My family has decided to build a home, and after finally deciding on a company (一条工務店/Ichijou koumuten), we now need to decide where to build it. We already know roughly what kind of plot we need (budget, size, distance to a station and elementary school, etc.), but we need help narrowing down an area to look at.
We currently live in Osaka, and were originally planning on looking in the north part of Osaka, but land there looks to be out of our budget. We've since started looking in the northeast near Hirakata, which is more in line with our budget and still has reasonable commute times. I've even found a few plots just across the border into Kyoto, but my wife is pretty adamantly against living in Kyoto even if it's just a stone's throw away from Osaka. I might be able to convince her if it's still pretty similar to Osaka, though.
How is Hirakata? How about the parts of Kyoto close to Osaka? Yawata and Kyotanabe in particular.
My wife has ruled out the entire southern half of Osaka because of crime/safety (治安が悪い) and bad schools. I've heard similar things, but I've never really been further south than Nanba – how is it in reality?
The other area my wife is heavily considering is the western part of Kobe (Suma-ku, Tarumi-ku) and Akashi area, since we have family in Kobe and Shimane. I don't know anything about the area, but on paper it look too bad… it's close to the ocean but clear on tsunami hazard maps, land prices are lower and there are bigger plots, and it's close enough to Kobe. However, I'm worried about two things: whether I'll be able to find work in the tech sector in Kobe, and how things are going to look in 20 or 30 years with Japan's shrinking population.
Akashi apparently has a lot of subsidies for families with children, and perhaps because of this it seems to have a (barely) growing population for several years straight, but Kobe's population is shrinking. I'm worried that we'll be building a home in a place that will start looking like a ghost town in 20 years, and our kids will permanently move out to Tokyo or something the second they turn 18.
Is anyone familiar with western Kobe/Akashi and how they'd be for a family with two small children, and how they might fare in a few decades?
by Spoggerific