America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but for zoning laws
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abio.substack.com
In the US, few people participate or care about local laws, zoning, and elections, or even understand why participation may be important. In a citizen ballot to determine if we should cap housing construction, 10% of the population voted. 5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state. Among those voters, most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses.
Most people do not realize how zoning impacts the daily life of everyone in an area, and how it impacts personal finances, which businesses will thrive, and public finances. Where I live, we have an absurd number of chains, and local businesses struggle. Part of this is out of our control, but the part that is (minimum parking requirements, single use zoning, etc) continuously gets upheld against changes that would help local businesses.
I think we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally. Many young people will protest national or state policies and be engaged at those levels, which is great, but very little time/energy is spent where they could directly see meaningful impact on their lives.
Who is "everyone" in this case?
No, I was not able to vote.
Do you have any clue how privileged you sound here? This is peak "have you tried not being poor" attitude.
Apartments are between 180-250k.
Funda. 28 apartments in Amsterdam up to 250k.
You’re literally wrong about everything you state here.
Even most long term residents legally entitled to vote don't make the effort.
To your point that so few people actually vote, it doesn’t take much to sway a local election.
I would never to ask to vote at a remote place where I do not live permanently, yet where I even not a citizen?
I'd wager that's a small proportion of almost every city. Most cities will have tourists who are visiting for a few days or weeks, and long term residents who have a permanent address there. The percentage of people living full time in hotels or airbnbs must be tiny. Perhaps in high cost of living cities there's more "hidden homeless" living on couches, but even then it's not going to be "a large part" of a city.
City, not country.
I live in a college town. Why shouldn't student voices be represented, when they are a huge chunk of our community?
Maybe I'm too US focused, and have been accused of that a lot recently, but your views are fundamentally at odds with basic democracy as I see it as a US citizen.
Should we deny long term residents the right to vote becuase they aren't voting in the interests of short term residents? I don't understand the principle here, unless you think that short term residents are not residents, or full people, or something.
It's pretty debatable if these temporary residents should have the same voting rights as permanent residents, since their interests are going to be at odds with long-term residents. I would not be happy if schools got defunded because university students who are only going to be there for a few years wanted to lower alcohol taxes.
Permanent residency/citizenship being a prerequisite for voting is used as a (very imperfect) screening for this.
In the US, people get to vote where they live. We used to require silly things like owning land or being male or being white, but that was a really bad idea.
It is not debatable at all if short term residents should had the same voting rights as long term residents. It is very settled constitutional law in the US, and a completely radical idea to suggest changing a principle that has been fundamental for the period of time when the US has been a strong country.
> Per your example, university students would vote against allocating funds toward schools or playgrounds, because they know they're not going to be raising a family there
I think you have very bad intuitions here. In my college town, long term residents get upset that college students vote in favor of school funding, because the long term residents have kids that have already graduated and they don't want to pay for it anymore.
Shorter term residents have significant disadvantages in local politics, as local politics is largely a function of long term relationships and getting the word out on obscure elections where there's almost zero coverage of candidates, and for positions where few know what they do. Depriving short term residents of even using a vote is a huge perversion to the idea of democracy in the US.
Sorry what? Only US Citizens are legally allowed to vote in federal and state elections. This explicitly excludes a vast swarth of short-term residents who are there on school visas, work visas, or permanent residents who haven't gotten citizenship yet.
for some reason, people on HN have a specific opinion when it comes to politics and voting and what are acceptable implementations ;-)
Anything less becomes extremely easy to game.
I saw your other comment with regards to the Netherlands. If that’s where you’re located, you only need to have a stable location once. Then you can register. Another person can’t unregister you from there, so you can vote even if you then move to a hotel.
Only question remains is how you want to deal with mail, but there are workarounds for that.
Max fine is 325€.
You can also go to city hall and give a temporary address.
Sounds like you just don’t know Dutch law and options at all tbh.
You can not. That is not how it works.
Sounds like you just don’t know Dutch law and options at all tbh.
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/gemeenten/vraag-en-...
Sounds like you just don’t know Dutch law and options at all tbh.
Not serious debate.
This comes directly from a historical British restriction on voting rights that in turn is an artifact of feudalism. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_2_1s3....
Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
Eh, a growing set of cranks. The diversity of political opinion in America seems to have exploded over the last decade. Cranks are now serious contenders for power and influence.
