So 500 die alone every year, let's give this number some perspective. Tokyo's population is 9.273 million, the highest of any city in the world, of which some 23% or roughly 2.1 million are aged 65 or over, and 500 of these are dying alone every year? So 0.005% of the general population or 0.023% of the elderly.
Have fun living in the car dependent sprawling suburbs when you're 80 and not legally allowed to drive anymore.
I guess one can hope that autonomous cars will finally appear to bail one out of this predicament, but I'll personally be setting myself up to retire in a place where everything I need is a short walk or wheelchair roll away.
My dad lives in a 55+ community in Nevada, and they have golf carts too. There's even a sign when you enter the development warning you that golf carts are permitted on the roads.
Unlike a lot of retirement communities, it looks like just another suburban housing development. The only hint that it's different, aside from the golf carts, is that every single house is one-story in order to accommodate people who can't (easily) climb stairs.
Sounds vaguely like the Somersett neighborhood in Reno (though I don't recall if it's entirely 55+; there are some kid-friendly amenities, which suggests that families with kids are allowed to live in at least some parts, but for some reason I remember it being mostly retirees).
Nope, it's Sun City Summerlin in Vegas. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if the formula is common.
As for their age policies, from what I remember of my dad telling me, only one resident of each house has to be 55+, but nobody under 19 is allowed to live there permanently (...and I just checked their Wikipedia article, and it confirms it). So no kid-friendly stuff there, but there are some younger people living with older relatives.
Insurance companies take this seriously and withdraw insurance when senior license holders receive minor tickets for moving violations. The same ticket that would not cause a rate increase for a 30-year-old can be the death knell of a senior's insurance.
Cities are no panacea. Just a couple of months ago I was in Manhattan after a bad muscle sprain. I could walk a few blocks but it was hard.
I guess in a dense city it’s easier to just take an Uber everywhere but for some types of restricted mobility it’s actually much easier to be able to drive a car more or less door to door.
Yes I read the parent. However, a lot of people are mentally/physically able to drive who have trouble walking around city streets. Personal circumstances differ of course. But cities are certainly not automatically easier for infirm people to get around.
And my general point was what I wrote. "Cities are not a panacea." If you don't believe that, get on crutches and travel around pretty much any city.
By the way, today I saw old man and woman riding electric scooters with seats (they look like this [1]). I thought that it could be useful for senior people in the city. But our city is mostly flat, of course they won't help to climb those endless stairways in Japan.
There are senior care services that exist to help seniors with those issues. Also many live with children or in communities. Plus, it's a lot easier to drive to a walmart than it is to walk to the subway and use it, if you are older.
The city is pretty bad for anyone except the young and wealthy.
> ... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income.
The goal was to make public housing a safety net for elderly, low-income and socially vulnerable people. The effect, however, has been to make social housing off-limits for most people: eligibility fell from 80% of households in 1951 to 25% after 1996.
And it has turned public housing into a kind of ghetto for poor and elderly people who rely on pensions and can’t afford private rents.
In Canada it is often controversial when upper middle class people are found to be living in affordable coops and anti-poverty activists, in an understandable effort to create as much low income housing as possible, often call for wholly low income housing projects instead of having buildings with mixed incomes. This article suggests at the flawed outcome from overly means testing benefits.
I increasingly think that for social safety nets to work well, they need to be universalized, if possible.
Otherwise we get welfare traps, ghettoisation or just poor quality (like buses in places where only the poor use em). It doesn't mean everyone has to use it, just that they can. This is common sense in services like health or education, where we're used to it.
We already have a good solution to avoid ghettoisation or traps called progressive taxation.
However, it doesn't go far enough because the tax rate doesn't take benefits into account, so even though you're getting >$0.80 of every dollar earned, after adjusting for benefits it may instead be $0.20 or even negative. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is an especially large contributor to this situation [1].
To avoid a trap, marginal income after taxes and benefits should start high and fall monotonically. It should probably also be concave up (the amount of income to bump you into the next 'adjusted tax' bracket gets bigger and bigger).
They hate it because it became a one stop shop solution for everything. (Especially the mental illness problems are troubling without any of the very much needed therapy, continuous follow ups, visits from a social worker, etc.)
Which seems to imply that while a poor door is not very common, it is becoming more common in response to affordable-housing regulations (requiring a % of market-rate developments to be affordable).
I have also seen this in public housing in Hong Kong. Government built housing for families in the 70s. Children move out. The remaining residents turn grey. The residents in the housing complex are aging along with the buildings.
