10 ms·

In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https:

In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60 https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3... An overview of zoning practices there: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

mc32 8y ago
Granted, but a decreasing population and a growing number of uninhabited houses sure doesn’t add to housing pressure. So it helps, but it may not account for all of it.
- darksaints 8y ago
  That's not true for Tokyo, which has been growing rapidly for 30 years now. Yet Tokyo's prices have remained flat during that time.
  - timr 8y ago
    You can't just cherry pick a single factor: Tokyo sprawls, but it's not especially dense. It has smaller buildings, much smaller apartments, and higher costs per square foot. Japan has better transit than the west, which makes long-distance commutes feasible. Moreover, there's a culture (and a tax system) that treats housing as a depreciating asset. On top of all of that, the Japanese tend to live together in communal units, with children living with parents long past the point where it would be considered okay in the west. And housing is still expensive relative to the local economy (which has been depressed for 30 years, by the way). All of these factors (and more) result in the housing economy you see in Japan. HN people love to fixate on zoning, but it's not even close to the whole story. If we suddenly asked westerners to live the way Japanese people do, there would be open revolt and riots in the streets.
    - saosebastiao 8y ago
      Fixation on anything other than housing supply is fixating on irrelevant noise. That includes density...there are plenty of dense cities that nonetheless restrict new supply and are thus unaffordable. Other affordable first world cities have accomplished the same thing as Tokyo via other means, including social housing (Vienna, Singapore), sprawl (Houston, Louisville), and density (Chicago, Montreal). There is one thing they all have in common: they all allow housing supply to meet demand. Anything else is a distraction.
      - timr 8y ago
        "Fixation on anything other than housing supply is fixating on irrelevant noise. That includes density." That's like "fixating" on the money supply. Sure, having more of it lowers prices. The point is: how do you get there? What are the side-effects of your proposal? These are not simple questions. Fixating on zoning, at the exclusion of all other considerations, is a facile answer.
        saosebastiao 8y ago
        Zoning is the primary means by which supply is restricted in the US. That isn't facile, that is ordinary root cause analysis and reasoning in action. Japan is proof that zoning doesn't have to represent a restriction on housing supply. But don't just dismiss Tokyo because you think other cultural factors are at play: Montreal, Chicago, Dallas, Calgary, and plentiful other US/Canadian cities have confirmed what Tokyo has already taught us.
      - notfromhere 8y ago
        Chicago is cheap because the city lost nearly a million people in the last 60 years. But if you limit it to the places folks moving to the city move, it is not cheap. Chicago city average really hides the fact that the places most people would consider living in Chicago aren't super cheap; still cheap-ish when compared to other coastal cities
imgabe 8y ago
I feel like this is the case for a lot of the differences between the US and other countries. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as "just make the Federal government do it for everyone". The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US and delegates everything else to state and local governments.
- pitaj 8y ago
  > The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US I wish. If that was true I'd be much happier with politics than I am.
  - skh 8y ago
    Your response only makes sense if the there are no constitutionally enforced limits on the powers of the federal government vs. state governments. The Medicare portion of the ACA being struck down by the Supreme Court is a notable counterexample to your comment. The check on federal powers may not go as far as you like but laughing in response to the comment that was made is in poor taste.
    - pitaj 8y ago
      I didn't mean any disrespect, but fair enough. Edited my original comment.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The Medicare portion of the ACA being struck down by the Supreme Court is a notable counterexample to your comment. Except that, AFAICT, didn't happen. (Though there is a current challenge to the Constitutionality of the Medicare changes, among other things.) You may be thinking of the mandatory (for continued state participation in Medicaid) expansion of Medicaid portion of the ACA being made optional rather than mandatory by the Supreme Court. Of course, one could argue that is an example that is arbitrary and, while it certainly evidences judicial limits, is hard to connect to it's Constitutional pretext, as it explicitly requires that both pre-expansion Medicaid are post-expansion Medicaid are Constitutional federal programs, but that Congress is somehow barred from replacing one with the others except by consent of the individual participating state.
2bitmachine 8y ago
In Japan, most housing is also a depreciating asset and isn’t used as an investment vehicle for global Capital. You need zoning changes AND this depreciation/disincentive to investment outside individual ownership if you want to recreate their affordability.
kazinator 8y ago
I'm for Japanese zoning, and Japanese anything else, provided we make everyone "Japanese" first: bred with the same common code of decency. Also, Japan is NIMBY at the national level, as in "not on my island". For instance, accepting few refugees. Smart in other ways, not just the zoning, you see. They protect their culture.
- ahoy 8y ago
  Ah, the classic "only monocultures can work toward the social good, if we'd stop accepting 'outsiders' we could do the same" trope. It's tired and xenophobic. The presence of foreigners isn't why laws that benefit already-wealthy real estate developers persist.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Exclusionary zoning developed in response to Supreme Court cases striking down state laws making it illegal for african americans to buy property in majority white neighborhoods: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/exclusionary-zoning-continues-racial-segregations-ugly-work/?session=1 https://tcf.org/content/commentary/exclusionary-zoning-conti... People are racist and xenophobic, we know that. It’s not xenophobic to point out that, within a democratic framework, peoples’ racism and xenophobia, coupled with a hetrogenous population, could make it difficult to implement policies that more homogenous populations implement successfully. For example, one mah argue that our justice system is strongly influenced by racism (an uncontroversial assertion, I think) and that’s a major reason why our voters prefer harsher sentencing and more aggressive policing than in Western Europe.