This is such bullshit. Pre-literate societies were not ignorant societies, they were not stupid societies, they were not issue-free societies. The printing press gave rise to literacy which then gave rise to both books and print-based issue campaigning. But the idea that before people were able to read they were also unable to understand "the issues being voted on" is ridiculous. People ate, built, got sick, got hot, got cold, got injured, were richer or poorer ... everyone had a framework in which to understand "the issues being voted on".
You could argue it wasn't an educated understanding, and that might be correct depending on your understanding of what "education" is. But the idea that people couldn't actually understand stuff until literacy arrived is just ridiculous.
So are the justifications of Adams and Blackstone. Literacy was the justification given by early Greek democracies with written legal codes, though some, like Athens, later broadened eligibility.
Someone renting an apartment and working a job in a community definitely has skin in the game in regards to local tax rates, building regulations, public amenities, etc.
Everyone has skin in the game but some have way more.
Maybe those transient homeowners are the ones who shouldn't get to vote...
Obviously someone with a kid enrolled in school and locked into a long-term lease is not transient and has a comparable amount of skin in the game as a homeowner.
(I still disagree with your broader point, since I don't think you can meaningfully draw a "has skin in the game" line.)
Don't complain about people not being engaged with local politics if you don't allow them to vote.
With your thinking you are creating a class of subhumans where you enjoy the benefits of their labour but you are not allowing them to vote. Like African Americans in the US not that long ago.
Black Americans are not nomads. We're forced out by them.
Who is going to speak for the people who aren't allowed to vote?
I’m also not expecting to fly to country X, book an airbnb for 6 months or get a summer job, and then just somehow be entitled to vote there.
Allowing popular referendum for everything just invites a particular and usually really dumb level of politics. You can influence a board’s decision and get some or all of what you want.
IMO one of the biggest problems with society is that you have this view that politics is this idea that it’s some sort of magical thing that is done to you. I can get my city councilman on the phone easily. Probably would get a meeting with my state senator in a few days if need be. Just show up and work with people.
People like me go to places with fairly free zoning. The jack boot lickers go to places with restricted zoning. Once one has a majority it just snowballs and pushes harder and harder in the direction it is going, because no one wants to buy/build a house in a place that will flip from the one strategy to the other.
Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
If there were regulations house would have cost at least double. Because I have a day job and no time for inspectors, nor any trade license.
>Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
Lol having lived in the third world I've eaten from probably a hundred of these. Very tasty. Not much different than the US where inspector is basically never there so you still must apply all the food sanitation rules in deciding regarding buying food from a vendor.
If you make a 5-seat japaneese-style neighborhood micro-eatery conform to the same cross-contamination standards as a 800-people-per-hour mcdonalds, you're making one of these unprofitable and de-facto illegal.
Yes, lets have health codes. But lets also recognize different risk profiles and encourage all sorts of entrepreneurship. If it's 1-size-fits-all, then the only size is going to be XXL.
Its been a while since I went through a food safety course, but I don't really recall any that would make it impossible for a small shop to achieve. I follow most of the rules I learned in my own kitchen at home. Stuff like don't use the same cutting board and knife between meat and veggies without cleaning in between, don't wear jewelry while prepping, keep things in safe time/temperature constraints, etc.
> Relatedly, our health code regulations also effectively outlaw people from opening restaurants in small spaces. Most jurisdictions require at least 3-4 different sinks—one for washing dishes (usually a large three-part sink), separate ones for washing hands, one for mopping, and often another for prepping food. This makes small commercial kitchens in under 200 square feet much harder.
> America’s food regulations are also not set up for a single person to manage. The U.S. has 3,000 different agencies handling food regulations. The whole system, scattered across eight places in the municipal code, is basically uncoordinated and varies depending on where you are.
Meatpacking has the same issue. FDA regulations are designed for industrial-scale chicken, beef, and pig processing. And if you're processing hundreds or thousands of heads a day, it's absolutely needed. But what if you have just a few heads? What if you have a small flock you want to sell to your neighbors? A 1000-head-per-delivery processing plant won't even answer your call, and you even if they did you have zero negotiating power, so your only options are to go big or not be able to legally sell it.
A lot of people have amish or menonite communities that are able to process your livestock legally, but even those are disappearing. So small farmers have no way to legally get their product to market, and so they're being gobbled up by the large industrial farms.
