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Tokyo Takes New York: Astounding Housing Facts
United Kingdom Architecture News - May 20, 2014 - 10:25 2567 views
High-rise buildings soar in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)
New York and San Francisco are in the midst of what they call a building boom. But there are building booms, and then there’s business as usual in Tokyo. Last month, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government released new housing data, offering an eye into the most active construction market in the developed world.
In 2012, builders in Tokyo’s 23 innermost wards began construction on nearly 110,000 new houses and apartments. Put into context, the numbers are astounding. England has 53 million people spread over 50,000 square miles of territory — six times the population of Tokyo’s wards and orders of magnitude more land — but on housing, England barely kept up with the much smaller area. The entire country saw just 115,000 new housing starts in 2012.
The New York metropolitan area (spanning the city and its suburbs on Long Island, in New Jersey and north of the city) has more than twice the population of Tokyo’s 23 wards. And yet not even building permits for 27,000 units were created — a number that’s far higher than the actual number of housing starts. It’s quite possible that, despite having twice the population, the New York metro area barely built a tenth what Tokyo’s inner-city did....Continue Reading
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