
Why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years - daddy_drank
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution
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sus_007
This article has already been discussed twice in HN.

>DUPE 1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734)
>DUPE 2:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711338)

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senko
The actually mostly talks about how this is beginning to change. The answer to
the question from the title is hidden in a single paragraph:

 _Unlike in other countries, Japanese homes gradually depreciate over time,
becoming completely valueless within 20 or 30 years. When someone moves out of
a home or dies, the house, unlike the land it sits on, has no resale value and
is typically demolished. This scrap-and-build approach is a quirk of the
Japanese housing market that can be explained variously by low-quality
construction to quickly meet demand after the second world war, repeated
building code revisions to improve earthquake resilience and a cycle of poor
maintenance due to the lack of any incentive to make homes marketable for
resale._

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GuiA
Using your comment as a jumping off point for the discussion of this aspect
particularly - as long as the construction is done with fairly environmentally
friendly materials, I don’t find that especially problematic.

Maybe because I am typing this from a San Francisco building that appears to
be mostly made of wood and nails, whose foundations do not seem to have been
updated in almost a century, and seems ready to collapse/burst in flames at
any moment’s notice, and for which I am paying the same price as the nice new
modern building down the street that does seem in better shape in case of an
earthquake or fire.

I am also reminded of the house where a coworker just moved in with his entire
family, of which most of the foundations are burnt due to a fire in the 90s.
The house still stands up - for now - and the landlord has been renting it
ever since because it would never sell in this shape.

So in geographic regions with high risk for seismic activity, tornadoes,
tsunamis, floods, etc, it seems like building houses up to the latest code
with cheap materials every 30 years is better than having very expensive
tinderboxes around for a century or so.

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booleandilemma
Meanwhile I’m living in NYC in a building from the 1920s with only have a
handful of electrical outlets.

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zitterbewegung
Something similar happened to Detroit where they demolished existing homes for
the same reason.

