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Comment by gimmeThaBeet | Hacker News Reader

What I wanna know is how does Tokyo do this semi-successfully? People point out the demographic declines of Japan as a whole, but the Tokyo metroplex hasn't been quite hit by that.

I know there was stuff like proposing to pay people to move away, but I don't know if that's a real thing?

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I'd suggest the way Tokyo does it wouldn't be acceptable to most people in vastly smaller and less dense cities (i.e. basically every other city in the world), where we have a very high expectation of how much space/land a house should be able to take up.

This is just incentives.

If you reward people for conserving a scarce resource, they'll use less of it.

If you reward people for wasting a scarce resource, they'll use more of it.

There's some natural human value attached to space, but in the current system people are incentivized to own more than they need, because to do anything else would be giving up free money, but the fact that everyone else is doing the same, ruins things for everyone.

Not sure I agree - it's cultural too. If you grow up with the expectation that you'll never own a spacious 3-BR house with a dedicated yard, then you wouldn't think spending your life living in small apartments or townhouses was so terrible. But I admit I'd find it very hard to adjust to even if the reward/incentive for doing so was super high. And the dog would almost certainly agree!

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