Emergent Tokyo: Designing the spontaneous city
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I think younger people are beginning to feel this way, as property ownership in cities becomes increasingly out of reach. But also, the amount of financial power that the property owning class has and the financial incentives to continue to develop our cities (more like metros) in the way that we have makes changing this exceptionally difficult.
Ironically maybe least true in Tokyo, where interest rates are extremely low, and houses are still sort of affordable as long as you can adjust your expectations (e.g. no 200sqm mansions).
The person I responded to said that Tokyo is surprisingly cheap if you compare it to California real estate in the major cities (read as LA or San Francisco) and be willing to take major cuts on space and standard of living. That’s sort of a weird argument. Additionally comparing it to NYC doesn’t make it less weird.
Of course living in Tokyo is cheap if you throw out standard of living, ignore the initial capital required to rent, and then compare it to some of the other most insane real estate markets.
You have everything in between.
There’s places (especially popular ones) that do key money (up to 3 months, which you don’t get back) and deposits (up to 3 months, which you do), but it’s starting to become less common, and you’ll always be able to find a place that doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t apply at all if you buy a house instead (for roughly the same monthly prices as renting).
My main point is that renting in Tokyo is possible regardless of your budget, where in other markets it’s just plain impossible due to the minimum price for even tiny apartments.
I think one has to experience it oneself though, my friends and relatives who never left the suburbs pity me for my restricted living space, and don't believe me when I tell them live is easier with less baggage and it a walkable center of town. I suspect they think I'm rationalising an inability to afford a suburban McMansion.
Yeah it would be easier if we didn’t buy them so much shit. But that’s a deeply ingrained part of American culture. Who has the time to cut their kids off from friends, extended family who buys lots of trinkets for every holiday, etc? Trust me we tried to fight that battle and all we have to show for it is a two inch thick layer of dinosaurs in the living room.
I suspect you're right that a lot of it has to do with the surrounding culture - almost nobody in Berlin lives in large homes (there are very few houses and most people live in 5-8 story high apartment buildings) & I think Germans as a habit just don't buy as much crap.
I grew up with a similar culture in India, but now live in the US where every Christmas, I receive a ton of stuff I could do without.
I have a question for you – wow many gifts do Germans give each other for Christmas, and what sort? I had just kind of assumed that most western countries do these things similar to the US, but as I have found out in the past that might be an incorrect assumption.
But Germans generally don’t celebrate holidays in massive gatherings, I would expect my mother in law to join us, or maybe 1 other person. It would be unusual for the number of people to reach double digits.
I think the problem is actually that people with aggregate political power in cities in America don’t really care about property values in the monetary sense. They treat their homes, community, and city on more political/ideological/ethical terms and preferences than on economic terms. The dense Tokyo-style city is absolutely foreign to most Americans and they disdain actions that would lead toward alternate city structures. This is as opposed to the property owning class, which should be more than happy to see their value go up by making more dense cities, especially when it is funded by taxpayers.
This seems like a case of just assuming capitalists/landowners are to blame and then coming up with an argument.
I'm not saying it's capitalists or landowners who are to blame for how US cities have been developed, simply that the power they hold and their influence on politics pose great challenges (amongst many other challenges) for creating more dynamic cities.
People who just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for a down payment on a house in the suburbs do not want their neighborhood to change into something that is not a suburb. If they wanted to live in a dense urban area, they would have done that.
As housing gets more expensive, this tendency will only increase -- if you had to work really hard for a really long time to buy a house, you will probably be more unhappy to find out that your neighborhood is changing than if you didn't have to try that hard to get into it -- especially when your options to move elsewhere are at least as expensive.
Why does this not happen in the U.S.? Is that also NIMBYism?
That has happened to people, so it's a valid concern.
I did spent a lot of money on a house in the suburbs. I would have preferred to buy something more dense and walkable, but getting anything decent like that was not an option. Because so much low-density gets built and the higher infrastructure need per unit in low-density areas gets subsidized by hifh-density areas, the economics work out greatly in favor of the suburbs in a lot of places.
The U.S. government has really allowed things to get out of hand with housing. The first thing they should address are investors and companies buying up houses. There are at least two houses in my neighborhood sitting empty and quickly dilapidating, as they were likely purchased by investors.
People love single-family homes in dense urban environments. A neighborhood that I think is a good example of comfortable density with a good variety of building sizes is Brooklyn Heights in New York City. You can buy a studio apartment for $250,000 or a townhouse for $17,000,000, and everything in between. You would make an incomprehensible amount of money selling your house if your neighborhood turned into Brooklyn Heights.
> The worst case is that they park your cars in front of your trash cans on trash day and it doesn't get picked up?
