The Challenges of Entrance to Super-Aged Society and Apartment Housing Legislation

This article examines the problems and institutional challenges of super-aged socialization as an important challenge facing our apartment housing legislation. In the current demographic and social structure, it is difficult to evaluate that the public need to continue to create new cities in the metropolitan area with large-scale land expropriation is recognized. The method of developing suburban forests or agricultural land into new cities through housing development projects does not fit with the housing demand of the aging society. The Housing Act should break away from the framework of the Housing Construction Promotion Act and be transformed into a legal system that reasonably and efficiently maintains and manages apartment houses in old urban areas. The renovation of old apartment houses is designed around the reconstruction system. Legislators have introduced some institutional supplementary measures according to the changing social structure, but it is still insufficient to cope with super-aged socialization in that (1) demolishing old apartment houses (or leaving the frame behind if not completely demolished) and (2) consequently building new apartment houses. In a super-aged society, it is difficult for elderly existing classified owners to pay the project costs required for the construction of new apartment houses, and it is difficult for the housing market to digest if the apartment houses continues to increase in the city area. Recycling-style projects, such as the sale of land that does not presuppose the reconstruction of apartment houses, are essential systems for the changed demographic structure. It is necessary to actively refer to Japan's apartment renovation system. The multi-family housing management system, which was established under the assumption that young household members engaged in income activities exist, will also inevitably change. In addition, with the super-aged socialization, it is necessary to flex the system that can easily repurpose or modify infrastructure by adapting it to reality and abolish it as necessary. Existing discussions have been limited to individual policies, such as priority supply of elderly care facilities or rental housing, and facility consideration for housing for the elderly, but macroscopically, a series of institutional reorganization covering the entire housing law has reached the point where it is necessary to reorganize the entire housing law, ranging from the construction and management of multi-family housing to infrastructure.