    - kazinator 8y ago
      That's right; so why would Japan have developed exclusionary zoning, when the question doesn't even arise that the vast majority your neighbors will be other than Japanese wherever you go, with the help of national policies that help keep it that way.
      - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
burlesona 8y ago
Federal zoning would be really difficult to get done constitutionally, but state level zoning wouldn’t be as hard and would have most of the same benefits, ie. reducing the power the nimbys. However there’s no reason to think that would fix it all, transportation planning, design, and funding is almost entirely a state and federal affair, and the nimbys still torpedo all sorts of things that would be great for the region at the expense of a particular neighborhood or block. To some extent though, that’s a feature of democracy, not a bug. There are a bunch of reasons we’re in the mess we’re in, and federal programs and subsidies contribute a lot. The threat to take away federal funding for places that don’t accept housing growth may be more effective than a brute force approach in the end, who knows.
- ende 8y ago
  Right. There’s no need to take this “all the way to the top” (ie Federal). States can easily supplant the zoning powers of their local governments.
  - xxpor 8y ago
    >States can easily supplant the zoning powers of their local governments. Depends on how home rule is set up in that state's constitution.
    - CamTin 8y ago
      Most state constitutions are relatively simple to amend. Certainly much easier than the U.S. Constitution.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    And they do; see the Housing Accountability Act in California, for example.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    Won't happen. The Nimbys have all of the money and can influence the votes in extraordinary ways. Look at Seattle, they won't budge and we have an enormous amount of single family housing. Our mayor is also nearly entirely useless as well, and seemingly only cares about sports teams. The amount of propaganda that would be pushed out to crush any changes to zoning would be on historic levels.
paulsutter 8y ago
Japan and China also have one national building code. A very different issue, yes, but should aimpkify the challenge of construction technology (in the US building codes are localized)
- nradov 8y ago
  All of the heavily populated areas in Japan have a similar climate and risk of natural disasters. Those factors are much more variable in the USA. A building code that works in San Francisco to protect against earthquakes would be ineffective in Miami where the risks are flooding and wind.
teachrdan 8y ago
Japan is also the unique case of a developed country with declining population. That must contribute to the higher availability of affordable housing, right?
- GreeniFi 8y ago
  Far from unique. Look at Europe.
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    The aging population is countered by powerful forces: - movement into few urban mega-centers (you can't even say "into cities" because there are plenty of cities with little or even negativ population gain) - immigration (e.g. see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-immigration/immigrant-population-hits-new-high-in-germany-idUSKBN1AH3EP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-immigration/immig...) -- and they mostly want into the already crowded areas, of course - aging population needs different homes than young families
educationdata 8y ago
Is there any data to support that Tokyo has more affordable apartment than New York? I have seen numbers compare rental price of 1/2/3 bedroom(s) in Tokyo to New York [1,2], but I do not trust those numbers, because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. I don't have a statistics for this, but there is an example [3]. OK. I found a table of comparison by sq instead of # of bedrooms [4]. [1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Japan&city1=Tokyo&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/one-bedroom-apartment-rental-cost-london-new-york-tokyo-a7634176.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/one-bedroom-apartme... [3] https://www.lifewhereimfrom.com/lwif-x-ep4-what-is-an-average-japanese-apartment-like/ https://www.lifewhereimfrom.com/lwif-x-ep4-what-is-an-averag... [4] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-tokyo-compared-to-other-world-cities/ https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-tokyo...
- elif 8y ago
  Tokyo is anomalous to the entire world. There is no city like it in terms of population density. It is literally NYC + LA + Chicago, the largest 3 US metropolises, combined. It would make more sense to use a remotely comparable city for comparison, like Osaka (still larger than any US metro)
- captain_perl 8y ago
  > because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. No, it doesn't matter to most people. A country with smaller apartments will have smaller appliances, smaller computers, etc. - like Japan.
oliwarner 8y ago
Housing in Japan is culturally unique. The average house depreciates completely after just 22 years. People just don't buy used houses. It's folly to compare zoning rules when the spirit of the law is so different.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  This is a big difference between the two. I'm totally ok with Japanese zoning, if we get Japanese depreciation and all housing is required to become worthless after 2 decades. However, YIMBYs only want half of that -- they want Japanese zoning, with American infinite appreciation. Which is disastrous to basically everyone who works for a living.
  - kcorbitt 8y ago
    > YIMBYs want [...] American infinite appreciation. I'd appreciate a source on this. Most self-identified YIMBYs I've met in San Francisco would be ecstatic if housing prices stabilized or fell – in fact that's one of their primary objectives. Vocal YIMBYs I've met are either (1) young people who don't own property, for whom the current stratospheric prices are out of reach, or (2) employers who have to convince those young people to come and work in the Bay Area, despite the unbearably high cost of real estate.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - oliwarner 8y ago
      Are these really YIMBYs? Do they own the property they want to live in (ie is it their back yard?), or are they renting nearby and want to own a nicer property? I'm certainly not arguing that some markets need resetting, but as parent says, this isn't what the people who want this want. They'll sell progressively crappier and crappier property because that's what property markets will bear when unregulated. The only way to depreciate without lowering quality is area decline. Sounds awful but I honestly think some places need this. If they keep growing, keep sucking in high paid jobs, the lower classes (that the upper classes need) won't be able to afford to live where they need to.