Future buyers might be worried about that or they might worried about the thing becoming a crack house or other xenophobic shit. I know lots of people who for reasons I don't agree with or even find appalling don't want to live next to an apartment building.
There can be a lot of selfish, not in my backyard type of behavior, but I think blaming homeowners is not effective.
Most people owning homes these days are having to put everything they have into being able to afford it, and they’re effectively forced to do that due to the market, skyrocketing and ultimately unaffordable rents with terrible living standards, schools, etc. Turning around and tanking their value due to some mega corp wanting to slap an apartment building down isn’t a good strategy.
A lot of urban “designers” just want to put apartments everywhere, but it isn’t a good strategy. It certainly isn’t organic. And most modern apartment buildings are built as cheaply as possible.
How does subsidization come into this? Just relax the zoning, make it simple to get permits and stop blocking everything at community meetings.
> A lot of urban “designers” just want to put apartments everywhere, but it isn’t a good strategy. It certainly isn’t organic
Agreed. The planning and homogenous construction that gets often pushed for is a problem. This in part can be addressed by smaller parcels. Order Without Design, book and podcast, go into this and how some cities solved it. Somehow real estate and housing tempts everyone to throw out all the lessons we learned from communism about the perils of central planning.
If the $ value of your house goes down, you can still live it in just fine. If you want to move, and the overall market is down, you will sell your house for less but you will also buy your new house for less. No matter what, a 100m2 house is still worth a 100m2 house in a similar neighborhood.
The only case you should be worried is if only YOUR neighborhood goes down in price while the rest of your city is stable or going up. Or only your city is going down and you want to move to a different city.
Anyway - it's still unclear to me how allowing small business in residential area would make the housing prices go down. If anything it would make it go up as having small business in a walking distance is very convenient.
Even multi-stories buildings, I see why homeowners don't want them because of their personal confort, but if it becomes the norm I don't see how it would make their property prices go down.
I don’t and didn’t say I did and really need lectured on that. It’s my primary complaint of how people think about the financial aspect of home ownership. I was a happy renting but mainly because I was very lucky and found a landlord who kept my rent below market and only raised it once. That was until I got tired of a revolving door of neighbors and a particularly nasty one, so I chose home ownership primarily for lifestyle. It’s nice to not have a maniac neighbor living above me.
Trust me, it’s not by choice that I needed to tie up so much of my worth in a mortgage. I’m not arguing against really anything other than indiscriminately blaming homeowners. Even when I was renting, which so far occurred every year except for one of my adult life, a lot of urban development generally increased rent and prices. As I mentioned elsewhere, a lot of urban designers just want to build, build, build. That’s something I don’t think solves what people think it does. And in general, urban design cannot fix cost of living issues and these conflicts of interests.
By the way, moving is a whole other discussion. I couldn’t have afforded my home merely a few months after purchase due to the volatility of interest rates.
Tokyo has extensive public transportation and culture and other things that support its density. You don’t get Tokyo in the U.S. by just slapping down apartment buildings, which typically come with parking and traffic demands on the local area.
When the kids leave the nest and it comes time to retire, downsizing is the way a home owner will "cash in" on that investment (or, as you suggest, moving to a less expensive community/city/state).
I'm sure you know all this but I am confused as to why you say it is not an investment. It is illiquid, to be sure, but it does not depreciate in the way that a car, for example, does. It seems to me no less of an investment than precious metals or stocks (but for the illiquid aspect I mentioned).
> The role of institutional investors is still being studied, but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they get it, they often ignore the structural problems that are harder to combat. Housing undersupply is the result of decades of locals opposing new home building. It’s not something that can be blamed on Wall Street greed and the nefarious tinkering of a private equity firm. And that’s a much harder truth to stomach.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22524829/wall-street-housin...
Whatever the amount of homes being purchased by investors, you have to look at the root cause of why they're investing. This is covered by the article - did any of you downvoters bother to read it?
> Yield-chasing investors have turned to the real estate market because it has become a very profitable place to put your money. And the main reason it has become so profitable is the preexisting housing shortage created by local governments and certain homeowners seeking to block new homes from being built, leading to a nearly 4 million home shortage nationwide.
Locally, when we look around at who's blocking housing, it's 100% our neighbors:
https://bendyimby.com/2022/09/07/development-code-weaponized...
* https://welcomingneighbors.us/
is proof that this is something people care about a lot and are fighting hard for. And we're starting to notch up some successes, too!
Why Japan Looks the Way it Does: Zoning https://youtu.be/wfm2xCKOCNk
What a Typical Tokyo Neighbourhood is Like https://youtu.be/TheOkz8oF_I
How about we ease up on both zoning restrictions and parking requirements?
Hard to have a functioning society when a near literal half of your population is seen at best as second class citizens.
