In this reflection, you’ll hear from a delegate on lessons learned from the Tokyo Study Trip
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By Nicholas Shatan
A moment of collective confusion struck early in the trip as Meiji University Professor Junko Tamura led us through Shinonome Canal Court, the first of six subsidized housing complexes we would see in Tokyo. The public housing complex, completed in 2005, features a second-story courtyard formed by four 14-story buildings, each with a series of double-height collective outdoor terraces. This key design element proposed by the site’s master architect, Riken Yamamoto, would be difficult to execute in subsidized housing in liability-averse New York City. Could this really be public housing?
The terms “public housing” and “social housing” would continue to cause confusion throughout the week. Professor Tamura used “public housing” to refer to housing owned and operated by Urban Renaissance (UR), a semi-public corporation managed by the national government, and “social housing” to refer to housing owned and operated by prefecture-level governments, like the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG). This English terminology is not standardized: another professor’s lecture referred to both types as “public housing,” and both types are referred to as danchi (団礜) by the general public.
What seemed to puzzle New York delegates most was not translation per se, but analogy. Most notably, UR is clearly not equivalent to NYCHA public housing in terms of population served. UR’s rents are approximately the same as the market, made attractive by a lack of fees and screening, though roughly 10% of UR households receive some form of rent reduction.(1) Delegates tried to understand it by comparing it to a wide range of familiar housing concepts, from Mitchell-Lama to Stuyvesant Town, but neither of these involve national ownership like UR.
Our New York City housing policy lens limited our questions to those we would ask there, so we did not always get the answers we expected. If this is public housing, what are the income restrictions? How is it subsidized and underwritten? How are rents set? What are the operating expenses like? What are the tenant protections and how are they enforced? What happens if an inspector needs access and a tenant will not open the unit? (This last one drew the most puzzlement from Tokyo officials.)
From all this confusion, I drew two main conclusions. First, a program like UR that has no real equivalent in New York should be analyzed in its context, but can open our minds to new possibilities at home. The differences should encourage us to be rigorous in the elements of evaluating housing programs: financing, design, rents, populations, ownership, cost to build and maintain. On the other hand, TMG-owned “social housing” does seem closer to NYCHA: these have stricter screening processes with lottery systems, and are meant only for the lowest-income Tokyoites. Yet the devil is in the details: its residents pay between around 16% of their income in rent. That should remind us that the New York standard of 30% is not natural. The question isn’t, how do we understand Tokyo by our standards? But rather, is it possible to change our own?