The regulations use safety pearl-clutching to force a specific outcome that benefits a specific group, and it's not the small family farmer the commercials idolize.
Nixon's secretary of ag said it explicitly: get big or get out.
I don't even mix my mop/cleaning sink (usually my tub at home) with my food prep, and my hand washing sink is separate from my kitchen sink when I'm actually in cooking mode. Even food trucks around me manage to meet these requirements.
I am absolutely addressing a core point, that's a big part of what you previously quoted about being unable to meet health safety requirements. I didn't bring up that example, you and the previous author did. Its quite combative to act like I'm just pulling out some extreme example, when you're the one who provided the example as a regulation strangling businesses, and was the only example given.
You said cross contamination standards make such places impossible. I asked for concrete cross contamination examples that make it impossible, and the only one you've given me so far is sinks. So I'm sorry I'm only really talking sinks here, that's all I have to work with here. Other than the vagueness of the fact there's a lot of tiny jurisdictions, but that doesn't really matter given we're talking about hyper local hole-in-the-wall places. They really only care about whatever their specific local regulations are, which are usually pretty easy to go figure out.
>> Most jurisdictions require at least 3-4 different sinks—one for washing dishes (usually a large three-part sink), separate ones for washing hands, one for mopping, and often another for prepping food
Just having the mop bucket doesn't solve the problem. You take that mop bucket, and dump it where? Where do you go clean the bucket and the mop after you dump it? Where do you go to get water for the mop bucket?
What do these super tiny restaurants that are supposedly impossible to have in the US do to actually clean their dishes? What do they do to properly clean hands after handling unclean meats to prevent cross contamination? What do they do to clean the things they use to clean the facility? Do they have people with unclean hands covered in potential salmonella in the same sink they're doing dishes in? Or the sink where they cleaned the mop bucket an hour ago in? Which sink gets the axe?
You're telling me we need to get rid of these sink requirements (its the only thing you've concretely pointed to), but offering no suggestions other than "buy a mop bucket", which doesn't solve the problem at all.
You've also pointed to the idea that overregulation is what is killing small meatpackers, but once again give no concrete examples of what regulations you'd drop. I do agree there has been too much consolidation in the meatpacking industry and that smaller producers have been squeezed out. I agree this is probably a bad thing overall and we should do something to change this path we're on. I'm not 100% sure its safe to lay a large chunk of that blame on overregulation. If anything, some of the reduction of regulations have made the burden higher, such as reduction in USDA inspectors with the requirement that the meatpacker hire their own inspectors. The inspection still needs to be done, but now its the meatpacker that needs to train the inspector and pay the payroll for that person. So please, can you share some concrete examples of the regulations which should be removed for meatpacking as well?
You're also misreading my comment. I'm not saying they definitely will do a sub-par job, but that its now an option, that they can do it. And given its the cheaper option (up front at least), it probably will happen more often. And especially when it comes to stuff like wiring, where once the walls are all sealed it can be expensive to inspect later, and yet if done improperly may kill your family and destroy most of what you own.
Just like that restaurant I give as an example, its not necessary they definitely will ignore food safety rules, but they sure make an effort and pride them selves to the ability to ignore them whenever they want.
If you're just doing something and intend to meet or exceed the rules then dealing with government enforcement apparatus is pure overhead. You were always gonna do the right thing so you gain zero upside and have to deal with a potentially capricious and unaccountable (in any practical way) enforcer which is a huge downside.
Second, the rules are chock full of 10,000ft ivory tower view type stuff that makes statistical sense but is inefficient compared to using judgment. But you can't use judgement because the whole point of code is to make everything quantitative so that idiots can inspect other idiots and parties can more efficiently bicker in court and whatnot.
There's a lot of upside to the fact the next owner isn't going to have to question if things were done properly, that insurance isn't going to be able to push back when something does go wrong.
So zoning can turn de jure code requirements into de facto nulled or altered.
In reality building code is how a huge amount of back handed regulation is done. When the powers that be can't make a particular rule, because of other laws, or because of precedent to the contrary, or because the peasants wouldn't stand for it, what they do is they adopt a ridiculous code and then slap a "can be waived at the discretion of board X" on it. This way they can make the thing they don't like a non-starter economically for most people.
