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Comment by 0x77x66 | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo is nice but the commute no shangri la. Trips longer than 10km are usually a hour because of so many train stops. Average commute to work is ~50min in a crowded train standing up.

Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. I think most people are just convinced it is always better somewhere else.

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Not everyone is standing on the train. The people who have the longest commutes usually also get on first, and thus have a seat. There are also express trains during rush hours... Do you have a source on the 50 minute average commute? 50 minutes on a non express train would be close to a last stop from the west side of Tokyo on one of the lines to the east side of Tokyo.

Here's an example involving one transfer and the last stop on one of the lines: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wako,+Saitama,+Japan/Tokyo+S... Currently it is 53 minutes.

This source says 59 min (in japanese). https://www.athome.co.jp/contents/at-research/vol33/

one in english is here: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...

This one is 45 min ... though that is all of Japan, not Tokyo specific.

btw, I think Tokyo is great. But I think these articles set bad expectations sometimes and I have met a few foreigners that were totally disappointed/burnt out when moving to Tokyo.

> 39.5 minutes each way

Ok that makes more sense if it's the one-way commute. US average commute seems to be about 27 minutes one way, with public transit rates going much higher.

I'd probably still take the train commute because it's self-driving and can potentially just sleep on the train (as many do).

50 minutes feels pretty standard to me here. That said, my 45 minutes of train in Tokyo are far more comfortable than the 20~30 minutes I once had in France.

The trains here are quiet, safe, does not stink, the air is conditioned in both winter and summer, the mobile network is always available and it's driven carefully.

I can just spend my time carelessly on my phone reading stuff (and HN!) or watching videos.

That said at least it was feasible for me to live in a clean, $650/mo apartment of my own, in a great neighborhood, <15 minutes from Shinjuku/25 to Tokyo. The concept of an equivalent place in a place like NYC is laughable.

I saw a video on YouTube showcasing $200-$250 rent rooms in the Tokyo area, some of them not that far out in terms of commute from the center. That is definitely something that doesn’t exist in the states, our housing codes would allow for it (small 2.5 tatami in area, they had no heat, shared toilets, no shower/bathing in the building).

A lot of things aren't available in North America because of the misguided belief that prohibiting low-quality market options leads those options being substituted one-for-one with higher quality options.

This applies to micro-suites, prohibited by minimum floor size ordinances, low-wage work, prohibited by minimum wage mandates, etc.

What actually happens is that more people are excluded from that market, e.g. people not being able to afford to live in SF, that - if microsuites were legal - would be able to.

This comes down to not trusting individuals, particularly those in lower skill/income brackets, and their own choices.

> Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. I think most people are just convinced it is always better somewhere else.

I think it’s about different people having different preferences. Most folks in Dallas (average commute under 30 minutes) aren’t wishing they were crammed into subway car in Tokyo. Likewise, people who like the urban lifestyle in Tokyo probably aren’t wishing they were stuck in freeway traffic in Dallas.

And the grass is always greener... I live out in the semi-country but within about an hour's drive of a major city. Yes, sometimes I think it would be nice if that drive were a walk or a short subway ride and that I could walk 10 minutes to a restaurant. But not enough to actually give up my space and quiet and move there.

ADDED: And I don't actually go in very often because it is a longish drive but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

> Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US.

This seems to be comparing urban Japan with rural America. From my experience in San Francisco the living spaces certainly aren't big.

Define "rural." The Bay Area is obviously especially problematic with respect to housing. But get 30-45 minutes out of many major cities, even along a commuter rail/light rail of some sort, and people have houses in places that, for better or worse, are not rural.

NYC apartments are nearly twice as large on average compared to Tokyo. In NYC bars and restaurants appear small to outsiders but go to Tokyo and wow, spaces are really small. That’s also a big part of its charm to be. But I couldn’t live like that day to day.

what's interesting to note is that retail vibrancy seems to have a direct inverse relationship to square footage; it is much easier to get high utilization out of a smaller space and thus also easier to be profitable.

I've lived in both NYC and Seattle. Older neighborhoods predominantly with retail like the 25-foot storefronts or small corner stores common in NYC and older parts of Seattle have lots of business thriving, many of them in low-margin industries. Newer Seattle developments have restaurant spaces sized to fit 100-200 people, which is pretty hard to fill outside of maybe a lunch or dinner rush, and those tend to cycle out restaurants and stores like no tomorrow.

If you compare the average apartment in SF to the average apartment in Tokyo, you’ll realize that the SF ones are actually quite spacious. Just, nobody knows how to use their space efficiently in the USA like people do in Japan.

That said the culture here, driven by the reality of living spaces, is to meet people outside of home, not invite people at home, allowing for more versatile design.

Back in 1993 I spent six weeks in Japan, four of the in Kyoto where I was working on a contract. Because I was a foreigner they said I didn't have to work Saturday, giving me time to visit many castles and tourist spots. The other two weeks were spent traveling to Nagoya and Tokyo.

Anyway, on one of those days a Japanese coworker chaperoned me. He told me when he was a kid he was astonished at how huge houses were in the US. How did he know? When he watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, the cat chased the mouse through so many rooms, far more than a Japanese house had.

Many commuters in the US spend >30min (often 45+min) in their car in insane traffic. It's not like its all roses to drive to work.

