Not only it's a good thing, but it's bad faith anyway because it's not telling the whole story.
Houses are seen as pretty-much worthless overall, and many people would decide to destroy and build a new house rather than fix and maintain a 20 years-old one. There are many reasons to this, both cultural and practical.
The good consequence is that the prices here are relatively stable and does not inflate like in the west. It is possible to buy an individual house in Tokyo for the average resident, you don't need to be rich.
But the elephant in the room that the article forgets to tell is that while houses become worthless quickly, land does not. When you buy a property, about 80% of it's price is the value of the land itself, not the house. And while it can fluctuate depending on the area and it's surroundings, it does not degrade much over time.
The other factor is that old houses are downright unsafe. This is a place that regularly experiences earthquakes, sometimes big ones, and construction standards have improved over time after learning lessons from bad earthquakes and with improved technology. So no one wants to live in a 50-year-old building that's likely to collapse when the next big earthquake happens if they can help it, and so buildings tend to be demolished more frequently and replaced with newer ones.
Houses are seen as pretty-much worthless overall, and many people would decide to destroy and build a new house rather than fix and maintain a 20 years-old one. There are many reasons to this, both cultural and practical.
The good consequence is that the prices here are relatively stable and does not inflate like in the west. It is possible to buy an individual house in Tokyo for the average resident, you don't need to be rich.
But the elephant in the room that the article forgets to tell is that while houses become worthless quickly, land does not. When you buy a property, about 80% of it's price is the value of the land itself, not the house. And while it can fluctuate depending on the area and it's surroundings, it does not degrade much over time.