Japanese zoning
urbankchoze.blogspot.com
urbankchoze.blogspot.com
- I walk past two or three different convenience stores on my 8 minute walk to the train even though my neighborhood mostly looks like it's residential.
- All of the buildings around me are either very large single-family homes, or medium sized 3 floor multi-unit apartments. Almost nothing higher than 3 stories. There is also a school and an embassy on my block.
- The very large estate owned by a single family that has lived there for over 30 years that was next to my building was torn down last year. They are constructing an apartment building. That single lot will go from 1 unit to 26 units. Most units are single bedroom and will not have a parking spot and will be priced from about $500,000 up to $1.5M for some of the larger ones. I think there will be 10-15 parking spots in the basement underground.
- A guy down the street from me has set up a vegetable shop in front of his house. He puts out locally obtained vegetables with prices and you take what you want and drop the money in a slot in a cardboard box he has in his open window. People running little side-businesses like this out of their apartments seems pretty common.
- Buildings tend to have walls that are built right up to the street edge forming a 'corridor' feel.
- Streets are so narrow when I first got here I couldn't believe they were 2 way streets. It might take cars 10-20 seconds to pass each other going the opposite way because of negotiating the walls.
- It's extremely quiet and peaceful (except for the construction next door)
I can't stand this and wish it were regulated. I stopped cycling in Tokyo because those walls up to corners make for a lot of blind turns for both me and drivers, and as someone with a hearing impairment, I can't count on being able to hear the car before it blindsides me or vice-versa.
Tokyo gets a lot of things right about zoning but the way bike lanes are designed here is absolutely maddening.
As a north american, I found this odd initially; but came to really appreciate it given all the excellent options for eating nearby!
I can imagine that people who have grown up in walkable neighborhoods, would find a totally car-based lifestyle annoying. But how will those people feel who have made the move in the opposite direction? If someone moves from e.g. Texas to e.g. NYC or London, will they feel restricted or liberated when they walk, and use the metro? Or will they try to keep driving everywhere?
At my previous residence going to the library meant a ten-minute drive, which wasn't so bad, and now it was a three-minute walk. (Interestingly I just realized that I usually lived about a ten-minute drive from the libraries near where I lived, back in Japan) I guess I could say I felt more liberated, almost like I was part-owner of the downtown space, and it was no longer a destination that I felt I had to plan to visit. The car no longer felt so necessary-though I still used it--and riding my bicycle felt like more of a natural fit.
There is a lake with swimming beach in summer and a forest which is around 10 minutes walk. These are all the things which are truly priceless. And I wish everyone sometimes in their lives experience this, how much good it is to walk to do almost everything you want.
So in Texas where driving may be affordable, necessary because there is no alternative, frictionless because businesses buy huge plots for car parking and perhaps slightly cheaper and more ubiquitous gas stations, a car makes sense. Particularly in an environment where everyone has one and we tend to want to conform.
Then take Amsterdam (where I live). Most amenities are nearby, walking distance. Separate bike lanes on every single street. Everyone uses bikes. Parking is crap (canal parking is a nightmare) and expensive, as are cars and gas compared to rather ubiquitous tram, bus and metro service and a strong intercity train network. A car is more expensive, gives more friction, and wholly unnecessary.
The exception is if you work far outside the city. Train is fine but a personal car can be a bit more dependable and more flexible despite a nice train system.
In short, I think it makes a lot of sense to expect say a stereotypical Texan to be fine not having or needing a car in say a city like Amsterdam. He certainly wouldn't feel restricted to walk or use public transportation, rather my point is, that he'd feel restricted having to use a car in a city not designed for cars. I can't imagine anyone driving everywhere in Amsterdam. (the far suburbs are perhaps the exception, what we call 'outside the ring', but even then italian-style scooters are more popular than cars here)
Walkability is the first preference, though, because of how nice it is, and how predictable it is in terms of timing.
It's insane. I want to leave any time I want, pull up in a vast parking lot less than a hundred yards from my destination, my GPS guiding me every turn of the way, and get there in air conditioned comfort without getting all sweaty from walking everywhere. I want to be able to go to any restaurant or shop within a 20 mile radius without thinking twice about it, instead of being constrained to a few places within walking distance. I want to be able to drive home a car overflowing with groceries from any store I care to visit instead of having to spread my shopping across every day of the week so that I can carry it home on the bus/train.
On the restricted/liberated spectrum, I feel strongly on the restricted side. You can't get anywhere in this city without paying, either for parking or public transport or an uber/lyft/taxi ride. I feel imprisoned within walking distance, unless I have a specific errand that justifies the price of a ride.
