Japan made housing affordable while the West is out here treating home ownership like it’s a lottery win and a blood sport at the same time. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, you can actually buy a place to live without selling your kidneys on the dark web. How? Not magic, not “Japanese discipline,” just a system that doesn’t treat every apartment like a gold bar you’re supposed to hoard for 40 years. Let’s take a little tour through the land of empty houses, zoning that isn’t allergic to apartments, and the only country where your house depreciates faster than your car.
First, let’s talk about the “akiya” situation. Japan’s got 9 million empty homes, which is about one in seven. Imagine walking down your street and every seventh house is just sitting there, collecting dust, maybe a raccoon or two. Some of these are vacation homes, some are waiting for buyers, but about 4 million are just straight-up abandoned. No renters, no buyers, no one even mowing the grass. In the West, this would be a national scandal, cue the thinkpieces and the “we need to build more!” crowd. In Japan, they passed a law in 2015 to actually do something about it. If your house is dangerous or just rotting, the city can yank your tax breaks and, if you keep ignoring it, they can force you to sell or tear it down. In 2023, they made it even stricter: now even just neglected houses get the hammer. Try pulling that in London or San Francisco, you’d have a riot of landlords in Patagonia vests.
But the real galaxy brain move is how Japan treats houses and land. In most of the West, a house is an “investment.” You buy it, you pray the price goes up, you sell it to some poor sap later. In Japan, the land is the thing that holds value, not the building. The house itself? It’s like a phone, it gets old, it gets replaced. A wooden house in Japan is expected to last about 22 years, concrete maybe 47. After that, it’s basically scrap. Banks don’t want to lend on old houses, insurance companies don’t want to touch them, and if you want to sell, you’re selling the land, not the shack on top. So people just knock them down and build new ones. They call it “scrap and build.” Imagine if every time your iPhone got slow, you just bulldozed your house and built a new one. That’s the vibe.
This means houses aren’t treated like family heirlooms or retirement plans. They’re just… houses. You live in them, you replace them, you move on. The result? Housing is just a thing you buy to live in, not a speculative asset. In Tokyo, you can buy a small apartment in a normal neighborhood for about $100,000. In Lviv, Ukraine, a one-bedroom is $75,000, but the average salary is $7,000 a year before taxes. In Tokyo, the average salary is way higher, and the price of a place to live isn’t some insane multiple of your income. Meanwhile, in the West, prices are up double digits every year, and everyone’s acting shocked when nobody under 40 can buy anything except avocado toast.
And then there’s zoning. Japan doesn’t do the “single-family only, no apartments allowed, keep out the poors” routine. Even in the strictest residential zones, you can build apartment buildings by default. Industrial zones? Sure, throw some housing in there, why not. In the US, try building an apartment in a nice suburb and watch the HOA call the cops. Japan regulates density with two numbers: how much of your land you can build on, and how much total floor space you can have. But the limits are way higher than in most Western cities. Some zones let you build up to 13 times the land area in floor space. That’s how you get actual city living, not just endless sprawl and commutes from hell.
And when the market does get hot, like in Tokyo, prices don’t just go up forever. In 2026, prices for used apartments in central Tokyo actually dropped for the first time in three years. Across all 23 wards, prices fell for the first time in over two years. Meanwhile, in the West, a tiny dip in prices is treated like the apocalypse, and every politician starts promising “affordable housing” while doing nothing.
So why does Japan have millions of empty houses and still manages to keep housing affordable? Because they don’t let empty homes rot forever, they don’t treat houses like gold, and they actually let people build where people want to live. The system is set up so that housing is for living, not for speculating. When a house gets old, you knock it down and build a new one. When a house is abandoned, the city can force you to do something about it. When you want to build an apartment, the law says “go for it,” not “please fill out these 900 forms and wait 10 years.”
Meanwhile, in the West, we get endless NIMBY drama, zoning that bans everything except McMansions, and a housing market that’s basically a casino for boomers. Every empty house is a “future investment,” every new apartment is a “threat to neighborhood character,” and every young person is supposed to just keep renting until their hair falls out.
Japan’s not perfect, but at least they figured out that housing is for living, not for flexing. Maybe the West should try it sometime, but then what would all the realtors and landlords do with their free time? Probably start a podcast about how nobody wants to work anymore.