Collapse and Reconstruction-4: Housing Policy in Kobe after the Hanshin Great Earthquake

Collapse and Reconstruction: Kobe <4>

Obstacles to Rebuilding

Many victims are hoping to go back to where they lived before the earthquake. There is therefore a major task to rebuild houses at the place where they collapsed and/or were burned down. There are, however, complex obstacles to reconstruction in the damaged urban area.
The financial conditions of many of the victims do not enable them to rebuild their houses. There are low interest loans provided by the Housing Loan Corporation, the Hyogo Prefecture and the City of Kobe. There is also a system for interest subsidy by the Hanshin Earthquake Restoration Fund. This fund of 900 billion yen was financed by the city and prefectural governments, and the benefit from working the fund is applied to restoration programmes. The elderly, however, do not have credit to make use of these programmes. The problem in the disaster area is not the shortage of loans but the lack of credit among the elderly victims.
The condition of housing lots in the urban area is in a state of real confusion. Housing lots in many cases are very small, on narrow roads and are over-crowded. Many existing houses which did not meet the requirements of the Building Standards Act collapsed and/or were burned down. Those existing unqualified houses were built before the Building Standards Act was enacted, and though they did not meet the standard they were allowed to remain. When rebuilt, however, the new houses must be adjacent to a road of four meters or more in width, and in general the building-to-site area ratio should be 60 per cent or less. It is difficult therefore to rebuild a house in a small site on a narrow road. Often, it is impossible to obtain the former building area or the former floor area. It is not rare to find a case where it is actually impossible to construct anything. More than half of the building lots in the inner-city area are not adjacent to a road of sufficient width.
Property rights are also in complete disorder. Land ownership, leaseholds and tenants' rights were a complexly mix. In wooden terraced housing, various rights are locked together in a single building. Many old people lost their lives in the earthquake. This means that there are many conflicts related to succession of title, which makes the matter of property rights even more complicated.
Much private wooden rental housing and terraced housing was lost. Although this housing was old and of low quality, it provided a place to live for low-income households and the elderly. In general wooden rental housing was managed by individuals or families as a sideline business. It supplied units with very low rents which would never be provided via the market. It is, however, impossible to reproduce low rent housing at the place where the wooden rental housing existed. Most of the owners lack both the ability to raise capital to reconstruct rental housing and the motive to do so.
Building lots, where wooden rental housing or terraced housing used to be, have been left vacant without any reconstruction. Or private developers have purchased groups of such lots for the construction of condominiums or expensive rental housing for middle- to high-income households. In both cases, private low rent housing has disappeared and will not be reproduced.
Mass-construction of public housing is meant to be a substitute for private rental housing for low-income groups. The disappearance of wooden rental housing, however, means a loss which cannot be replaced by public housing. That private housing was located in an urban area, where people had a wide choice. It was easy to move in. No identification nor income certification were required, unlike public housing. It is difficult to build public housing in an urban area. People have to go through complicated procedures and it takes a long time to move in. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of studio apartments and prefabricated rental apartments. New housing of these types, however, demands higher rents and a security deposit compared to the wooden rental housing, and they usually require identification and income certification.
Japanese housing policy has promoted the mass-construction of standardised housing which has made it difficult to respond flexibly to situation where there is a wide range of circumstances and needs. After the Housing Restoration Plan of July 1996, the City of Kobe launched various programmes to encourage houses rebuilding in the urban area: temporary rent subsidy for those who moved into private rental housing, loans for the elderly for reconstruction of their houses holding a mortgage on real estate, aid for projects in which two or more victims construct housing collectively on a site obtained by combining small lots, and aid for projects in which narrow streets are made wider. Hopes have been placed on such programmes as new methods for housing reconstruction. Many of the programmes, however, not accompanied by a state subsidy and their contribution and future is uncertain.

Concluding Comments

The housing problem in the post-Great Hanshin Earthquake period cannot be seen only in terms of the damage caused by the disaster. Urban restructuring was underway before the earthquake and socio-economic polarisation was prevalent in Kobe. The differential in the condition of housing between the suburbs and the inner-city was consistently increasing. The earthquake occurred in these circumstances and accordingly housing damage was also unequal. Dilapidated housing, wooden rental housing, wooden structured terraced housing and housing stock in the inner-city area were devastated. A big gap occurred in housing recovery after the earthquake between the eastern and the western parts of the urban area. In the western area, those on low incomes and elderly residents face an absolute shortage. Housing damage and the process of housing recovery are rapidly expanding the geographical disparity which already existed before the earthquake.
The measures implemented as housing recovery policy are not based on a special framework but have followed the two-tiered system which is the usual basis of housing policy. A programme in which mass-construction of temporary housing shifted to mass-construction of public housing as welfare housing was implemented. Temporary housing and public housing, however, are characterised as residual housing, strictly limited to providing for low-income and/or elderly victims, who have been forced to the outskirts, and are in a more segregated situation. Housing recovery policy operated for the self-help group and for the welfare group separately to spatially replace the victims. Low-price private rental housing disappeared and will not be reconstructed in the inner-city. It has become hard for low-income people to find a place to live other than in the public housing on the urban periphery.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Willem van Vliet and Ray Forrest who not only provided helpful comments on this paper but also corrected the use of English.

Correspondence

Yosuke Hirayama, PhD, Associate Professor in Housing and Urban Studies,
Department of Human Environment, Kobe University, Nada, Kobe 657-8501, Japan.
Tel. and Fax: +81-78-803-7771
email: yosukeh@kobe-u.ac.jp

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