Abstract
The purpose of this study is to analyze the role which the social rented housing has performed in Japan and explore the possibility of the Japanese housing policy to place more importance on using the social rented housing for households with vulnerable persons and households with urgent needs to move, than ever. Such policy, however, tends to create the poverty trap which is indigenous to the residualization of welfare. What causes this problem in Japanese housing policy is mainly the gap of rents between the private sector and the social sector, which is larger in inner-city area. There is substantial need for intermediate affordable housing options. And the Japanese scheme of admission to the social rented housing, the characteristic of which is being based on the draw, has proved to be the cause of unfairness among low-income households and the difficulty to let in households with urgency. The anomalies can also be the threshold to the poverty trap, and would not be resolved unless the admission scheme is converted into such a scheme that households with priority needs are secured with appropriate accommodations.