In my city you can park a semi trailer as storage. But it counts as a "structure" and because it's not a commercially manufactured shed, car port, stick framed garage or litany of other exemptions you have to go through the "everything else" process which includes all the "normal code shit" that any other non-exempt structure would hav to go through like an engineered foundation and snow loads and all sorts of other stuff that's just inappropriate. They have a similar set of BS they use to prevent DIYers from erecting kit buildings.
Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/21/glendale-election-coro...
Glendale, Colorado is the quintessential example of this. Like 2,000 people live there due to insane gerrymandering, but there are tons of businesses and money moving around. The mayor gives crazy zoning benefits to his wife (strip club and dispensary on the main road, right next to target and chikfila) among other controversy. Dunafon controls the county with the help of other powerful players.
The most powerful weapon the powerful have against the majority of "ordinary people" is to propagate the idea that all this local stuff is boring and ultimately decides nothing. To make people stop caring.
One reason so many local city policies favor the old, is that they're retired and have the time to participate
When in American history have we had more things that are more engaging¹ competing with civic participation for our free time?
¹: and I think the terrifying answer might be:
LOL, never, so? Hurry up and die.and a lot more after
Now, that doesn't mean that everyone used the extra time for civic participation, but when you compare that to today, when far too many people have to work two or three jobs per adult just to keep the lights on, I think it's fair to say that there was more free time.
Note that I'm not saying you, yourself, are a proponent of the status quo, deliberately spreading propaganda.
But protests are absolutely not useless.
"waaaah they don't change Trump's mind after a single protest waaaaah" of course not. That's not what they're there to do. That's the win condition, not the only move in the game.*
Protests have a variety of important effects, but let's just focus on two of the big ones, which are closely linked:
1) They tell the other people who disagree with what is going on that they are not alone. That there are others like them out there, and that if they do try to do something (whether that's go to a protest themselves, call their congresspeople, or whatever), it won't be just shouting into the void.
2) They tell the people who agree with what is going on that this is not over. They can't just expect to be greeted as liberators; there are people in their own hometown who think that this is not OK, it shouldn't be allowed to continue, and anyone who supports it can expect at least a side-eye at the supermarket, if not much more serious social shunning.
And no: neither of these lead directly to a change in the policies that are being protested. But that doesn't mean that they're useless, any more than it's useless to, say, release wolves into Yellowstone, if what you care about are some of the myriad downstream effects of a trophic cascade.
* Not, I would note very firmly, that it's a game. This is merely a convenient metaphor.
What has no effect pretty much ever is protesting foreign policy, because the majority of people in any country neither care nor know what happens anywhere else.
The reason Civil Rights, Gay Rights and so on got traction was not through protestors changing politicians' minds. It was through the masses changing their minds and actually going to the ballot boxes to replace their (essentially robot) politicians.
A smart central planner can act for the shared benefit, they are sensitive to the votes of renters in some other high density area that also can't solve the problem locally etc.
if you want to live there you can pick from more options
developers capture value, but the buildings are there
obviously the usual problem is that the land value goes up, and thus the rent goes up too (because suddenly the neighborhood becomes more desirable - which again is a sign of benefits for those who already live there)
(an akira kurosawa movie about a japanese politician)
FWIW, it is a learned behavior that voting doesn't change much. It doesn't help when elected officials obviously ignore the will of the people (nationally, see polling data on legalizing, or even at least decriminalizing, marijuana, as one example), or when things just get overturned by someone else. My neighborhood "votes" on zoning, but the vote literally means nothing. The city council has to hear how we voted, but they don't have to take the vote into account.
I get that it's easy to scold people that don't vote, but it is more important that people with power do something to earn our votes. Hold them accountable. They're failing us more than our neighbors who have either been taught that voting doesn't matter especially when sometimes voting laws make it harder than it should be to vote anyway.
So the voters are wrong? You know what's "better" for them, right? Whether they want it or not, right?
> we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally
Because they are more in line with what you think?
PS
I'm being downvoted - but what is the point of local administrators, except to follow the voters demands? Sure, if you are a local politician, make your case, but local administrators ought to be doing whatever-it-is that people voted for. That's the whole point of voting, as I understand it.
The point is NOT to make people keep voting until they get it right, according to the administratots. That's the wrong way around! The administrators should be enacting whatever the voters want.
It doesn't really matter what I think when 5% of the population are controlling policy that impacts 100% of the population.
> Because they are more in line with what you think?
No, because they will be impacted for a longer period of time, and are less engaged locally.