Two words: Google Maps.
I think bigger cities have a journey planner website and a mobile app to go with it. For example, here's the one for London: http://tfl.gov.uk/
Also, the trunk transport lines (they can be metro, train or buses) should go every 10 minutes, or every 5 minutes, so one does not need a timetable to use them.
Copenhagen has mostly converged on that: the metro, trains, and trunk bus routes now mostly run 24/7, with the same route all the time, and high enough frequency that you don't have to worry about when they'll come and how to time connections (typically 2-7 minute headways during the day, 15-20 minutes at night, 30 at night for some buses). Works well, though of course it isn't cheap to operate such a level of service. I definitely find it easier to take night buses now in particular, as they've been moving more of them to this schedule. It's something I do only occasionally so I'd never remember what the "N" night-bus routes were, but now it's easy, because the answer is that it's just the same "A" bus routes as always, not special night buses.
P.S. based on the short amount of time I've spent in Texas I would rank it as one of the most horrible places I've visited on the face of this planet. I cannot comprehend how anyone would voluntarily live there. The same goes for anywhere (including suburban Australia) with vast expanses of low density housing. You have all of the bad parts of living in a city (low privacy, crime, lack of natural spaces) with none of the good (proximity to services, cultural density, high quality mass transit, entertainment etc).
Later on, I moved into the city, and though I loved some aspects of it, there were others I hated. Walking everywhere within a few blocks was great for example. We could actually think about where we wanted to eat while we were in the process of walking out the door and after we started feeling hungry! (mindblowing)
But other aspects simply sucked. Mass transit, in general, is terrible in most of the U.S. To get to the local subway (so I could get to work) from our apartment, I had 3 choices:
1) A 5 minute drive
2) A 30+ minute walk over sometimes unsafe walking areas (overpass with no sidewalk, couple other muddy/dirty no-sidewalk areas)
3) An hour long bus ride with two transfers. The buses never kept to schedule so a 20 minute wait to get on and at each transfer wasn't uncommon.
Once I got on the train, it was a pretty easy 45 minute ride with 1 transfer and then an easy 15 minute walk from the station to my office.
So say I wanted to take mass transit to get to work. I'm looking at up to ~3 hours 1 way. If everything clicks into place, it's still a minimum ~2 hour ride 1 way. These days we have google to help us find a route, and a quick check of my old route shows an approximately 1.5-2 hour commute via mass transit.
If I cut the trip to the subway down by driving, I'd either have to pay for parking (~$10/day) or get a ride from my wife.
If I walked, I'd probably get my work clothes (suit) dirty and endanger myself.
The alternative, to just drive into the office was a 1 hour drive with a $20/day parking fee.
The public transit experience sucked so bad, and consumed so much of my day, that I eventually just opted to drive myself in. I at least had the flexibility during the day to go places I couldn't walk to for lunch.
This wasn't NYC however. I've spent a few weeks here and there in NYC for work and pleasure, and almost always I just take the subway. I don't go to the outer boroughs much, and when I do I've never strayed far from a subway station -- I'm sure If I bothered to integrate the bus system into my life I'd be even happier. When I was in London, I did exactly that and the integrated system worked great (even if it was expensive). edit btw, does anybody else think it's weird NYC hasn't integrated either airport into the subway system?
I find the experience in NYC generally really good. I've done the same in London, Seoul, Barcelona and Paris and the only times I wish I had a car was when I was shopping and had to haul a bunch of groceries home on the local subway. In other cities more like where I live, with similar levels of service, I usually just use a car.
I was recently in Orlando and we decided to use the local bus system instead of a car. It was...okay. But bus service was so infrequent that if you missed your transfer you'd easily wait another 30-45 minutes for the next bus.
So to me there's kind of an uncanny valley mass transit falls into. If it's hyper dense like NYC, I think it's fantastic. The need for a car just isn't there most of the time, and it's cheap enough and the service is frequent enough that you don't end up standing around doing nothing for 30 minutes and hopefully don't have to make a half dozen transfers. There's a few cases where I really want a car, but you usually end up rethinking how your life functions and end up getting rid of lots of those (more frequent shopping and smaller groceries), but some are a still a pain (big packages). Fortunately, services like Zipcar (or just calling a cab) usually fills in those gaps.
