In INEGI’s National Housing Survey of 2020, 57.3 percent of owner-occupied homes had been acquired through autoconstrucción or autoproducción, self-construction or self-production.
INEGI’s satellite account of housing for 2024 found that the self-production of housing contributed 55.6 percent of the housing sector’s GDP.
To rent a home in Mexico City, a tenant is traditionally asked for an aval, a guarantor who owns property in the city or its metropolitan area and puts up the deeds. The custom is a rule of the market, not of the law. Landlords prefer a guarantor whose property is free of liens.
A tenant who has no such person can buy a póliza jurídica, a legal policy, for 30 to 50 percent of one month’s rent. In 2025, the magazine Expansión reported that a guarantor with property was increasingly hard to find.
In 2020, INEGI’s National Housing Survey counted 5.8 million rented homes in Mexico, 16.4 percent of all private inhabited homes. According to a report on the survey by the legal publication IDConline, only 54 percent of rented homes had a current lease contract.
On March 27, 2020, Claudia Sheinbaum, head of government of Mexico City, asked landlords to postpone the rent of tenants with lower incomes. “Es el llamado a la solidaridad con personas que tienen menores ingresos,” she said, a call for solidarity with people who have lower incomes. She compared the request with the banks, which had postponed payments by four months.
The request had no legal force.
Two ceremonies mark stages in building a Japanese house. The jichinsai, the ground-calming ceremony, is held before construction begins. It asks the guardian deity for protection.
The jōtōshiki, the ridgepole ceremony, comes in the middle of construction. It is held when the frame is finished and the ridgepole has been set in place, to celebrate that stage.
The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Ginza, Tokyo, designed by the architect Kurokawa Kishō, was completed in 1972. Its 140 capsules were attached to two main pillars. Each capsule was a dwelling of about 10 square meters. The building was demolished in 2022 because it had aged.
Japan’s first capsule hotel, Capsule Inn Osaka, opened in Osaka in 1979. Kurokawa designed it as well.
In October 1966, the architect Azuma Takamitsu completed Tō no ie, Tower House, in Shibuya, Tokyo. The site measures 20.56 square meters.
Three floor plans adopted in 1951 were called 51A, 51B and 51C after the year. The 51C plan had a floor area of only about 35 square meters. It came to be regarded as an excellent and highly functional plan, and later apartment layouts took it as their prototype.
The designer Suzuki found that a larger kitchen could also serve as the place to eat. The bedrooms could then be divided, while eating and sleeping still happened in separate rooms. This is said to be the origin of the Japanese dining kitchen, the DK.
In October 1959, Daiwa House began selling the Midget House, a small prefabricated building. Among its development conditions were an area of no more than three tsubo, about 10 square meters, and a building time of no more than three hours.
The idea came from the wish to give children a separate study room at home. At launch, a six-mat version cost 118,000 yen and a four-and-a-half-mat version 108,000 yen.
In a traditional Japanese house, fusuma and shōji are removable partitions. A booklet of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism on Japanese houses describes the tsuzukima, rooms that connect to form a hall. With good use of the partitions, it says, they can serve gatherings of every size, from many people to a few.