As much as I'd love to have something like Matsuya in the US, it's just not practical here. I'm surprised it hasn't been talked about yet, but zoning is also a major factor in the spiraling of housing costs.
This is no accident.
Edit: I’m not young, but I didn’t grow up with any sort of privilege.
For comparison, even our best-case scenarios for urbanism here in the states (like NYC) have incredibly convoluted zoning rules, which in turn make it impossible to build anything new without intervention from the city/state: https://zola.planninglabs.nyc/about#9.72/40.7125/-73.733
Also, Japan generally has good mass transit throughout their cities, which essentially doesn't exist in the US. Less mass transit -> more cars -> need for parking -> larger buildings with setbacks to include parking -> less density -> less mass transit... Land use and transportation systems in the US have been co-evolved to the present sub-optimal state we have now.
I will note, I have not lived in Japan. I'm just going by what I've seen hopping in street view on a lot of the smaller towns. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
While yes, the small towns are way more sprawlly than the big cities in Japan. However, what I've seen doesn't even come close to how spread out things are in much of the US. Can you point to any place that looks like this[0] in Japan? Note, that is an "urban" area, not rural.
Sure, far more people get around by car. Transit access falls off considerably. Big box stores have actual parking lots. But I don't see parking lots like this[1] common when browsing around on Google Maps.
If anything, a lot of these sprawling small towns are far more dense and walkable than what even "dense" US cities are! A lot of the streets I'm seeing making up a lot of these towns are a good bit narrower than what most neighborhood residential streets I've lived on here in the US.
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wm2LcemskN6tB5nP6 [1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/9qhyJjKpTRGoKunn6
Feel free to show me parts of Japan I'm missing though. Maybe it exists and I haven't seen it yet, I did just kind of hop between a dozen or so small towns all over Japan.
In Japan, you can start and run your own business in your your own house (like your garage), within certain limits. This is why there are businesses in Japan like tiny cafes and shops that are nonviable anywhere else.
Where you and I live, the commercial section is a completely separate unit which is usually quite large, must be rented separately, and comes with a lot of regulations.
‣ Not Just Bikes: https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U
‣ Life Where I'm from: https://youtu.be/wfm2xCKOCNk
Every single one of these rules that amounts to death by a thousand cuts preventing these sorts of businesses (as well as many others) will be rabidly defended by many/most if presented in the abstract. That sort of inability to reason about the forest based on what you're doing to the trees is the root problem. And it's a social/ideological/moral one, even if it expresses itself via governments.
It's no more "reasonable in isolation" to peddle rules than it is to justify littering in the park because they don't take effect in isolation. If everyone does it everything goes to crap and we all know it so we don't let anyone justify littering in the park using the effect in isolation.
The problem is, that's not really how it works. There are a bunch of regulations made by bureaucrats, but those tend to be the pretty arcane ones which are necessary but aren't adding a lot of cost (think "what color do the flashing lights on radio towers have to be so planes don't crash into them"). And simultaneously, there are a bunch of regulations which are actually driving costs up, but those are the ones either broadly supported by the public, or supported by one particular interest group who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it because their livelihood or home equity depends on the rent extraction.
To actually cut costs with deregulation, you need to fight ugly political battles often against sympathetic groups (homeowners, doctors, teachers, construction workers etc.), which no politician wants to do, so they instead try to pretend that "bureaucrats" (who could be less sympathetic than bureaucrats?) are to blame.
There is hope. Scott Wiener is a California politician who saw that these problems can't be resolved at the local level and got himself elected to the state legislature. He is smart about how he sets up the battles so he has had very good results incrementally improving California's zoning - and other things - by gradually restricting local zoning authority when it's abused.
We are not yet at the "convenience store at the subdivision corner" stage, but give him time.
And, look, I am all for attacking some regulations; but I have to confess the requirement for multiple sinks is going to be far down my list of regulations that have to go. Odd to see it be one of the top mentioned ones, here.
The biggest question, for me, is raised when the complaint is dropped that we spend about an hour in the kitchen. I cannot believe that that is an meaningful number to compare between city and urban/rural living. Which, at large, is a big part of the problem with looking at anything from places like Tokyo. They have density that many in the US just don't understand.
The article even largely acknowledges this by comparing Manhattan pizza shops. A business model that you just can't magically make work in less dense cities.
And sure, we can tackle making places denser. A large hurdle there is that people want both the space that they currently have, along with the benefits of higher density. And that just doesn't work.
