Sul blog Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches si discute di akiya, ovvero le case abbandonate in Giappone, che sono spesso messe in vendita per pochi euro o persino gratuitamente. Molti articoli sulla stampa internazionale, incluso Vice (IT), hanno rilanciato la notizia di queste occasioni imperdibili:

they all say basically the same thing: local governments throughout Japan are promoting the acquisition of abandoned houses in order to get people to move into their regions and lift the tax base.

Molti potenziali acquirenti però, ignorano che l’acquisto immobiliare in Giappone, con rare eccezioni, non è mai un investimento:

More to the point, people who do sell their homes almost never make back what they paid for them.

Once when we wrote an article about how housing is not an asset for most homeowners in Japan, the editor for the newspaper we work for rejected it because he didn’t believe it was true, even though we included lots of refererences from other publications that said as much.

At this point, we think most Japanese people know this, despite all the talk about “maintaining property values” at all cost. We certainly know it. Almost as soon as we moved into our new house in 2014 the assessed value dropped by almost two-thirds—and that’s for property tax purposes, which tends to be higher than market assessed value.

L’autore quindi riflette sul suo acquisto e su ciò che accadrà alla sua casa quando non potrà più abitarla:

What can we do with it when we reach the age where we can no longer live here? There’s a very good chance we won’t even be able to sell it. Since we don’t have children, there’s no one to inherit it.

In the end, we may become one of those homeowners who slips away in the middle of the night and leaves their house to the weeds and the snakes, which is how we became obsessed with the blog, urbansprawl.net, by a former bus driver named Yusuke Yoshikawa, who studies and writes about “genkai new towns.”

Suffice to say there are akiya in these developments, not to mention vacant lots that were never built upon and which are now covered in weeds and sometimes illegally dumped refuse.

A problem that Yoshikawa often encounters on his field trips is lack of boundaries and borders. It’s very difficult to tell where one property starts and another begins, and not just because of a lack of physical markers. Apparently, in many cases the boundaries are undetermined because the developer simply carved up the tract for sales purposes but never properly had the development surveyed. It’s a problem we have also written about and which is particularly acute in these new towns. What that means is that anyone who does buy a property and wants to find out exactly where the borders are will not only have to hire a surveyor, but also communicate with surrounding property owners to gain their permission and cooperation, which, in most cases, is almost impossible. Consequently, it is even more difficult to sell these properties.

Immagine da Pixabay.