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"By this metric at least, Tokyo fares far better than comparable cities - no lede buried." But to make that comparison fair, you need to control for a lot of i
by timr 10y ago
"By this metric at least, Tokyo fares far better than comparable cities - no lede buried."
But to make that comparison fair, you need to control for a lot of important factors. I've named a couple of big ones. There are others (like land area - Tokyo is huge. SF and Vancouver are tiny and constrained by geography.)
This article simply asserts that Tokyo is affordable (which, again, it is not), and that its "affordability" is due to construction. There's no real data here that supports that conclusion. It might be "relatively" more affordable than the frothiest global markets, but SF and Vancouver have been experiencing much higher population growth over the last decade, and SF in particular has been ground zero for a massive speculative bubble. The comparison is apples and oranges.
- ska 10y agoYou can argue with the conclusions or methods , sure. But to claim that they buried the lede was just disingenuous.
- timr 10y agoThe article's thesis is contradicted by the evidence cited by the article itself: Japan's cities are not "affordable" to the people who live there. Arguing that Japanese cities are "more affordable" than other, less-affordable cities is a truism; by definition, every city that is less expensive than another city is doing something that makes it cheaper. This fact alone provides no useful information. But some people really want to believe that Japan's building habits are the answer, and not, say, their 30-year recession, or sprawl, or any of dozens of other factors. Perhaps "buried the lede" is not the right phrase for this kind of thing, but it's still nonsense.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoThe Tokyo metropolitan area contains the entire population of California in a region the size of the Bay Area.