* optimizations. Some of these restaurants don’t have a counter, or any customer facing staff. Select your meal and pay at a vending machine, get your ticket number, wait for your order to be called. * onsen/community center: it’s entirely feasible to own less things and have fewer sq/ft at home if you can go to your local rec center to shower/spa, watch tv, sit on the couch, eat dinner, hang out with friends, etc. as a tourist my meal+spa+etc was maybe $10? * public transit: a lot of these shops are viable in Tokyo because rails move people en masse quickly
I thought the planning process in UK is even more perilous because of the lack of zoning laws? Everything is up to council review, which basically means vibes based instead of something that's codified.
It's totally normal to have shops, restaurants and houses in the same area, and often on the same street.
Basic pre-packaged sandwiches can be had for under $2.
For about $4.75 you can get a sandwich, pastry, and a latte from just about any of the chain corner shops (Tesco Express etc)
It's not gourmet, but it's a solid affordable option that millions of people eat every day. There's no real equivalent of this in the US sadly.
Germany has the Döner Kebab, it's now about 5-9€, but the have cheaper options available too. Again, hugely popular.
I'm sure most European cities have these.
>junk food, Japan
You can microwave it in 4-6 minutes; ingredients are often flash-frozen, locking in nutrients; and food-safety concerns are addressed at scale, rather than in a hit-or-miss way in a tiny storefront.
So perhaps, instead of advocating for more tiny restaurants that would likely need to skimp on safety considerations, we should be advocating for more microwaves available in grocery and convenience stores, so people can select a frozen meal, heat it up, and be on their way.
There were't any $4 healthy bowls of anything, but there were $2 "red hot beef & bean" (& fake soy filler) burritos which hit the spot if you'd failed to find a way to eat real food...
The problem with the microwave solution, I think, is that pretty much only burritos and pasta can be packaged in a microwavable way that still tastes good? And maybe like a few kinds of vegetable side dishes.
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/neighborhood-commerci...
The city council just had a work session and was quite supportive of the idea.
In Seattle I've seen a ton of smaller spaces become vacant and stay vacant for years because landlords aren't interested in lowering rent prices; they're holding onto the building/land itself because it'll appreciate over time and there's little to no cost to them to hold onto empty space. Roosevelt Square here is a great example of what I'm referring to, because you've got prime restaurant and retail space located right next to public transit that's increasingly going empty.
That might help a little, but you won't notice. Beating such taxes is done with low value businesses. A mattress store is a typical case, good for holding larger spaces with almost no capital cost: a low overhead business used to hold a retail property until values appreciate. Smaller spaces are held with little clothing stores nobody shops at, or wire transfer shops and such. There is a plethora of such operations holding real estate everywhere, barely breaking even or losing modest amounts of money.
It's compelling to imagine there is some brilliant tax fix for every ill, but investors are a lot more agile than tax authorities; they make their living solving these impediments. Handling food is one the costliest ways to hold a commercial property, so that's rarely how its done.
The business model works because when a buyer appears looking for numerous sites for expansion, they can deal with a professional investor group that can close deals in a cinch. This greatly lowers costs, because otherwise said buyer has to employ a small army of expensive people and take years to acquire or develop properties themselves. The buyer pays a premium for the value of foregoing all that. The price covers all the years of expenses; minimum wage labor, taxes, upkeep, and a good deal of profit, after years or even decades of squatting.
Nowhere in any of this is there someone with dreams of $4 lunch bowl shops.
The landlord isn’t operating the store so why would they need to rent to a business with low operating costs.
If you're asking why the landlord doesn't just leave the site vacant? They're offsetting costs or obviating vacancy taxes or both. There are a lot of reasons why it's beneficial to keep the lights on and babysit a place.
If you're asking why the landlord minds having a real tenant instead? The landlord doesn't want a real lessor that actually values the location, holds a 10+ year lease, invests money for improvements, makes weird modifications, etc. They want a junk business they can kick to the curb when the time comes.
Often the landlord and the placeholder business are the same, behind the scenes, renting from themselves. No hassle when it's time for the deep pocketed tenant/buyer to move in. All you need is a low cost property manager to look in on the place once a week, make sure the "staff" are actually showing up, and keep the plumbing/heat/electrical working.
