Innovations in Gearing the Housing Market to Welfare Recipients in Osaka’s Inner City: A Resilient Strategy?

ABSTRACT

For this paper we apply the framework of resilience as an adaptive process to examine alternative practices that assist socially vulnerable populations into the urban fabrik. The recent direction of Osaka’s inner city rental housing market for public assistance recipients is used as case study. We look on systemic aspects such as changing tenant revenues and welfare policies, and analyze the innovative housing reuse practices of local landlords and real estate agents. Our results show that the resilience-producing systemic properties are co-produced by public assitance policies, the particular condition of Osaka’s inner city and individual stakeholders' actions. While these stakeholders have benefited immensely from the housing market’s resilient response, it is structured by uneven dependencies, which ultimately affects the housing opportunities and care services for current and future tenants.

KEYWORDS:

• Rental housing
• resilience
• single elderly households
• public assistance
• inner city
• Osaka

Acknowledgements

We thank Geoffrey DeVerteuil and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments that helped to shape our ideas, and Libby Porter who contributed much to the readability of this paper. We also thank all those people who shared their time and knowledge with us during our research in Nishinari.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Burakumin was an outcast group at the bottom of Japanese society during the feudal area. It consisted of people who were discriminated because they had occupations considered impure or tainted.

2. The term “North West Nishinari” stems from the area’s designation as a “densely built up residential area with high priority for intervention” by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in 2002 (TSK 2008).

3. Bunkajūtaku is a tenement building predominantly built in the Kansai region during the 1950s and 1960s. Typically it is a two-floored building made of wood and plaster, with several flats in a row. Meaning “cultural housing”, it takes pride in the higher living standard it offered with a toilet in every flat, but lacks nevertheless a bathroom.

4. In the Japanese context apartment buildings (apāto) are wooden tenement houses with shared toilets and without bathroom.

5. Nagaya are wooden row houses without bathroom that were the standard housing before the Second World War in Osaka.

6. Flat sizes in Japan are normally calculated in the amount of tatami mats. In the Kansai region one tatami corresponds to approximately 1.82m², but many flophouses use smaller tatami.

7. The categories of public assistance are livelihood-, educational-, housing-, care-, medical-, maternal-, vocational-, and funeral-benefits.

8. The compared places are Tsurumibashi 1chōme 10ban 19 rated 150.000 yen and Kitahorie 1chōme 44ban rated 445.000 yen. Both areas are comparable zones for normal commerce (TKK 2016).

9. This concentration of public assistance recipients also increased the mortality rate drastically, illustrating the importance of the issues around solidary death. In Nishinari the mortality rate rose between 2000 and 2013 from 14.0 (out of 1000 people) to 21.1, while the rate for entire Osaka rose only from 8.2 to 10.2 (OSKK 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - Japan [25257014].