This paper explores the role played by housing inheritance in stratifying people’s housing situations. In Japan, as in many other mature home-owning societies, the distribution of existing housing wealth over generations within families progressively acts as a novel mechanism in widening inequalities. The aging of the population leads to an inevitable increase in property inheritance, resulting in the differentiation of housing and asset conditions among offspring generations. Many inheritors on lower incomes live in inherited housing, while those on higher incomes tend to rent out inherited properties. Meanwhile, a number of residential properties that are located in rural areas and that are inherited by urban households remain vacant with almost no marketability. The paper stresses the importance of housing inheritance as a new key driver for reshaping the contour and structure of housing stratification.
In Japan, the second-hand housing market has remained underdeveloped, reflecting the construction-oriented housing policy system. Therefore, the market is not expected to play a significant role in the redistribution of existing housing. Meanwhile, families have been positioned as one of the keystones of Japan's housing approach. Consequently, the family system, rather than the housing market, plays a particularly definitive role in structuring mechanisms for redistributing housing wealth. In this context, increasing inheritance will become more important in determining housing circumstances surrounding offspring generations. Thus, Japan's ultra-aged and property-based society will likely undergo increasing disparities between affluently propertied families that further accumulate housing assets over generations, modest families that have a tendency towards the dissipation of their housing assets accumulated in the past, and perpetually renting families that are increasingly being excluded from mainstream society. This suggests limitations imposed on the family-oriented system of distributing housing wealth in terms of expanding inequalities.