The street I spent my childhood on there was about 30 kids under 10 years old. Now there is about three. My family moved away but I recently checked and the girl next doors parents have lived there ever since. They're in their 80's.
Mulling it over I think uniform single use zoning/construction is 'bad'. I saw presentation by a guys showing various housing. One of them was a very nice 1920's era apartment building in Redwood city. One of his points was it'd be totally illegal to build something like that today.
That indicates poor zoning to me. If you have mixed market-rate and social housing you should be building them adjacent to each other or (as is often done now) in the same building.
Several of the examples in the article hinted at familial estrangement, which makes things much worse.
I lived in Taiwan, which also has a stagnant birth rate (only 181,606 births last year, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3611847) and a decades-long trend for young people to migrate to the large cities, or go to China to try their fortunes there.
But there is also a strong tradition of multi-generational households and traditions/holidays that emphasize family relations or filial piety, Lunar New Year being the most obvious. Certainly, family strife exists (and can be exacerbated if people are forced to live together) and many seniors live alone, but I think because of the cultural emphasis on familial contact, there is also a level of contact and awareness that can mitigate the extreme situations described in the article. Being smaller also helps (most cities on the island are no more than two or three hours away by high-speed rail).
In recent decades, there has also been a trend to legally allow foreign caregivers (mostly Filipinos and Indonesians) for people aged 85 and up, and tacitly allow for foreign caregivers for younger seniors and wealthy families. I am not sure how Taiwan's national health system covers those costs, or if the elderly poor can afford them.
Does Japan have any similar system of allowing foreign caregivers?
I am secretly looking forward to the Japanese style rural depopulation that seems inevitable in Taiwan. Real estate there is hugely expensive - especially considering the low quality.
There is however strong criticism about the strict immigration requirements, e.g. learning supposedly high level Japanese in only a few years. This allegedly leads to nurses only staying in Japan temporarily, leaving, then going through the same program again. This then apparently bars them from benefits that Japanese citizens would have, although they stay in Japan for years.
> Several of the examples in the article hinted at familial estrangement, which makes things much worse.
Yes as somebody from a Taiwanese family that also really stuck out from the article. The daughter in Tokyo only seeing the father once a year? Seems like there are deeper problems there.
Lol.. I see my mom like once every 3 years and my Dad maybe once year. This is in America. With work and kids and living in different states and countries it financially impossible to get everyone together. I hardly saw my grandparents too so it’s not abnormal necessarily.
Wow, I missed that one. The first several paragraphs make it read like something I need to sit down and give some undivided focus. Seems very well written.
I can certainly offer some anecdata to it. My family died 20 years ago with my grandmother. (Or rather it _really_ died when the question came up of who should care for my Alzheimer's-afflicted grandfather.) Before then we were a tightly-knit group; after, a rapidly unrolled ball of yarn. And as the only child of two divorced (since I was 2 weeks old!) and bitter parents, that was basically it for me. I'm occasionally in contact with a couple of my cousins, but largely I seem to have just ceased to exist to most of them.
In everything from technology to culture to aging, Japan seems to be a portent for things yet to happen in the west.
We tend to view suburbs as these static places that serve a particular purpose for primarily families and where nothing changes. But in fact suburbs are starting to transform into de facto retirement communities as boomers exit the workforce, due in large part to incentives from certain laws that keep them there and prevent development (no comment on who created those laws). One clear example is schools in Cupertino are closing due to declining enrollment - something that certainly doesn't fit the conception of a suburb being a place where families are raised.
What??? I'm from Cupertino. Haven't been back in ages but I had no idea this was going on. Do you have a source? not that I don't believe you, but I would be interested in learning more.
Cupertino residents are incredibly NIMBY and incredibly dedicated to not letting anyone new move in - traffic, you know. The city council they just elected has many great opinions like "Apple employees are too poor to live in Cupertino" and "Men who work at Apple will molest our daughters and hire prostitutes".
Right now Vallco mall has been torn down and the city is trying its best to stop an affordable housing development there.
>also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income...
Part of problem in US:
>Cupertino residents are ... incredibly dedicated to not letting anyone new move in...
Sounds like HNUser "npunt" was correct in the assertion that the same thing seems to be going down in both places, and for similar reasons. Difference being that the Japanese are open to using the law in a more stringent manner to keep younger people out.
There's a lot of differences - Japan actually has great zoning and land use laws, and zoning is nationally controlled, so homeowners can't abuse it to raise their own property prices like in California. That's what the "traffic" complaints are excuses for.
