after adjusting for benefits it may instead be $0.20 or even negative. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is an especially large contributor to this situation [1].

To avoid a trap, marginal income after taxes and benefits should start high and fall monotonically. It should probably also be concave up (the amount of income to bump you into the next 'adjusted tax' bracket gets bigger and bigger).

[1] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publicati... (page 767, Figure 2)

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

And in the US, a lot of upper-middle-class HATE mixed income dwellings.

At least in dense cities, public housing can be mixed into free market housing.

pas• 7 years ago

They hate it because it became a one stop shop solution for everything. (Especially the mental illness problems are troubling without any of the very much needed therapy, continuous follow ups, visits from a social worker, etc.)

tungwaiyip• 7 years ago

I have also seen this in public housing in Hong Kong. Government built housing for families in the 70s. Children move out. The remaining residents turn grey. The residents in the housing complex are aging along with the buildings.

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

The street I spent my childhood on there was about 30 kids under 10 years old. Now there is about three. My family moved away but I recently checked and the girl next doors parents have lived there ever since. They're in their 80's.

Mulling it over I think uniform single use zoning/construction is 'bad'. I saw presentation by a guys showing various housing. One of them was a very nice 1920's era apartment building in Redwood city. One of his points was it'd be totally illegal to build something like that today.

SomeOldThrow• 7 years ago

That indicates poor zoning to me. If you have mixed market-rate and social housing you should be building them adjacent to each other or (as is often done now) in the same building.

ilamont• 7 years ago

Several of the examples in the article hinted at familial estrangement, which makes things much worse.

I lived in Taiwan, which also has a stagnant birth rate (only 181,606 births last year, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3611847) and a decades-long trend for young people to migrate to the large cities, or go to China to try their fortunes there.

But there is also a strong tradition of multi-generational households and traditions/holidays that emphasize family relations or filial piety, Lunar New Year being the most obvious. Certainly, family strife exists (and can be exacerbated if people are forced to live together) and many seniors live alone, but I think because of the cultural emphasis on familial contact, there is also a level of contact and awareness that can mitigate the extreme situations described in the article. Being smaller also helps (most cities on the island are no more than two or three hours away by high-speed rail).

In recent decades, there has also been a trend to legally allow foreign caregivers (mostly Filipinos and Indonesians) for people aged 85 and up, and tacitly allow for foreign caregivers for younger seniors and wealthy families. I am not sure how Taiwan's national health system covers those costs, or if the elderly poor can afford them.

Does Japan have any similar system of allowing foreign caregivers?

lacampbell• 7 years ago

I am secretly looking forward to the Japanese style rural depopulation that seems inevitable in Taiwan. Real estate there is hugely expensive - especially considering the low quality.

eska• 7 years ago

I don't know how the Taiwanese system works, but there are government programs to bring foreign nurses to Japan.

https://news.mb.com.ph/2018/06/19/japan-to-directly-recruit-...

There is however strong criticism about the strict immigration requirements, e.g. learning supposedly high level Japanese in only a few years. This allegedly leads to nurses only staying in Japan temporarily, leaving, then going through the same program again. This then apparently bars them from benefits that Japanese citizens would have, although they stay in Japan for years.

gyc2• 7 years ago

Several of the examples in the article hinted at familial estrangement, which makes things much worse.

Yes as somebody from a Taiwanese family that also really stuck out from the article. The daughter in Tokyo only seeing the father once a year? Seems like there are deeper problems there.

fooblitzky2• 7 years ago

Maybe the culture of extremely long work hours alienated the father from his family?

sjg0073• 7 years ago

Lol.. I see my mom like once every 3 years and my Dad maybe once year. This is in America. With work and kids and living in different states and countries it financially impossible to get everyone together. I hardly saw my grandparents too so it’s not abnormal necessarily.

jseliger• 7 years ago

hinted at familial estrangement, which makes things much worse

This article appeared on HN a few weeks ago: https://www.city-journal.org/decline-of-family-loneliness-ep... and has stayed with me. Perhaps it'll stay with me forever.

cydonian_monk• 7 years ago

Wow, I missed that one. The first several paragraphs make it read like something I need to sit down and give some undivided focus. Seems very well written.

I can certainly offer some anecdata to it. My family died 20 years ago with my grandmother. (Or rather it _really_ died when the question came up of who should care for my Alzheimer's-afflicted grandfather.) Before then we were a tightly-knit group; after, a rapidly unrolled ball of yarn. And as the only child of two divorced (since I was 2 weeks old!) and bitter parents, that was basically it for me. I'm occasionally in contact with a couple of my cousins, but largely I seem to have just ceased to exist to most of them.

Guess I fit the new statistic.

spaceflunky• 7 years ago

What's up with all these children hating their parents? Not judging but genuinely curious. Is something in the culture?

