68-Year-Old Couple Sells 40-Year-Old Home to Rent Public Housing

For years, the couple’s fully paid-off four-bedroom home represented security. By age 68, however, the house had become a growing financial and practical burden.

The property was approaching 40 years old, and the costs of maintaining it included exterior repairs, water-heater and roof work, fixed-asset taxes, insurance and garden upkeep. The couple, identified by pseudonyms as Yasuo and Kazuko, receive about 220,000 yen a month in pension income. Their two children have moved out, and the couple had lived alone for roughly a decade.

Kazuko began worrying that future repairs would require them to keep drawing on their savings. They considered buying a used apartment, but units in convenient locations cost more than expected and would also involve management fees and repair reserves. She suggested public housing instead.

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Is it too small?

Because public housing applications generally impose income and housing-ownership conditions, the couple first sold the home for about 19 million yen and temporarily rented nearby. Their first application failed, but a second application succeeded, giving them a two-bedroom unit with half the previous living space.

Yasuo initially wondered whether the new home was too small. In practice, a bedroom and living room proved sufficient because their children had homes of their own and rarely stayed overnight. The couple no longer cleans unused rooms or pulls weeds in a garden. They kept the sale proceeds rather than using them to buy another house, despite the sadness of leaving behind the column where they recorded their children’s heights and the garden where Kazuko had grown flowers. Yasuo said owning a house does not necessarily make later life more secure.

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A bigger house always means greater security.