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Comment by danbolt | Hacker News Reader

The reasons for Japan's lower housing prices make a lot of sense to me and I think their solutions are a good idea for developed nations.

I'll admit I'm not particularly educated on this sort of issue, so I'd love to hear from someone who thinks this sort of central planning isn't as good of an idea.

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It's the opposite of central planning. According to the article, there is a uniform set of rules. Follow the rules, build your condo building. In the US there is central planning on the local level, usually the city level. Planning commissions determine if your project meets the "character of the neighborhood" and neighbors bitch and complain that your project will "create more traffic" and the (central) planning commission denies your permit.

I agree with what you observe, but I'd characterize Japan's solution as massively and strictly central planning, whereas the US has loosely adhered to local planning.

You're confusing strictness with centralization. The rules are strict, but there is no centralized control. The way you get decentralization is by having rules.

Consider Bitcoin for example. The rules are incredibly strict. You basically have no choice but to obey all of the rules in order to participate. They will not budge, and they were devised by one person, which calls to mind "central" and "control" but is just the opposite. Those rules are carefully constructed to allow the system to be completely decentralized. No permission is needed to participate. No one has the power to veto or alter your contributions. Simply obey the rules and no one else can have power over you.

The distinction you are making about federal vs municipal control isn't about centralization vs decentralization, it's just about the scale of centralization. Municipalities are small, but they still have a single bottleneck at the mayor/city council.

The reason this matters is that a rule-based decentralized system provides a structure that you can rely on. You can make a plan for compliance, and be reasonably assured that it will work. With centralized planning, even at if the central office is only governing something as small as an HOA, then there is no plan you can make which has an assurance of success. You are at the whim of the planners who have veto power.

This turns planning into a stochastic game where your plans need to have redundancy at every level in order to have high probability of success, which increases cost and slows the pace of development substantially.

I appreciate the distinctions! I feel like I should research them more, but I must be conflating the the terms in my mind.

To add some more context: Japan defines a zoning "scaffold" at the national level, but it's extremely simple (8 pages with colorful diagrams) and highly permissive [1]. It defines a handful of zones cities can use across their neighborhood, allowing roughly "low, medium, high, or ultra high" density, and not much else. Your low-density neighborhoods still allow about as much density as much of Brooklyn, irregular plot sizes, homes that use 100% of the plot next to homes that 20% of the plot but are correspondingly much taller, and homes that double as a neighborhood restaurant. And the zoning is applied to large neighborhoods, not to individual plots of land.

There's also no minimum parking requirements, and cities often forego street-side parking: parking lots are privately built to meet demand.

In contrast, American zones can be hyper micro-managed: NYC defines hundreds of zones, and designates "zone" at the individual building level instead of neighborhood--the complexity spans 3500 pages[2]--not including a list of landmarked buildings and neighborhoods and their specific rules, which is a sizable list itself. Even if you adhere to the zoning laws for your plot of land, your new building proposal may still be rejected for not fitting in with "neighborhood character." (This concept doesn't exist in Japan: you can build a restaurant shaped like a boat next to an ancient temple for all anyone cares, or a corner store shaped like a tomato[3]).

Beyond that, NYC has an unfortunate habit of retroactively changing the zoning under parcels of land to become more restrictive, ensuring (1) old buildings are never torn down and upgraded for fear of being forced to rebuild it smaller, resulting in very old housing stock, and (2) it's a political rent-seeking game of rich land owners to fight for upzoning or rezoning of their individual plots, boosting their land value (see the controversy with NYU; nobody interested in just building middle class housing would ever go through this legal battle).

In comparison to highly restrictive and micro-managed US zoning laws, the national zoning scaffolds in Japan almost resemble a bill of rights more than a centrally planned system: city governments are allowed to plan densities to help with infrastructure planning, but they may not restrict what you can do with your plot of land, what buildings on that plot may look like, etc. anywhere near to the extent practiced in the US. They also don't, as far as I know, retroactively restrict your land rights like has happened in over 40% of Manhattan [4]. US zones are far more "centrally planned," just at the city/county level rather than national.

[1] http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000234477.pdf [2] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/zoning/zoni... [3] https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQKl1g6... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...

As someone living in Tokyo, Japan's zoning is my favourite thing about this country. When you first arrive it seems like chaos, but living here makes you appreciate it very quickly. It makes it such that low priced residential areas are completely intermixed with multi million homes, commercial lots (from mom and pop stores to smallish supermarkets), restaurants, schools and kindergardens, senior care centers, mild industrial usage and even some small scale farming here and there.

From within 10mins by foot from a 900$/m appartment I have 3 (!) trainstations, around 30 restaurants, 7 small to mid sized supermarkets, a uniqlo, around 8 small electronics shops, a city park with pond, a public swimming pool, around 10 small to mid sized playgrounds, a car rental, around 10 bento shops...... I could go on. I'm not even kidding with 10min on foot btw. Living densely has lots of advantages.

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