How many rich tech people from SV/Cali who paid top dollar for Texas property are now quickly fleeing after the recent political happenings that stripped the rights of half the voting population? I’ve seen quite a few personal anecdotes on HN & also a general trendline across publicly accessible real estate data that point to them ditching their Texas properties quite quickly. This most definitely affects property values, & at least touches on zoning issues in the grand scheme of things.
Not very many at all, in my estimation. Those "rich tech people from SV/Cali" moved to Texas in the first place for their bottom lines, not because they thought Texas was the vanguard of progressive politics. I doubt a socially conservative state becoming more socially conservative is going to trigger many reverse moves.
If I had to guess, the extremely restrictive abortion laws (prohibited after six weeks of gestation with very few exceptions) that you're obliquely referring to are not going to stand for very long, either.
The rich tech people who moved from California to Texas often were doing it specfically because of support for the political party that did that stripping (sometimes centered on tax/regulatory policy rather than culture war issues, but still supporting the party knowing the culture war stance was part of the package.)
So, probably not many.
And as another commenter mentioned, only Houston has "no zoning", and they have most of the regulations that are normally in zoning code in other cities anyway.
https://www.amazon.com/Made-Tokyo-Guide-Junzo-Kuroda/dp/4306...
From the introduction:
> The buildings we were attracted to were ones giving a priority to stubborn honesty in response to their surroundings and programmatic requirements, without insisting on architectural aesthetic and form. We decided to call them “Da-me Architecture” (no-good architecture), with all our love and disdain.
But there are certain cultural and demographic factors in play in such East Asian cities, which are often considered a bit taboo to mention. However these factors are also responsible directly or indirectly, for some of the most praised aspects of these cities. And why it would be virtually impossible to replicate some of these successes in somewhere like NYC.
If you aren't going to mention those factors, why hint at them? Just to annoy people and puff yourself up by insinuating you know something special that others aren't willing to hear? Just say what you mean -- or don't even bring it up.
I doubt that these factors (presumably the more heterogenous racial and cultural makeup of Japan as compared to the US) have anything to do with the contrasts for operating small businesses that are specifically mentioned in TFA:
- For any two-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor — even in the most residential zoned sections of the city.
- Liquor licenses are extremely cheap and easy. A liquor license in an American city can sometimes run up to $500,000.
- (In the US) Usually for retirement, people are counting on their property values going up so they have a strong incentive to resist changes that might threaten them. A lot of the dynamism we see in the emergent urbanism of Tokyo are things that reduce predictability, which reduce property values.
Are there cases in the US where similar liberal regulations for operating businesses have been established, and shown to fail due to demographic or cultural factors? I suspect not.
But as things stand now even in small US cities, there is a ton of red tape that stands in the way of small businesses. That has little to nothing to do with cultural and demographic factors; and happens to be largely the focus of the article.
For example, if you can trust that new restaurants will not cut corners on cost, health inspection becomes more of a formality. If you can trust the building will be left in good condition by businesses, it is more acceptable to rent a place out to whoever wants it, and so you see as time goes by that a small cornerstore becomes an upscale hairdresser, which becomes a laundromat, which becomes a take-out restaurant.
Homogeneous demographics might help, but I suspect building a high trust society is more culture than demographics. For example, a religious group may create a high-trust enclave by promising to excommunicate members who violate norms, while a demographically homogeneous country may destroy its culture in civil war and build something low-trust, too (China).
This is the kind of question that benefits from a probabilistic analysis: does ethnic homogeneity, on average, help or hinder building and maintaining a high trust society?
Many conflicts in world history have an ethnic dimension. Many substantial social cleavages, even if they are not ethnically based, over time may evolve an ethnic dimension. For example some religions have an ethnic dimension, most religions require members to marry only within the own religion etc. Moreover, people are more likely to procreate with people they spend a lot of time with. So even linguistic differences can lead to ethnicisation, since it's easier to socialise with people you can easily communicate with.
I've got a sort of mixed-message about Tokyo real-estate prices anyway. Sometimes the impression I have is that it still is expensive but only if you are comparing the cost per square feet with Western cities and not the cost of dwellings — I guess the salient point being that the Tokyo-ite will live in a smaller "flat" than their Western counterpart and so may in fact have a smaller rent.
It's over of the many cases where we don't like the options that poverty forces people to choose, so we make the options illegal instead of doing something about poverty.
- Lower per capita infrastructure costs
- Lower BMI (more walking as things are closer together)
- Lower per capita energy usage and CO2 emissions
- Fewer school shootings (they decrease as neighborhood density increases)
- Lower rents in cities
...the list goes on.
What other ways (better ways?) are there to prevent school shootings?