Shoddy construction
Thursday, December 2, 2004
Digging around for articles on home-building in Japan, there aren’t a ton of them in English, I’m finding. Did find this one just now, “Home-buyers in Japan up against a stacked deck” (Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2002), which is about shoddy construction in Japan and the difficulty of the consumer complaint process here. Some food for thought here, particularly about how little houses are worth after 20 years or so. This paragraph at the end stuck out as well:
Although exact comparisons are difficult given the difference in land prices, Tokyo residents pay more than twice what their Los Angeles counterparts do for a house that’s 25 percent smaller. The gap for condo purchases is even greater. The average city dweller has a ¥98.8 million outstanding mortgage on a property worth half that.