However, most places are not ultra-large, ultra-dense first world cities and building a comparable system in those smaller cities just isn't economically feasible in general. Bus systems are too complicated compared to trams or trains, and without knowing your entire route and schedule ahead of time are hard to impossible to figure out off the cuff, and frequent stops means it takes forever to get anywhere. So even if they have the appearance of a robust mass transit system, practically they don't function in the same way a Tokyo or NYC or Paris does.
So I found it cool that was possible to live where I live, and do it without a car, but it's also possible in the sens that L.A. and NYC are within "walkable" distance from each other if you don't mind walking for 38 days nonstop.
note
today I live in a new style suburb. My house is an easy 5-10 minute walk to a pretty large array of shopping, restaurants, entertainment and services. Comparable to what you'd likely find within an easy 5-10 minute walk in most urban environments. I haven't taken my car shopping at my local grocery in about 2 months. My doctor, a movie theater, etc. are all walkable. There's a commuter bus lot in my neighborhood as well and for not too much money, I can take it into the city, it takes special lanes much of the way and turns a 2 hour drive into a 45 minute bus ride with a 20 minute easy walk.
I'm also a 20 minute drive from the nearest subway stop and the line is expanding in my direction. Hopefully in a few years it'll be a 5-10 minute drive, giving me tons of transit options.
So I kind of get the best of both worlds.
For LaGuardia, it's basically NIMBYism.
JFK has the AirTrain connections to the subway and LIRR. Why that, why not just an actual subway? Bureaucratic turf expansion - the airports are owned by the Port Authority who has deep pockets and wanted to build a system under its own control.
Being a NYC lifer, I always forget that's not normal - in other cities I'm always surprised to realize when the airport is smoothly integrated into the transit system.
I am pretty sure Brno, Czech Republic or Brandenburg, Germany are not wealthier per capita than Orlando and somehow they managed to build a decent transit system despite being much smaller towns.
EDIT: I just checked on wikipedia and Brandenburg an der Havel has a bit over 1/3 the population density of Orlando so it's definitely not a density issue. Wiki doesn't have density figures for Brno but it seemed comparable to Orlando.
It's in contrast to modern development trends you're seeing in NA - seems like almost all new commercial development is in the form of large parking lots + big box brands & international franchises in the same layout configurations give or take a liquor store or restaurant or two.
I was thinking about this the other day, how wasteful these mega-lot developments are - given all the other existing areas of a city that could be utilized & improved. Instead, you rarely see new commercial investment in older areas and slowly and surely parts of a city become ignored and deteriorate. If a neighborhood is lucky, investment may someday return - but usually in the form of an artificially incentivized (ie- tax/political) effort. Things might just naturally balance out and be less wasteful if small business was as pervasive as it is in Japan; thanks in large part to their zoning system.
I always assumed those closed stores were just a sign of bad economy or dwindling population and I am not completely convinced that that is the real reason, but this was explained to me as one major reason according to someone working in a project where they try to convince these building owners to let younger people use the space for their small business.
I live in a city of 400,000 people. The sheet metal factory has been in business for 65 years so I'm guessing that they were here first and as the city grew, the area was designated as a Neighbourhood Commercial Zone so they could stay but allow houses to be built since it is close to the centre.
Some other weird things in my area:
- there will be 3-4000 sq ft mansions and then down the street there are people living in basically what amounts to something a little bigger than a shack
- there is one new house near me that was literally built in a parking lot. It is surrounded on 3 sides by a parking lot and the back side faces right onto an apartment building.
- another house comes directly up against a graveyard
Yet, when it did come to living in those neighborhoods, would they change their mind?
Even the most busy office district can become quite dead and scary at night time, would you want to walk alone there at night when nobody else is around? Who watches over your house during the day?
The problem is also when you combine these time slices with the traveling - Everybody has to travel between the different zones at exactly the same time, causing major traffic congestions.
"Collectively, the write-off equates to an annual loss of 4% of Japan’s total GDP, not to mention mountains of construction waste."
sidenote: Thanks to Google and people like jcdavis I don't have to remember anything myself
How about zoning at the state level?
Sometimes we're told that it's a natural result of city living, sometimes we're told that without high rise apartment density, it's inevitable. Tokyo has 35 MM people, almost double the second largest first world city (Seoul, 21 MM), and has housing prices to income ratios far lower than London, New York, or Los Angeles. [0]
Tokyo has very few high rises, medium density (150/hectare or 40k/mi^2)[1], low traffic, quiet streets, and mostly single family residential homes. What it doesn't have is low density suburbs (everyplace is medium density), mandatory free parking, or a street grid that serves much car traffic.
