The situation is more complicated still. In the early 1920s, lawmakers concerned that rapid urbanization would lead to massive homelessness adopted legislation giving strong rights to tenants, including businesses. Current laws specify that when land or a building change hands, the new owner must accept the current leaseholders or tenants for 10 years under the terms of any existing lease or contract. Tenants, then, represent a third level of stakeholder that can bring redevelopment plans to a halt.
Of course, such a situation does not stymie all development. In some cases, says Motohara, particularly in Kobe's Mano district, there have been few problems reaching consensus on rebuilding decisions. That community suffered less than some others and has a more extensive history of neighbors working together. In recent years, for example, Mano residents formed a community group to protect and expand existing parks and "green" areas by forging voluntary agreements between homeowners and area industry leaders. That kind of experience paid off after the quake. Residents worked together to put out fires and rescue victims trapped under collapsed homes, while in other city districts people sometimes waited stoically for help from official fire and rescue services which never arrived.
Rebuilding in still other cases, Motohara reports, has begun after developers bought out some landowners or leaseholders willing to sell.
But in the typical case, the legal framework greatly increases the compensation required to satisfy an objector. Partly due to strong tenant rights, landlords in Japan demand up-front payments for securing an apartment (a similar phenomenon exists in rent-controlled cities in the United States). Those payments raise the cost of moving, which in turn raises the cost of a buy-out, which in turn raises the cost of development.
Such laws create enough problems during economic booms, all the more so in the wake of an earthquake. Japanese authorities have made a difficult situation even tougher by invoking the Afflicted City Rented Land and Rented Housing Temporary Processing Law, a post-war measure originally designed to boost protection for tenants of buildings destroyed by Allied bombing campaigns. The law made it virtually impossible for owners of bombed buildings to use destruction as an excuse to cut ties to current tenants and then rebuild a structure serving a newer, presumably more profitable, purpose. The government invoked the law in the Kobe area a month after the quake. If an owner does not wish to rebuild a damaged building, the law effectively transfers ownership to the tenants. Renters have up to two years to request the rights transfer and a third year in which to start construction before losing their rights.
The effects of these various policies add up. Privileges handed to farmers, tax advantages granted to landowners, other tax policies toying with the timing of land sales, and protection granted tenants all have hugely increased the transaction costs involved in rebuilding Kobe. In any one block, says Osaka University economist Tatsuo Hatta, "a very large number of people have various property rights concerning land ownership, house ownership, land lease, house lease, or mortgage. It is not easy to assess the market value of each right." Indeed, such tinkering greatly complicates decision making in a situation where flexible, creative decisions are critical to rapid recovery.
Despite the regulatory web, many areas in Kobe are being rebuilt. Much of the damaged infrastructure and big business property has already been repaired or rebuilt. A March survey by the Kobe Chamber of Commerce reported that about one half of its membership had recovered 70 percent to 90 percent of pre-quake business. Another quarter of the membership had recovered 50 percent to 70 percent. Cargo volume at Kobe Port recently reached 70 percent of former levels.
For the area's large industries--steel, auto parts, shipping, and tourism--rebuilding has been expensive but possible. No one, for instance, doubts who is responsible for reconstructing the Daimaru department store downtown: Daimaru. The same holds true for the restoration of basic infrastructure. Transportation and utility services, as well as general cleanup (which the national government agreed to pay for), progressed fairly smoothly.
Where property rights were clear and generally unmarred by political policies, recovery projects benefited from the abilities for which Japanese managers and workers are renowned. But for another group of earthquake victims, recovery came to a stop before it even had a chance to begin. These are the more than 27,000 families who still live and work in temporary shelters. They are former residents of Kobe's older neighborhoods, areas with tiny, narrow streets and old, wood-frame homes which EQE engineers witnessed "burning freely."
In March 1995, not even two months after the quake, government officials announced the initial version of the Hyogo Phoenix Plan. (Hyogo Prefecture is the state-level government for which Kobe is the capital city.) Though surrounding areas also suffered quake damage, particularly in neighboring Osaka Prefecture, Hyogo cities and towns bore the heaviest shaking and devastation. Expanding on a pre-quake, area-wide development plan, officials packaged an ambitious series of projects spread throughout the prefecture. Hyogo Gov. Toshitami Kaihara introduced Phoenix as a plan designed "not only to restore the region to its pre-quake condition but also to solve underlying problems faced by Japan, such as an increasingly aging population, the need for an open economy, and the concentration of problems associated with increased urbanization around the world."
The specifics constitute a city planner's wish list: well-aligned high-rise housing structures with shopping plazas at their bases; parks stretching and weaving between buildings; museums devoted to art, "disaster science, health care and science, technology and culture"; an "EDUMENT" center hailed as an "intellectual theme park"; an arts and culture center; a housing center for students; an international multimedia and entertainment city in Kobe, along with the Higashi Harima Media Garden City in Miki; a Super Convention Center; an Import Mart; and an International Garden City "founded as a communication city to promote exchange between people and cultures from Japan and abroad."
How such plans square with the "need for an open economy" has yet to be explained. Imagine a giant square of city land, cleaned up from the earthquake and supporting temporary structures for residents and businesses. Planners want to wipe the parcel clean and begin again, with wider streets, open parks, and high-rise apartments. That means using more common public land than before, which in turn means taking land from private owners. Specifically, the government has earmarked 11 percent of currently private land for takeover via the Japanese equivalent of eminent domain. (Because so many communities are balking at turning over land, the final amount will likely be closer to 7 percent.)
The city has declared it is up to citizens to "decide what they want," according to Kanemitsu, the Kobe city official. Who gives up how much of what, however, is far from clear. Some citizens may sell off or contribute all of their land for city use. Others may contribute only a portion of their land. Whatever land is left for private use will then be reallocated among those residents wanting to stay and rebuild for themselves.
In the hardest hit areas, 49 community councils were established to help facilitate these "land readjustments." Organized by local residents and chaired by community leaders, these councils orchestrate the give-and-take discussions necessary to develop a broad-based consensus on an adjustment plan. And most now have been successful--at least at producing something formal to present to city officials. But the process has taken two and a half years or more--enough time to make compromise appealing to nearly anyone.
While the Phoenix plan is supposed to speed up the process, it has stalled recovery in two ways. First, it has essentially eliminated incentives for private, market solutions. Though it's difficult for people to acknowledge, the government has become the de facto owner of large chunks of Hyogo land. Individual residents still retain title, but the city and prefectural governments get the final word on what can be done with any given piece of property. That effectively squashes any interests private firms might have in buying out current landowners or in making their own plans for private development. Moreover, developers know their easiest money comes not now but later, when the dango system--a rigged bidding process that rotates project winners through the ranks of leading construction firms--distributes contracts for all those museums and the intellectual theme park.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
قبلة الوداع|9.8.11 @ 6:11PM|#
thank u