mc32 8y ago

Granted, but a decreasing population and a growing number of uninhabited houses sure doesn’t add to housing pressure. So it helps, but it may not account for all of it.

darksaints 8y ago
That's not true for Tokyo, which has been growing rapidly for 30 years now. Yet Tokyo's prices have remained flat during that time.
- timr 8y ago
  You can't just cherry pick a single factor: Tokyo sprawls, but it's not especially dense. It has smaller buildings, much smaller apartments, and higher costs per square foot. Japan has better transit than the west, which makes long-distance commutes feasible. Moreover, there's a culture (and a tax system) that treats housing as a depreciating asset. On top of all of that, the Japanese tend to live together in communal units, with children living with parents long past the point where it would be considered okay in the west. And housing is still expensive relative to the local economy (which has been depressed for 30 years, by the way). All of these factors (and more) result in the housing economy you see in Japan. HN people love to fixate on zoning, but it's not even close to the whole story. If we suddenly asked westerners to live the way Japanese people do, there would be open revolt and riots in the streets.
  - saosebastiao 8y ago
    Fixation on anything other than housing supply is fixating on irrelevant noise. That includes density...there are plenty of dense cities that nonetheless restrict new supply and are thus unaffordable. Other affordable first world cities have accomplished the same thing as Tokyo via other means, including social housing (Vienna, Singapore), sprawl (Houston, Louisville), and density (Chicago, Montreal). There is one thing they all have in common: they all allow housing supply to meet demand. Anything else is a distraction.
    - timr 8y ago
      "Fixation on anything other than housing supply is fixating on irrelevant noise. That includes density." That's like "fixating" on the money supply. Sure, having more of it lowers prices. The point is: how do you get there? What are the side-effects of your proposal? These are not simple questions. Fixating on zoning, at the exclusion of all other considerations, is a facile answer.
      - saosebastiao 8y ago
        Zoning is the primary means by which supply is restricted in the US. That isn't facile, that is ordinary root cause analysis and reasoning in action. Japan is proof that zoning doesn't have to represent a restriction on housing supply. But don't just dismiss Tokyo because you think other cultural factors are at play: Montreal, Chicago, Dallas, Calgary, and plentiful other US/Canadian cities have confirmed what Tokyo has already taught us.
    - notfromhere 8y ago
      Chicago is cheap because the city lost nearly a million people in the last 60 years. But if you limit it to the places folks moving to the city move, it is not cheap. Chicago city average really hides the fact that the places most people would consider living in Chicago aren't super cheap; still cheap-ish when compared to other coastal cities

imgabe 8y ago

I feel like this is the case for a lot of the differences between the US and other countries. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as "just make the Federal government do it for everyone". The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US and delegates everything else to state and local governments.