This
> 10+ year lease
I haven’t had a ton of experience with commercial property, but I have enough to know that at least where I live 10+ year leases aren’t common.
5 is much more common even for businesses spending significant money on buildout.
But also the kind of businesses the article is talking about wouldn’t require extensive buildout, so they would be much more amenable to shorter terms.
There are other reasons $4 lunch bowls are never going to happen in the us. Much higher labor costs (despite what the article said about similar minimum wage) is the biggest one.
> All you need is a low cost property manager to look in on the place once a week, make sure the "staff" are actually showing up, and keep the plumbing/heat/electrical working.
They could do that. Or they could actually make some income by renting it out instead of spending $50-100k on a fake business waiting for a payday that may never come.
There are many locations that are never going to attract a renter with deep pockets. And even in locations that will, it doesn’t take many years running a fake business to erase any eventual profits.
So you, the property owner, end up in a situation where if you lower rent to attract a new tenant, the bank will recalculate your loan, potentially ending in a margin call.
Because you are a heavily leveraged house of cards, a rug pull on a few of these loans could cause a cascade liquidating your commercial inventory. Your business is buy a property, take a loan against it, use that loan to buy a property, etc etc.
Therefore it becomes worth it to carry vacant properties, because they are acting as the stilts holding up your money making properties. The vacancy becomes a cost of doing business, and gets factored into the rent of places that are getting leased.
The current location my office is in, was vacant for 12 years before we signed a lease, owned by a big name commercial real estate firm.
But no, we can't have wealthy people lose some money or the banks take a loss, that'd be terrible. We'll just continue crushing the middle class and poor with high rent costs and empty properties.
It isn’t all zoning laws.
> But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.
Lets napkin-math this. If we assume a food truck has margins at the upper end of the fast-casual industry of 9%, then each $18 burger-and-fries nets 1.62 in profit.
$28,276 / 1.62 = 17,454 burgers-and-fries.
If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
And that doesn't cover any of the other fees and expenses a food truck might have.
Those are brutal economics. I'm impressed it's only $18!
This looks crazy because it is incorrect. In your premise, that 9% profit margin includes the regulatory costs for a brick and mortar restaurant already. The only way your logic works out is if truck regulations are on average $30k more expensive than a regular building, which they almost certainly are not.
You can’t even begin to do the calculation without knowing the breakdown underlying the profit margin you cite.
2. burrito trucks sell their burritos at the market clearing price for a burrito, which is $18 because most of that burrito truck's competition is brick-and-mortar restaurants with expensive rent because of zoning laws.
Yes, a bowl at chipotle in the US might be 2x the price (more, probably) of a Japanese bowl, but it matters if I am getting 2x the calories also.
And there are foods in the US that are technically as cost effective, although maybe not as nutritious, like pizza which they mention, that can be around $1-$3 per slice. (Not my first choice for a lunch, but I could pickup a large 3 topping dominos pizza for $10 and make 3-4 lunches out of it, for example)
The title doesn't capture that, but the issue is not that the US can't produce $4 lunches. It's it can't enable cheap(er) healthy lunches
A rice bowl at Chipotle, for example, is not unhealthy (rice, beans, meat, vegetables). Plenty of restaurant food in the US is perfectly healthy (or, you can look at nutrition facts to know if it is). And if I can take a single US portion size and split it into two lunches that are Japanese-sized portions, then maybe we're getting the same amount food per dollar.
And on the "healthy" point: The article doesn't discuss nutrition facts at all or refer to any specific meals or dishes.
They link to an article concerning the price of Japanese bowls, that mentions "a regular-sized bowl of rice with beef from Japanese fast food chain Yoshinoya, which costs around 468 yen (S$4.25)." I don't know Japanese so it's hard for me to find nutrition information about that particular dish, but I suspect that a beef bowl is high in saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium (because most stir-fried beef is higher in these things). Is that healthy? Japan as a country has higher sodium intake than the US. Is that healthy? And so on. I suspect a big factor of the "health" of these lunches is that portion sizes are just smaller than in the US (but I have no data).
I’m not advocating for anything (certainly not optimizing for calories per dollar).
My point is just that the article has no data. It says a Japanese lunch is cheap and a US lunch is expensive and doesn’t consider what you actually get for the money. It assumes the US lunch is a worse deal, but I suspect it’s really not if you adjust the price for the amount of food.
