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The story
News that rents for family-sized rental apartments in Osaka City have climbed to an average of ¥170,000 a month — the highest level in the Kansai region — made the rounds on 5ch. When the thread highlighted a family of five who sold their house and moved into a danchi (a public/semi-public housing estate), commenters piled in with their own experiences: “There was even a shopping street, a clinic, and a pool right on the grounds,” and “Some danchi have had elevators retrofitted.”
At the same time, others raised concerns about aging pipes, noise, and the buildings’ structural lifespan, making for a thread that covered both the perks and the pitfalls of danchi living.
Published 8/23 (Sun) 12:00 PM
Kansai TV
In recent years, rents for rental apartments in city centers have kept climbing. Properties in Osaka City have seen sharp increases too, with average rent for family-sized apartments in particular reaching roughly ¥170,000 — the highest level in the Kansai region.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Some danchi have been renovated recently and had elevators retrofitted.
They get sold off to private companies and keep standing.
Even if they're past their service life as public housing, that doesn't matter once they're private.
If you live somewhere that inconvenient, you'll lose money on gas and bus/train fares anyway.
Still better than a "rabbit hutch" apartment (slang for Japan's notoriously cramped housing).
The rebar inside rusts and corrodes, so if there are cracks, it'll deteriorate even faster.
Figured out what that meant later.
There were these two guys, Numata and Watanabe, who were exactly that.
Never got told that myself, but I understood the meaning once I grew up.
I grew up in a danchi for national civil servants, and looking back, the Tokyo metropolitan housing estate right next door had a lot of… let's say "characters."
City- or prefecture-run ones are no good.
The old public-corporation (kōdan) estates were fine.
Weird how you could tell the difference even in the same new town, built in the same era.
There's gonna be noise complaints for sure.
Wouldn't live there even if you paid me.
My parents live in one, and it's full of old folks with no kids around, so it's pretty quiet.
Pets aren't allowed and people seem to actually follow that rule, so no dogs either.
Kōsha and UR estates are reinforced concrete buildings, so unless some brat is literally jumping around, you barely hear anything from next door.
Not like those flimsy rentals from builders such as Daito Kentaku.
Bringing up such a niche example doesn't really prove anything…
Probably rates went up and their mortgage blew up.
The problem is the bathroom and toilet — structurally, you can't change them. The type where the bath drains into a canal-like groove cut into the floor is the worst.
It gets slimy right away, and just knowing dirty water is running through there is gross.
And then there's that fat toilet pipe — you can hear the poop from the floor above falling down it.
If none of that bothers you, it's fine though.
If that's the case, I'd rather renovate an old farmhouse out in the sticks.
There's no dedicated pipe space, so the drain stack runs right through the room. A bare steel pipe with no soundproofing wrapped around it is the worst.
There was a post office, a clinic, a park too —
you could handle basically all of daily life without ever leaving the property.
There was even a kids' pool on-site, managed by the danchi itself.
Granted, a lot of these places needed a bus ride to reach the train station.
But with the aging population and falling birthrate, the shopping street ended up all shuttered.
The Tokyo metropolitan danchi near me even has something like a small gym.
For sports lovers, having facilities right on the property must be amazing.
For this kind of "nikoichi" layout (two units merged into one) — if you use the right side as the bedroom and sleep there, do you have to step out onto the balcony to get to the sink/washroom?
Background and Key Points
Danchi (団地) are the large-scale concrete apartment blocks built from the 1950s through the 1970s by the Japan Housing Corporation (日本住宅公団), predecessor to today’s UR (Urban Renaissance Agency), along with parallel projects run by municipal and prefectural governments. They were Japan’s postwar answer to housing shortages and rural-to-city migration, standardizing the 2DK “dining-kitchen” floor plan that became the template for the modern nuclear-family home. Many estates were built as self-contained “new towns” with their own shopping streets, clinics, and schools — which is why posters recall being able to live without ever leaving the grounds. Crucially, UR rentals require no key money, no guarantor, and no agent commission, so their rents sit well below the ¥170,000 figure driving the original story, which is part of why families are looking at them again.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t “danchi good or bad” in the abstract — it was old kōdan/UR-built concrete versus municipal public housing and cheaper private apartments. Posters treated UR-lineage buildings as solidly built and quiet, while flagging unfixable structural quirks (exposed drain pipes, canal-style bath drains, merged “nikoichi” units) as the real cost of that age.
What outsiders will likely miss is the social history behind the “don’t play with the danchi kids” comment: postwar public housing carried a class stigma in Japan that has nothing to do with the buildings’ current appeal to young renters. Also unmentioned: UR housing has income and household-size eligibility screening, which shapes who can actually access these bargains.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “Some Sold Their House and Moved In as a Family of Five — The Appeal of “Danchi” Housing as Occupancy Rates V-Shape Recover, Popular with Younger Generations Too, for the “Resident Community,” Reiwa-Era “Danchi Living”.”
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