> In Japan, old houses are rightfully considered depreciated

Even newer buildings in Japan are made in cardboard, with no/little isolation, and everything is made to be destroyed 30 years down the road anyway. Disposable houses/apartments that cost an arm and a leg anyway.

> Having a house built in the 1700s sure isn't going to be easy to solarize or insulate.

You have no idea what you are talking about. In Europe, stuff built in the 1700s and still standing today were built with thick walls and will last several other centuries without any issue, and have excellent isolation (sound and heat).

You don't pay for the house in Japan; you pay for the land usage, thats a fairly common and understood thing here. You CAN build good houses in Japan but most developers don't see the point due to extreme changes in codes, and due to the everpresent threat of earthquakes causing percieved structure damage.

True on the insulation, but having rented in one of those places, dealing with plumbing is an absolute nightmare. Same goes for electrical work, which can be all over the place. Structural repairs are very expensive too, because you need specialized constructors to handle the old building and if the house is put under "Denkmalschutz" (monument protection?), it'll limit your options of what you can alter and who can do it even more.

> I like how you say this like it's undoubtedly a good thing. In Japan, old houses are rightfully considered depreciated as things like "severe regulations" and "low energy consumption" change over time as technology improves.

Not having to deal with earthquakes helps keeping buildings up for longer.

> Having a house built in the 1700s sure isn't going to be easy to solarize or insulate.

In terms of environmental impact, there is a compromise somewhere between using houses for 3 centuries and a decade. Rebuilding all the time is worse than the gains from better insulation and higher environmental standards. It is more expensive as well.

> So paying for 300+ years of that upfront seems pretty dumb.

It’s a good thing we don’t do that, then. Nobody in Europe expect a newly-built house to last for 300 years. However, plenty of them are more than 100 years old and perfectly fine. You can improve insulation both on the inside and the outside of the building, double or triple glazing and some rock wool under the roof go a long way.

> In Austria, are there severe regulations on the safety of building and energy consumption of cars?

Yes, there are.

> I take it that it's very common to see 60, 70, 80 year old cars on the road there and they're not just disposable cardboard quality things, right?

No, 60 years old cars are not common, and for several reasons: there were fewer of them initially, because they were more expensive; cars decay faster than houses due to things like accidents and corrosion; cars get more expensive to insure with time and older cars need more fuel, which makes them less economical to run. Again, there is a sweet spot somewhere between 3 and 30 years.

Not sure whether you are deliberately exaggerating, but you don’t really make any good point. They did not say that we should keep using the same things for millennia, just that re-using to some extent is better than re-building.

Japan has one very important and unusual challenge: very high risk of earthquakes.

Not only does this mean that it's more likely overall for a house to simply fall down, it means that the codes attempting to make that less likely are still evolving, as we improve both our understanding of what works well and our building methods and materials.

Attempting to generalize the situation in Japan to the rest of the world is therefore going to be somewhat unhelpful.

As for cars, they are also not particularly comparable, for similar reasons: we've been building houses for literally thousands of years, and while we certainly have more options than we used to, some of which are unquestionably improvements on the old, the fundamentals of what it takes to build a sturdy, safe house haven't changed much. Meanwhile, it's only been just over 100 years since the car was invented, they're much more fundamentally a piece of technology than a house is, and we're currently in a period of rapid improvement in various kinds of safety technologies within them. Again, attempting to compare is unhelpful.

Houses built in the 1700s (and still standing) are for the largest part built for heavy shingle roofs, adding solar cells isn't a huge issue. Insulation is a matter of adding foam plates to the exterior (or interior if you want to show off your original facade) with some thought for steam barriers, and upgrading your windows. It won't get as good as a newly built low-energy house, but you can get quite far.

And if you are confident that the house will still stand in 60 years, then an investment in solar+insulation that takes 20 years to pay for itself is quite attractive (and something your local bank will probably give you a loan for).

Insulating a house built in 1700s is definitely not a matter of "put foam plates on the outside/inside". If you do that, you are likely to create molds inside of the building. Insulating old buildings is typically a specialized and highly delicate work that tends to be quite expensive. I live in a building from the 1900s and the insulation process would be fairly difficult.

In the area I live in (mid-size city in SE Germany) many buildings are from the early 1900s/late 1800s. Insulating those is pretty much a common and economic thing to do.

- At a rough estimate such a building costs 600.000 € - 1.000.000 € nowadays.

- Costs for insulating the exterior walls, the roof and ground floor against the basement is approx. 30.000 - 60.000 €.

- New, insulated windows: approx. 10.000 – 30.000 €.

You'pre good then on energy saving.

And yes, they usually just put plates of foam on the outside. Somehow the mold issue appears to be solved by now as a house-painter told me recently.

> Somehow the mold issue appears to be solved by now as a house-painter told me recently.

I'm not persuaded that the issue of mold simply disappeared. It might be the type of foam they use nowadays, or the way they insulate the houses. For example, I've seen houses insulated from the front and not from the back. At first, I thought it was a cost cutting measure, i.e. "look good, be cheap," but it's actually so common that I don't think that's the answer.

Molds can become toxic in extreme cases, and once they appear, it's amazingly difficult to get rid of them. It's possible that in a town that's highly historic, there are companies that specialize in insulating historical buildings (though I assumed that the vast majority of historical buildings in Germany was destroyed during the wars).

As a side note, I'm not saying it cannot be done. My point was that it was far from "slap some foam around the house". I'd love my building to be insulated.

During the popping of the Japanese real estate bubble, which saw the value of the land under the imperial palace as the same as the value of the entire state of California[1], mortgages were offered in 100 year terms[2].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/309... [2] https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990...

Often what happens is that the house itself stays as is but the inside gets renovated plus new windows etc.

There are little strict "low energy consumption" regulation in Japan so cheap newly built houses still suck. Even though it's not economical for heating at a decade term.