As a result, housing in Tokyo is a lot cheaper than you'd expect it to be. Still, the issues with public housing aren't surprising. I'm not sure you can get evicted from Section 8 apartments in the US for making more money, but it wouldn't surprise me.
The current government (supposedly right-wing) has reformed immigration to the point it's easier to move there than to the US. Your whole family can work, you can get permanent residency in a few years, it's all good. Of course, having a college degree makes it a lot easier.
It's not very appealing for Americans because the work culture is pretty bad and pay is low, so you can't get out of student debt, but I met a lot of Asian immigrants last time I was there.
Your comment made me think of how astonished I was at the numbers of elderly in the South Bay when I relocated here. You'd think those folks would have cashed out and moved to a tax friendly state with better weather, but for some reason they've stayed put.
If they move just a state over, the average temps are over 100 degrees during the day. There are other issues with the heat like an elderly lady died because the power company turned her power off for being $51 behind. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/aps-cut-power-heat-cust...
As someone over the hill, I can confirm that the older I get, the more heat feels good. There's a reason why Arizona is full of retirees. The cold, humid air in the bay area, especially during winter, is not good for an old body. Now obviously heat can kill the elderly, but if someone cashed out their bay area home and moved, they'd have more than enough money to buy a nice place and run the air conditioner whenever they like.
If nothing else, I'd figure they'd move to LA for even better weather and cheaper rent. That doesn't help with the tax situation, but it's something.
Maybe they're here for the family connections, but it seems less and less likely to be the case given the exodus of longtime residents from the area.
If they don't own a house, I can't see how they'd manage to stay. Renting around here on a fixed income must be brutal.
I think the simplest explanation is that once people have put down decades worth of roots in a place, most would prefer to stay, no matter how many millions their house would sell for. I think for most people the upheaval of leaving all your friends, acquaintances, family, local culture, habits, patterns of living, and your very home behind far outweighs even a eye-opening property value. You'd need a damn good reason to leave, so unless you're forced, you'll stay.
You could sell your bay area house for $1M and buy a palace in AZ for half that. That leaves you with a nice chunk of change to pay property taxes with.
But it's unnecessary. If you bought your 3 bedroom house in Cupertino in 1978 for $60k, you're paying taxes on about $140k, so about $1400 a year. These people can live on just Social Security.
If they can easily afford to stay where they are with all of their friends and community, in a spectacular climate, not have to deal with the hassle of moving or maintaining a larger house, and pass a $2.5 million asset to their kids, why would they move?
To follow their children who probably left the bay area so they could raise a family?
To escape the cold and humid winters of this 'spectacular climate'(seriously, that's a very relative opinion. San Diego was better. Phoenix is fine if you have AC).
To not have to deal with the hassle of maintaining a 40-60 year old house?
To not have to pay some of the highest state income taxes around?
To reallocate their assets to a growth vehicle and pass on more wealth to their children(seriously our market is maxed for now)?
To live near millions of people in their age bracket in an environment that caters to them?
To have access to superior medical care(IME, South bay sucks. San Diego is better. Phoenix is better. San Antonio is better. etc...).
CA is generally a horrible place to retire unless you have money to burn. If I were 65+, had children, and owned a house in the south bay, I would leave in a heartbeat unless my children were working FANG jobs in the same area of the bay.
The economics work better for renters that are moving, rather than owners.
For an owner, their property taxes are lower than it would be with a new house out of state. If they want they can borrow against the home value to access the equity. Their income is lower, so less attraction moving to a lower tax state.
This is a issue particular to California because of Prop 13. In many other places in US, the housing stock circulate as people go thro life changes. Not so much in California
One solution for Cupertino would be open enrollment if they haven’t implemented it yet. But there’s an issue where older people don’t sell because there is nothing for them to buy. There’s a big push accessory dwelling units now which basically the owner could move into and either rent or sell the main property. That’s a potential way to create more housing. It’s probably a drop in the bucket though.. I’m not sure if the expected number of ADUs would satisfy much demand.
one thing that is markedly different is immigration. Japan has minuscule amounts of immigration, and non japanese blood people can't be citizens. In Canada, at least, they recognize we'd all be old white people without the current levels of immigration.
There's no blood requirement to get Japanese citizenship. It's actually easier than many western countries, including the US, for skilled immigrants.
They just don't allow much unskilled immigration, which is why the total number is low. And even that is rapidly changing; in particular, a brand new immigration policy was passed this year.
Its funny the US is saved from all this by the immigrants it hates.
The rest of us have 20 years to invent robots that can replace workers... At least people have saved for their retirement here so its not going to destroy the budget.
