being refurbished to reconstruct the residential facilities of the community as a whole and to enhance the convenience of daily living of child-raising families, etc.

Further, Housing Assistance Councils have been organized in a collaboration of local governments, real-estate agent organization, Housing Support organizations and the like to enable the low-income bracket, child-raising families, etc. and other individuals who need special housing care to facilitate their moving into private rental housings. The Councils, working in conjunction with the Project for Promotion to Built Private Rental Housing Safety Net, release information on available private rental housings. As of March 31, 2013, 32 Councils are in service (Graphic 225). The Kumamoto City Housing Assistance Council, founded in July 2011, for example, hosts a Website that disseminate information about rented housings, etc. (451 vacant houses registered in fiscal 2012) and also holds consultation meetings periodically to promote smooth moving into private rental housing.

Source) MLIT

## Column

## I nducing Double-Income Child-Raising Couples into Citizenship - An Effort of Nagareyama City, Chiba Prefecture

A 20-to-25-minute train ride apart from the center of Tokyo, Nagareyama City, Chiba Prefecture (housing a population of 167,674 in March 1013) stages active promotional campaigns to grab residents. Prior to the opening of the Tsukuba Express train service in 2005, the city inaugurated a Marketing Office within a department in October 2003 and promoted it to the Marketing Department in April 2004 to develop a marketing technology that targets double-income child-raising couples in a bid to lure residents. It aims to enhance its public awareness and branded concept of a "town of the forest closest to central Tokyo" by putting PR ads through the media of TV, the newspaper, the Web and so on and hosting entertaining events inspired by green and forestry, such as "Marche" of the Forest, "to augment the city's awareness and its branded image of being a "green town closet to central Tokyo."

The city’s promotional activities are characterized by their focus on double-income child-raising couples, generally known as “DEWKS (double employed with kids).” The idea is to induce double-income couples having a high tax-bearing capacity to live in the city when the amount of inhabitant taxes accounts for about 50% of the city’s tax revenues and personal inhabitant taxes command about 90% of the amount of the inhabitant taxes and encourage their children to live long after they grow up, thereby keeping up a circulation of generations to achieve sustainable pace growth for a housing city.

To help child-raising families live at ease, “Station-Front Pickup Nursery Stations” have been opened, for example, as one endeavor to clear up Wait-listed Children. According to this system, parents en route to their office send their children to a station-front station and let them bus to and from a specified nursery school in town. This makes it possible to send children to and from any nursery school with vacancies in town, thereby offering a powerful tool of clearing Wait-listed Children (57 children are on the Wait-listed Children on April 1, 2013).