From single buildings to urban redevelopment: Ark Hills (1986)

What the principle of never hurrying had to carry

“Never hurry — that is the knack of buying land.” For a single building the principle showed up as ten years of negotiation. Applied to a whole block in Akasaka, it became sixteen years to assemble the site and twenty to completion. A project that in the 1971 reports was expected to break ground the following year in fact ran to 1986. To choose the method of sharing added value with the existing landowners was also to decide to carry the money through all that time. Behind the negotiations that would not hurry, one can see a cash position that could not.

Whether a project on this scale matched the company’s strength is another question. Mori Akira later said of Ark Hills that “judged by our capacity, the investment was ¥100bn too large.” The rents on which the investment case rested rose during the bubble, and the company mistook that for extra headroom. What was really supporting the business was the unrealised gain in its land, and when that gain disappeared in the 1990s, opening the next block by the same method became impossible. A success that took twenty years turned into the constraint of the following twenty.