At least Japan has reasonable social housing and delivery services for them. The problem is their kids don't seem to visit or care. This exists in America it's just in trailer parks in declining interior towns.
I tend to think that there's some business opportunity here, especially for tech companies (although they might not be entirely a private sector). I've seen numerous companies who are specialized in surveillance and communication for the elderly. They are not yet widespread due to technical and privacy concerns, but I'd be excited to see more development in this area in future.
You’ve got to admire Japan- they face a problem for the welfare of their citizens, but they’re grappling with it in an intelligent and informed manner. They’re not particularly close to solving the underlying issues but, from the sound of it at least, steps are in the consistently right direction.
In the U.S., in contrast, this kind of problem wouldn’t even come up- because everyone involved would be living on the street, and no one in a position of civic authority would consider it their responsibility.
79 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadHave fun living in the car dependent sprawling suburbs when you're 80 and not legally allowed to drive anymore.
I guess one can hope that autonomous cars will finally appear to bail one out of this predicament, but I'll personally be setting myself up to retire in a place where everything I need is a short walk or wheelchair roll away.
You're describing Florida and they drive anyways.
I've been to a couple golf cart communities in Florida and they are actually pretty cool for retirement
Unlike a lot of retirement communities, it looks like just another suburban housing development. The only hint that it's different, aside from the golf carts, is that every single house is one-story in order to accommodate people who can't (easily) climb stairs.
As for their age policies, from what I remember of my dad telling me, only one resident of each house has to be 55+, but nobody under 19 is allowed to live there permanently (...and I just checked their Wikipedia article, and it confirms it). So no kid-friendly stuff there, but there are some younger people living with older relatives.
I guess in a dense city it’s easier to just take an Uber everywhere but for some types of restricted mobility it’s actually much easier to be able to drive a car more or less door to door.
And my general point was what I wrote. "Cities are not a panacea." If you don't believe that, get on crutches and travel around pretty much any city.
Follow that up with: get on crutches and travel around pretty much any suburb.
[1] https://www.dhresource.com/0x0s/f2-albu-g6-M01-8B-09-rBVaSFt...
The city is pretty bad for anyone except the young and wealthy.
> ... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income.
The goal was to make public housing a safety net for elderly, low-income and socially vulnerable people. The effect, however, has been to make social housing off-limits for most people: eligibility fell from 80% of households in 1951 to 25% after 1996.
And it has turned public housing into a kind of ghetto for poor and elderly people who rely on pensions and can’t afford private rents.
In Canada it is often controversial when upper middle class people are found to be living in affordable coops and anti-poverty activists, in an understandable effort to create as much low income housing as possible, often call for wholly low income housing projects instead of having buildings with mixed incomes. This article suggests at the flawed outcome from overly means testing benefits.
Otherwise we get welfare traps, ghettoisation or just poor quality (like buses in places where only the poor use em). It doesn't mean everyone has to use it, just that they can. This is common sense in services like health or education, where we're used to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_...
However, it doesn't go far enough because the tax rate doesn't take benefits into account, so even though you're getting >$0.80 of every dollar earned, after adjusting for benefits it may instead be $0.20 or even negative. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is an especially large contributor to this situation [1].
To avoid a trap, marginal income after taxes and benefits should start high and fall monotonically. It should probably also be concave up (the amount of income to bump you into the next 'adjusted tax' bracket gets bigger and bigger).
[1] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publicati... (page 767, Figure 2)
At least in dense cities, public housing can be mixed into free market housing.
Mulling it over I think uniform single use zoning/construction is 'bad'. I saw presentation by a guys showing various housing. One of them was a very nice 1920's era apartment building in Redwood city. One of his points was it'd be totally illegal to build something like that today.
I lived in Taiwan, which also has a stagnant birth rate (only 181,606 births last year, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3611847) and a decades-long trend for young people to migrate to the large cities, or go to China to try their fortunes there.
But there is also a strong tradition of multi-generational households and traditions/holidays that emphasize family relations or filial piety, Lunar New Year being the most obvious. Certainly, family strife exists (and can be exacerbated if people are forced to live together) and many seniors live alone, but I think because of the cultural emphasis on familial contact, there is also a level of contact and awareness that can mitigate the extreme situations described in the article. Being smaller also helps (most cities on the island are no more than two or three hours away by high-speed rail).
In recent decades, there has also been a trend to legally allow foreign caregivers (mostly Filipinos and Indonesians) for people aged 85 and up, and tacitly allow for foreign caregivers for younger seniors and wealthy families. I am not sure how Taiwan's national health system covers those costs, or if the elderly poor can afford them.
