This is the most important paragraph in the article. It can’t be overstated how ingenious Japan’s system of zoning is and how much this has benefitted their society in ways we can only dream about here in the West.
Granted I’m approaching it from the perspective of a tourist or business traveler, but 6/6 of the European cities I’ve been in were fully navigable for my purposes via transit. I’d probably guess half or less in the US.
Even in NYC or SFO, the metro areas are so large it really makes the success rates low depending on the trip.
Something that, for some reason, people in the states don't want to accept is that - when given the choice - the vast majority of people prefer living in dense urban environments.
You see the same dynamics in London and Paris.
People do not "prefer to live in dense urban environments" by urbanist standards.
They prefer to live in dense urban environments by North American standards, which can still be far less dense than urbanists really want.
And this was my comparison?
Nobody wants to live there, it's too crowded and there's too much demand for housing! Oh wait, that makes no sense.
You are required to live there, its not a choice.
Almost every town in the US, at one point, was dense enough to support a vibrant main street. Many (most?) of them even had tram lines and other forms of public transportation.
It's not an either or proposition. You can have cost-effective infrastructure through relative density without having to deal with all of the trappings - good and bad - that come from a city.
The vast majority of people REQUIRE to live NEAR their employment which happens to be in cities.
Look what happened to NYC real estate rent when you gave people the choice of NOT doing that. Look what happens when you force them back to the office, they come back, but not by choice.
At the peak of the bubble era, just the land underneath the Imperial Palace had an estimated real estate value larger than the entire state of California.
So yeah, it's extremely rough when there's nothing valuable to invest your money in.
I’ll agree it sucks you can’t have a really cheap house an 15% return on your money (which seems like an exaggeration). But with some ingenuity I think people could make the lower property and house prices work for them a lot more than they do.
If you think real investors should make 12-15%, you are essentially bankrupting the next generation. (Even 10% annualised would do it.) That is enormous intergenerational wealth transfer, ensuring the next generation cannot own a home before they are 50 years old or they rent forever.
Outside of central Tokyo (the most central ku's surrounded by Yamanote train loop line), there is almost no capital appreciation for homes (and apartments) because NIMBYism does not exist (quite literally through the national building code). As a result, they build enough for the demand, and home prices are relatively stable, roughly rising at the rate of inflation. France is pretty similar outside of central Paris. Before post-COVID inflation got out of control, Germany was also similar.
The center of Tokyo and Osaka are a bit special because they are the largest job centers in the whole country, and there is very (insanely?) high demand and not enough land to maintain low capital appreciation for homes. That said, there is still constant tear-down/rebuild projects in Tokyo to build denser housing. It is hard to walk 10 mins in central Tokyo and not see a tear-down/rebuild project. Fortunately, they have incredibly strict noise controls at construction sites, so you rarely hear it, but you see it.
> the houses in Japan are knocked down and rebuilt between essentially every occupant
> they're pieces of garbage meant to last a decade or so
> So yeah, it's extremely rough when there's nothing valuable to invest your money in.
I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.
Example: Texas
Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.
But it would not be legal to build japanese neighbourhoods in Texas.
That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.
Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.
To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An alarmingly large amount of what goes on in the US falls into that category IMO.
There are many kinds of zoning laws going as far as to say how tall and how open fences have to be depending on the type of yard the fence encloses. Eg a backyard can have a 7ft high 100% closed fence while a front yard is limited to 4ft and must be 50% open.
How someone can “abuse” sections of the law that can get so wildly specific as to restrict paint color is lost on me.
I don’t buy into the Japanese exceptionalism in such generic terms. Show your work.
I would imagine this plays a large role in this.
You will see countless threads on Reddit about bad neighbors in the US. Folks playing loud music, causing disturbances at all hours and will not stop. This applies to zoning as well. If the law allows it, people will do it so there is much more consideration in the US. I don’t know if it’s the right solution but certainly different cultures play a huge role in this.
No idea what our local zoning laws are
Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.
So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.
The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.
IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).
If the land is more valuable without a structure the current owner has natural incentive to do that, or someone else has incentive to buy, demolish and re-list.
I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.
https://www.city.inagi.tokyo.jp/en/faq/kurashi/1001633/10016...
There are tax benefits for new buildings for a limited time so maybe that's what I was thinking about and became confused.
Let's start from the glaring problem: The purpose of the US zoning system was institutionalized racism to keep the "undesirables" out rather than anything having to do with development management. Once you realize that, all of the misfeatures (NIMBY, excessive permitting, sclerotic bureaucracy, public participation) make obvious sense.
Practically every zoning system would be better than that.
Here is a good YouTube video to you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5pPcV54kiQ
That isn't ingenious, it's battery farming.