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Comment by omegaworks | Hacker News Reader

California suffers earthquakes and fires, yet we persist in our refusal to make our cities denser.

Doesn't Japan see homes as a depreciating asset while America's economic treats homes as a persistent or appreciating investment asset? Wouldn't this be one of the big reason affluent companies and people are buying up homes in the USA and turning them into rentals?

*Edit, fixed wording.

Yes, exactly. Our natural environment is similar, but our monetary and economic policies support different priorities.

Their cities are also much older. Tokyo is like 400-600 years old.

They ran out of undeveloped land long ago and were forced to increase density.

At least in California, cities are like 50-150 years old at best. Lots of cities are only running out of land now. In 300 years, I'm sure somewhere like LA will be dense.

California doesn't have 800+ years of cultural experience tearing down and rebuilding earthquake or fire damaged buildings.

800 years is enough time for a badger to evolve to correct behaviour through natural selection and random chance.

I thought that the whole point of homo sapiens is to use intelligence and draw conclusions quickly. Maybe I was wrong.

What does this even mean? My point is that Japanese society has a lot of old institutions and practices that accommodate rebuilding and revitalization. California was largely built up after WWII and has a lot of institutions that favor suburban development and have a status quo bias.

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