But of course they like large living spaces, most people do. The issue is how costly suburbia is on a societal level. It promotes car usage, fosters social isolation, prevents building walkable and convenient neighborhoods, etc. The worst part is that after the cat's out of the bag, nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes. Better to heavily restrict or disallow the option in the first place.

> of course they like large living spaces, most people do [..]

> nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes

This is a view that is strident and sanctimonious, yet completely wrong.

Suburbia did not come to exist because of a desire for big houses, which are just an incidental side effect, it's about home ownership.

Specifically getting out from under the thumb of landlords. It was suburbia and the automobile -- not the New Deal -- that created the American middle class.

Without the suburbs, you have to live in large urban tenements (or in rural areas) and there is no possibility of homeownership, as those landlords only sell to other landlords.

Now along comes transportation technology which allows you to keep your job in the city but live where land is cheap enough to buy.

Woohoo!

Now you can be a homeowner thanks to automobiles, roads, and highways.

The houses are larger than the urban tenements and flat just because the land is cheap. Going vertical is very expensive and makes financial sense only when land is expensive. So the size and shape of the house has nothing to do with why people rushed there. They rushed there because they want to get out from under the thumb of the urban landlord.

Take a look at home ownership rates in the 20th C[1]:

    1900: 46.5% <- Nothing much happens from 1900-1930
    1910: 45.9% 
    1920: 45.6%
    1930: 47.8% <- Great Depresssion + New deal: 1933-1941 sees decline
    1940: 43.6% <- post-war suburbia boom: 1946-1966
    1950: 55.0% 
    1960: 61.9% <- Increase slows as suburbs built out 1960 - 1980
    1970: 62.9%
    1980: 64.4% <- massively falling rates don't do much to 2000
    1990: 64.2%
    2000: 66.2%

So to look at the post-war suburbia boom as some kind of indulgent preference for big houses is to completely miss what this is about.

And note that a side effect of the growth of suburbia is the shrinking of rural areas, as people in rural areas don't need to relinquish home ownership and become renters if they move to cities. That used to be the case. Before suburbia, if you wanted to move to the city, you needed to rent from one of these landlords.

But, you counter, we have condos! Well, there were no condos in 1940, and by 1990, less then 5% of housing units were condos[2]. There are very few condos in America, because again the owners of the big multi-unit properties prefer to rent them out rather than convert them to condos, and there just isn't that much infill land available in existing urban areas for developers to come in and add a significant amount of condo urban housing stock.

So please stop judging people and wildly moralizing about long term social or economic trends. That's a terrible lens through which to understand economic history.

- - -

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...

[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf

Unfortunately, that economic trick can't be repeated forever. We've simply run out of land that is within commutable distance, and our governments are collapsing under the lifecycle cost of infrastructure for ever lower densities.

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I read an interesting article that framed the new laws around loosening single family zoning in California as allowing a new type of homesteading. Basically, the zoning regulations have forced homeowners to more or less get value only out of the house they actually live in. Actually homesteading with a garden in your backyard in 2021, the way American homesteads used to be small farms, would not really make any sort of significant income.

The argument was that people can now choose to use what was previously more or less legally mandated unproductive[1] land, your backyard and front yard, to be converted into more housing, which could be rented out as a source of income.

There are many developed countries with very large middle classes, such as japan, korea and large parts of europe that didn't go with the car dependent lifestyle and make everything but suburbs literally illegal to build and created policies to boost home ownership, such as the 30-yr government backed mortgages and the mortgage interest tax deduction.

The modern american middle class grew because of the post war economic boom and it being the only industrial economy left standing, along with many other structural advantages, such as a large population, a safe geopolitical region and huge amounts of natural resources. It wasn't because of suburbs, the suburb boom happened because of white flight.

There are countries with higher homeownership rates, such as spain, and it really hasn't done them much good. Home ownership rates do not really matter for how well your economy is doing: https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-h...

I don't believe suburbia promotes social isolation. In fact the opposite. At least in my experience most people living in a suburban neighborhood get to know their neighbors where as it's the stereotype that people in the city make it a point to not know any of their neighbors (except on Sesame Street). It might just by my anecdata but it fits my experience.

Note: I prefer a walkable city I think.

It doesn't take much to be ~50 mins. I lived in Yayoi-cho. As a reference I could walk west from Shinjuku station and get to my apartment in 30 mins.

I worked in Aoyama. The closest station was Nakano-shimbashi on the Marunouchi line but it was better for me to take the Oedo line from Nishi-Shinjuku 5-Chome station. Walking to that station was ~15 mins. With waiting for the next train it was another 15 mins to Aoyama, then another 10 mins walk from the platform to the Office. So 40 mins total. That's only 10 mins short of your average.

I'm sitting on the subway train home, not entirely sober at 1:30 in Stockholm enjoying public transportation. I have 50 minutes to the city center (15m walking, 30m subway + 5m leeway). I just moved here from a smaller city and I adore it, public transportation brings people together. The spacious American homes you're talking about were plentiful where I used to live, but it just encourages people to stay at home zoning themselves off.

I'm quite social so I guess that plays a role in my preferences.

How often do you have to travel 10km? With a high population density just traveling 1km means you're whizzing past the homes of a hundred thousand people.

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