A lot of these people who die alone with unclaimed bodies have children. Why don't the children care?

npunt• 7 years ago

In everything from technology to culture to aging, Japan seems to be a portent for things yet to happen in the west.

We tend to view suburbs as these static places that serve a particular purpose for primarily families and where nothing changes. But in fact suburbs are starting to transform into de facto retirement communities as boomers exit the workforce, due in large part to incentives from certain laws that keep them there and prevent development (no comment on who created those laws). One clear example is schools in Cupertino are closing due to declining enrollment - something that certainly doesn't fit the conception of a suburb being a place where families are raised.

crimsonalucard• 7 years ago

What??? I'm from Cupertino. Haven't been back in ages but I had no idea this was going on. Do you have a source? not that I don't believe you, but I would be interested in learning more.

astrange4• 7 years ago

Cupertino residents are incredibly NIMBY and incredibly dedicated to not letting anyone new move in - traffic, you know. The city council they just elected has many great opinions like "Apple employees are too poor to live in Cupertino" and "Men who work at Apple will molest our daughters and hire prostitutes".

Right now Vallco mall has been torn down and the city is trying its best to stop an affordable housing development there.

gyc2• 7 years ago

https://cupertinotoday.com/2018/01/09/cupertino-school-board...

FreedomToCreate2• 7 years ago

Article on school enrollment in Cupertino

https://outline.com/AVgVLN

011000114• 7 years ago

Your comment made me think of how astonished I was at the numbers of elderly in the South Bay when I relocated here. You'd think those folks would have cashed out and moved to a tax friendly state with better weather, but for some reason they've stayed put.

FreedomToCreate2• 7 years ago

They have stayed put because there is no where with better weather

dougmwne• 7 years ago

I think the simplest explanation is that once people have put down decades worth of roots in a place, most would prefer to stay, no matter how many millions their house would sell for. I think for most people the upheaval of leaving all your friends, acquaintances, family, local culture, habits, patterns of living, and your very home behind far outweighs even a eye-opening property value. You'd need a damn good reason to leave, so unless you're forced, you'll stay.

mathattack2• 7 years ago

Their houses are paid off and they are locked in to low property taxes.

gopi• 7 years ago

This is a issue particular to California because of Prop 13. In many other places in US, the housing stock circulate as people go thro life changes. Not so much in California

sjg0073• 7 years ago

Seniors can transfer their property tax from their previous property to the new one.

sjg0073• 7 years ago

One solution for Cupertino would be open enrollment if they haven’t implemented it yet. But there’s an issue where older people don’t sell because there is nothing for them to buy. There’s a big push accessory dwelling units now which basically the owner could move into and either rent or sell the main property. That’s a potential way to create more housing. It’s probably a drop in the bucket though.. I’m not sure if the expected number of ADUs would satisfy much demand.

gdilla• 7 years ago

one thing that is markedly different is immigration. Japan has minuscule amounts of immigration, and non japanese blood people can't be citizens. In Canada, at least, they recognize we'd all be old white people without the current levels of immigration.

aikinai• 7 years ago

There's no blood requirement to get Japanese citizenship. It's actually easier than many western countries, including the US, for skilled immigrants.

They just don't allow much unskilled immigration, which is why the total number is low. And even that is rapidly changing; in particular, a brand new immigration policy was passed this year.

kevin_thibedeau• 7 years ago

70 year olds wouldn't be so decrepit if it weren't for the lifetime of smoking.

astrange4• 7 years ago

Don't forget that drinking milk is actually bad for your bones.

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/349/bmj.g6015.full.pdf

Animats• 7 years ago

Japan, except for Osaka and Tokyo, is emptying out. The country's population peaked in 2011.[1] It's not a suburban problem.

At least Japan can maintain that housing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan

euske• 7 years ago

I tend to think that there's some business opportunity here, especially for tech companies (although they might not be entirely a private sector). I've seen numerous companies who are specialized in surveillance and communication for the elderly. They are not yet widespread due to technical and privacy concerns, but I'd be excited to see more development in this area in future.

maxander• 7 years ago

You’ve got to admire Japan- they face a problem for the welfare of their citizens, but they’re grappling with it in an intelligent and informed manner. They’re not particularly close to solving the underlying issues but, from the sound of it at least, steps are in the consistently right direction.

In the U.S., in contrast, this kind of problem wouldn’t even come up- because everyone involved would be living on the street, and no one in a position of civic authority would consider it their responsibility.

ruytlm• 7 years ago

xchaotic2• 7 years ago

A very good example of the negative effects of reversing a good social policy (universal social housing)

Tokyo's suburban housing became vast ghettoes for the old

Related Stories