The annoying part is that we lived 4 houses down from the building. We would never drive there ofc. The other thing is that the parking lot was so small, all spaces could be seen as Handicap accessible.
Instead we rented in a different area and the handicap spaces are significantly further from the building.
Maybe it ended up working out since our company grew and I know that space would not have been big enough.
She was a VP for a high-tech company in japan. But at some point she decided to slow down.
She opened a small bakery. She told me a lot of it is easier than it looks. She has a second "family" now, customers that come every day. I think she sells small meals to go too. If she wants to take the day off, she just closes the store for the day.
There were no $4 lunch bowls nearby, but I didn't need that to appreciate that I could walk to six restaurants, two wine shops and three cafes in less than three minutes. It was wonderful.
Frankly I think alternative laws should be applicable (you don't need to be able seat wheelchair people if you're willing to bring the food to them to-go) since I just think it's not worth losing that efficient density and cost-effectiveness for a tiny tiny fraction of the population.
there would be more supply if not for restrictive zoning laws. and more supply = lower prices
How many are homeless?
What does the median worker spend in money and time commuting from somewhere further?
(See what I did there?)
we've built a ton of structures with existing zoning laws when the economy is good, more than we've built during this deregulation paradigm. we stop when the economy or market is bad. very simple concept.
There's also the other turd in California real estate policy: Prop 13.
* less supply (at the same demand) leads to higher market clearing prices
really not complicated
Are there $4 lunch bowls there?
The lax zoning laws doesn't mean there are no rules, just that there are no rules preventing you from having an eatery right next to an active oil and gas well right next to a townhouse right next to a liquor store right next to a welding shop.
[0] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...
$7-9 for bun, and 3.25-5.50 for banh mi
Japan only appears cheap if you earn in USD, GBP, and Euros. For most Japanese households, costs have risen higher than salaries [1][2] and they are now facing inflation due to tourist spending [7][8][9].
It also doesn't help that the median household income in Japan is around $25,000 [3] compared to $83,000 [4] in the US. Even Koreans (who used to be Japan's "Mexicans") now earn more in Korea than in Japan, which is a massive psychological shock in JP.
This is why you've starting seeing the rise of populist far right parties like 参政党 in Japan campaigning on an anti-tourist and anti-foreigner plank - it's overwhelmingly young Japanese (18-34) who are facing the brunt of tourism-induced inflation and a bad job market, and have as such shifted right [5][6]. And mainstream Japanese parties like the LDP have had to shift further right as a result.
[0] - https://www.nippon.com/ja/japan-topics/c14023/
[1] - https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/apac/en/insights/markets-an...
[2] - https://www.iima.or.jp/docs/newsletter/2025/nl2025.48.pdf
[3] - https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/mro/2029703?display=1
[4] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
[5] - https://asia.nikkei.com/opinion/sanseito-brings-far-right-po...
[6] - https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/japan-election/nostalgia-an...
[7] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/travel-leisure/japan-s-tour...
[8] - https://therobinreport.com/japans-backlash-on-luxury-tourism...
[9] - https://www.princetonpoliticalreview.org/international-news/...
2. The median household income in Japan is significantly below the US ($25,000 [1] versus $83k [2]), let alone other OECD members.
[0] - https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage...
[1] - https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/mro/2029703?display=1
[2] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
That's the federal minimum wage. The actual minimum wage, factoring in state and local rates is actually around $12, 65% higher.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251122_FNC...
Not to mention most states have their own minimum wage at over $10.
The US federal minimum wage hasn’t increased in nearly 20 years. Japan raises it regularly.
The problem with US or any other country is that too many things that should not be ideological become ideological. So many people would be happy to live in a 1400 sq ft 3 bedroom house over 2500 sq ft single family homes if a lot of other things were provided.
Musk's city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbase,_Texas
Disney's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)
Also, see the Simpsons's episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain" which, btw, has a very funny guest appearance by Stephen Hawking.
Anyway, the main issue here is population density, not labor availability. If there tens or hundreds of thousands of people working and living in a quarter mile radius and average foot traffic was in hundreds or thousands per hour rather than dozens or less it would likely be easy to sell $4 bowls and make a profit - most of the US is vastly less dense and walkable than that though, even in cities.
Nice strawman. How about a $4.59 salad at Carls Jr or Wendy's, or an In-n-out cheeseburger for $4?
Zoning is only one tiny piece of the puzzle.
Guess why the rent is expensive?