Does Japan have any similar system of allowing foreign caregivers?
https://news.mb.com.ph/2018/06/19/japan-to-directly-recruit-...
There is however strong criticism about the strict immigration requirements, e.g. learning supposedly high level Japanese in only a few years. This allegedly leads to nurses only staying in Japan temporarily, leaving, then going through the same program again. This then apparently bars them from benefits that Japanese citizens would have, although they stay in Japan for years.
Yes as somebody from a Taiwanese family that also really stuck out from the article. The daughter in Tokyo only seeing the father once a year? Seems like there are deeper problems there.
This article appeared on HN a few weeks ago: https://www.city-journal.org/decline-of-family-loneliness-ep... and has stayed with me. Perhaps it'll stay with me forever.
I can certainly offer some anecdata to it. My family died 20 years ago with my grandmother. (Or rather it _really_ died when the question came up of who should care for my Alzheimer's-afflicted grandfather.) Before then we were a tightly-knit group; after, a rapidly unrolled ball of yarn. And as the only child of two divorced (since I was 2 weeks old!) and bitter parents, that was basically it for me. I'm occasionally in contact with a couple of my cousins, but largely I seem to have just ceased to exist to most of them.
Guess I fit the new statistic.
A lot of these people who die alone with unclaimed bodies have children. Why don't the children care?
We tend to view suburbs as these static places that serve a particular purpose for primarily families and where nothing changes. But in fact suburbs are starting to transform into de facto retirement communities as boomers exit the workforce, due in large part to incentives from certain laws that keep them there and prevent development (no comment on who created those laws). One clear example is schools in Cupertino are closing due to declining enrollment - something that certainly doesn't fit the conception of a suburb being a place where families are raised.
Right now Vallco mall has been torn down and the city is trying its best to stop an affordable housing development there.
>also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income...
Part of problem in US:
>Cupertino residents are ... incredibly dedicated to not letting anyone new move in...
Sounds like HNUser "npunt" was correct in the assertion that the same thing seems to be going down in both places, and for similar reasons. Difference being that the Japanese are open to using the law in a more stringent manner to keep younger people out.
As a result, housing in Tokyo is a lot cheaper than you'd expect it to be. Still, the issues with public housing aren't surprising. I'm not sure you can get evicted from Section 8 apartments in the US for making more money, but it wouldn't surprise me.
It's not very appealing for Americans because the work culture is pretty bad and pay is low, so you can't get out of student debt, but I met a lot of Asian immigrants last time I was there.
https://outline.com/AVgVLN
If nothing else, I'd figure they'd move to LA for even better weather and cheaper rent. That doesn't help with the tax situation, but it's something.
Maybe they're here for the family connections, but it seems less and less likely to be the case given the exodus of longtime residents from the area.
If they don't own a house, I can't see how they'd manage to stay. Renting around here on a fixed income must be brutal.
If they can easily afford to stay where they are with all of their friends and community, in a spectacular climate, not have to deal with the hassle of moving or maintaining a larger house, and pass a $2.5 million asset to their kids, why would they move?
To follow their children who probably left the bay area so they could raise a family?
To escape the cold and humid winters of this 'spectacular climate'(seriously, that's a very relative opinion. San Diego was better. Phoenix is fine if you have AC).
To not have to deal with the hassle of maintaining a 40-60 year old house?
To not have to pay some of the highest state income taxes around?
To reallocate their assets to a growth vehicle and pass on more wealth to their children(seriously our market is maxed for now)?
To live near millions of people in their age bracket in an environment that caters to them?
To have access to superior medical care(IME, South bay sucks. San Diego is better. Phoenix is better. San Antonio is better. etc...).
CA is generally a horrible place to retire unless you have money to burn. If I were 65+, had children, and owned a house in the south bay, I would leave in a heartbeat unless my children were working FANG jobs in the same area of the bay.
For an owner, their property taxes are lower than it would be with a new house out of state. If they want they can borrow against the home value to access the equity. Their income is lower, so less attraction moving to a lower tax state.
They just don't allow much unskilled immigration, which is why the total number is low. And even that is rapidly changing; in particular, a brand new immigration policy was passed this year.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/349/bmj.g6015.full.pdf
The rest of us have 20 years to invent robots that can replace workers... At least people have saved for their retirement here so its not going to destroy the budget.
At least Japan can maintain that housing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan
In the U.S., in contrast, this kind of problem wouldn’t even come up- because everyone involved would be living on the street, and no one in a position of civic authority would consider it their responsibility.