Do you have any examples of buildings like this, I've looked but can't find examples online? It seems zoning has a 15% overhead (all things being equal and as best as I could argue with the data I've found so far), maybe it's higher but I haven't found articulable/shareable evidence of that yet. IANAL, so hopefully an expert on HN can help chime in.

I've looked (links below) and have done more querying than a comment thread like this probably warrants but wasn't able to find your assertion articulated anywhere.

Neither Japan or Houston are unconstrained free-markets without land use control so I'm doing my best to roughly/quickly tease out zonings isolated impact on affordability. Neither locations have 0 laws so they are close to apples to apples and since we're just doing relative comparison I'd rather keep things data driven. Houston has deed restriction but that is a simple free-market/libertarian private contract solution. Does Japan ban deed restrictions? Both japan and houston have historical zones

I've linked these two jstore articles as well as a more digestible video.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/724839 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30238667 https://japanpropertycentral.com/real-estate-faq/building-re... https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/04/113144-watch-debunki...