There are eight first world cities over 10MM people and their housing to income ratios roughly run like this:
(Middle class people can easily buy homes) Osaka/Kyoto Seoul Mexico City Tokyo (Things start to get really expensive) Paris Los Angeles London New York (Insanely expensive)
Japanese zoning has a lot to be proud of. If Nagoya were a smidgen larger, Japan would dominate the liveable and affordable part of the list even more.
[0]http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/japan-shows-the-way-to-affor...
[1] SF is about 70/ha incl. parks, Manhattan 260/ha, Paris (20 arrondissements) 210/ha
If you want to lower housing prices, get rid of rent control policies and ease up on the zoning. Developers will create more housing units and you'll see a substantial increase in supply, leading to a lowering of the price level.
The problem is that those already living in the city don't want this. They are against new development and they're all for rent control. They want to continue paying artificially low prices, while keeping anyone else who may want to live there out. Just a tad bit selfish.
One of the big complaints about "increasing rents" is more of the matter that low-income rental stock is almost never built, whereas luxury apartments are built constantly (though they have to provide a number of low-income units that are the same quality as everything else in the building). The low-income stock still exists, it's just the most sought after rental stock in the Boston market.
This is partly because they're innately more desirable locations -- people are willing to pay more to live in a city with major sports teams, museums, opera houses, universities, shopping centers, etc.
housing prices to income ratios
The most recent statistics I've seen show Vancouver as having the highest housing price to income ratio; while Vancouver's median housing price is relatively modest (closer to Santa Barbara than San Francisco or San Jose), Vancouver's median household income is quite low (around the same as Minneapolis or Baltimore).
Interestingly, if you look at Vancouver's recent housing price trends, you'll see two very different trends: Prices of detached houses have roughly doubled in the past 8 years, while prices of condos have barely kept up with inflation. This makes perfect sense in terms of geography: There is no more land available for detached houses in Vancouver, but condo construction is booming (a few years ago Vancouver had more units of condos under construction than New York).
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/scant-e...
Zoning alone doesnt solve affordability though (SF is probably the outlier in this case as growth has been constrained for so long). Much of it is down to economic issues and policy. In Japan prices fell drastically from the boom due to large scale debt restructuring which has also led to a decade of stagflation.
Tokyo, Osaka, Mexico City, Seoul, and (to a lesser extent) Paris don't have steep gradients of density from center to edge and have better defined natural boundaries between urban and rural.
The blending in the USA edge cities is the result of heroic subsidy levels and Stalinist command and control zoning and minimum free parking mandate policies. It is not natural or compatible with free markets.
The areas I quoted in the USA (NY County, NY and SF County, CA) are very specific and not at all fuzzy.
[0] http://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/per... [1] http://www.uctc.net/access/37/access37_sprawl.shtml
- France population is increasing steadily, while Japanese population is in for a dive. You cannot reasonably expect land prices to soar in Japan like they will in Paris, since going forward there will be less and less people sharing said land.
- Earthquakes (and the lack thereof in France). In France anything less than 50 years old is considered new. In Japan a house over 30 years old has negative value, and such properties are priced as follows: price of land minus price of house destruction/removal.
If you are sitting on a lot of cash you simply cannot just buy anything in Tokyo or Osaka and wait for prices to rise. So you have much less speculative investments to drive prices up.
The population point isn't super relevant because people are still moving into Tokyo (for work or school mainly), so Tokyo's actually growing _faster_ than Paris is (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+Tokyo+ove...)
The big difference being that almost nowhere in the Tokyo metropolitan area has low-density buildings (compared to people in nicer suburbs on the outskirts of paris with huge housing.)
The fact that there are so many old buildings in Paris is also a consequence of making things hard to build in Paris. There's more than enough demand to make obscene amounts of money with a decent sized apartment complex in downtown Paris (if you could build it). It's not like Tokyo is falling over every 10 years to earthquakes.
One thing is that houses in some Tokyo suburbs are built like crap, so old houses are falling apart (not building many houses out of stone). I think more recent housing is built more sturdily (not sure though)
Anyways, the comparaison is fair, because the prime difference is what we're talking about : Zoning laws. There is nothing magical about Paris which makes it impossible to use the same techniques to solve this problem.
What about house size? I looked into the original study linked there [1], and it does have a section about house size, but I couldn't figure out if and how they control for size when calculating the median house price.
If they don't control for size, then it's not very surprising that Tokyo scores better than the US cities, given that the median Tokyo house is about half the size of the median US house.