Japan's constant decrease in birth rate, paired with an aging population, resulted to a massive increase in the number of abandoned houses and properties in their country. This crisis is expected to move further with an estimated loss of more than one-third of Japan's population by 2060.
According to the US Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook, Japan ranks 54 out of 225 countries when it comes to death rate. It is not a troublesome spot but then Japan sits third in ranking when it comes to the lowest percentage of birth rate in the world. Factor in those two statistics and you'll have a troublesome result. This has made a weighty impact on Japanese housing since the 1990's and the numbers of ghost or abandoned properties in Japan have doubled come 2013.
In a report by The New York Times it was stated, "Long-term vacancy rates have climbed significantly higher than in the United States or Europe, and some eight million dwellings are now unoccupied, according to a government count. Nearly half of them have been forsaken completely -- neither for sale nor for rent, have they simply sat there, in varying states of disrepair."
To address the issue, the Japanese government, in May 2015, passed the Vacant Housing Law that would allow the government more power to enforce code violations to demolish long abandoned properties that have been ruined and will post potential harm. They also gave focus on creating a database that will identify vacant properties, their owners, and help bring the said properties into public use.
Peter Manda, a New Jersey-based fraud investigator with EY (formerly Ernst & Young), examines the Vacant Housing Law and sees that it can also be applied to similar crisis happening with the US Housing. In his Cityscape article, reported in Citylab, Manda emphasizes, "A response to the shifting demographics of a rapidly expanding elderly population and contracting younger population that includes planned, focused, and proactive policies must nevertheless include a 'what then?' calculus," he writes. "By including the 'and after death?' question into housing policy, policymakers can make the tough optimization choices necessary to spare the next generation the costs of dealing with a national blight problem similar to the one currently experienced in Japan."