pitaj 8y ago
> The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US I wish. If that was true I'd be much happier with politics than I am.
- skh 8y ago
  Your response only makes sense if the there are no constitutionally enforced limits on the powers of the federal government vs. state governments. The Medicare portion of the ACA being struck down by the Supreme Court is a notable counterexample to your comment. The check on federal powers may not go as far as you like but laughing in response to the comment that was made is in poor taste.
  - pitaj 8y ago
    I didn't mean any disrespect, but fair enough. Edited my original comment.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The Medicare portion of the ACA being struck down by the Supreme Court is a notable counterexample to your comment. Except that, AFAICT, didn't happen. (Though there is a current challenge to the Constitutionality of the Medicare changes, among other things.) You may be thinking of the mandatory (for continued state participation in Medicaid) expansion of Medicaid portion of the ACA being made optional rather than mandatory by the Supreme Court. Of course, one could argue that is an example that is arbitrary and, while it certainly evidences judicial limits, is hard to connect to it's Constitutional pretext, as it explicitly requires that both pre-expansion Medicaid are post-expansion Medicaid are Constitutional federal programs, but that Congress is somehow barred from replacing one with the others except by consent of the individual participating state.

2bitmachine 8y ago

In Japan, most housing is also a depreciating asset and isn’t used as an investment vehicle for global Capital. You need zoning changes AND this depreciation/disincentive to investment outside individual ownership if you want to recreate their affordability.

kazinator 8y ago

I'm for Japanese zoning, and Japanese anything else, provided we make everyone "Japanese" first: bred with the same common code of decency. Also, Japan is NIMBY at the national level, as in "not on my island". For instance, accepting few refugees. Smart in other ways, not just the zoning, you see. They protect their culture.

ahoy 8y ago
Ah, the classic "only monocultures can work toward the social good, if we'd stop accepting 'outsiders' we could do the same" trope. It's tired and xenophobic. The presence of foreigners isn't why laws that benefit already-wealthy real estate developers persist.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Exclusionary zoning developed in response to Supreme Court cases striking down state laws making it illegal for african americans to buy property in majority white neighborhoods: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/exclusionary-zoning-continues-racial-segregations-ugly-work/?session=1 https://tcf.org/content/commentary/exclusionary-zoning-conti... People are racist and xenophobic, we know that. It’s not xenophobic to point out that, within a democratic framework, peoples’ racism and xenophobia, coupled with a hetrogenous population, could make it difficult to implement policies that more homogenous populations implement successfully. For example, one mah argue that our justice system is strongly influenced by racism (an uncontroversial assertion, I think) and that’s a major reason why our voters prefer harsher sentencing and more aggressive policing than in Western Europe.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    That's right; so why would Japan have developed exclusionary zoning, when the question doesn't even arise that the vast majority your neighbors will be other than Japanese wherever you go, with the help of national policies that help keep it that way.
    - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

burlesona 8y ago

Federal zoning would be really difficult to get done constitutionally, but state level zoning wouldn’t be as hard and would have most of the same benefits, ie. reducing the power the nimbys. However there’s no reason to think that would fix it all, transportation planning, design, and funding is almost entirely a state and federal affair, and the nimbys still torpedo all sorts of things that would be great for the region at the expense of a particular neighborhood or block. To some extent though, that’s a feature of democracy, not a bug. There are a bunch of reasons we’re in the mess we’re in, and federal programs and subsidies contribute a lot. The threat to take away federal funding for places that don’t accept housing growth may be more effective than a brute force approach in the end, who knows.

ende 8y ago
Right. There’s no need to take this “all the way to the top” (ie Federal). States can easily supplant the zoning powers of their local governments.
- xxpor 8y ago
  >States can easily supplant the zoning powers of their local governments. Depends on how home rule is set up in that state's constitution.
  - CamTin 8y ago
    Most state constitutions are relatively simple to amend. Certainly much easier than the U.S. Constitution.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  And they do; see the Housing Accountability Act in California, for example.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  Won't happen. The Nimbys have all of the money and can influence the votes in extraordinary ways. Look at Seattle, they won't budge and we have an enormous amount of single family housing. Our mayor is also nearly entirely useless as well, and seemingly only cares about sports teams. The amount of propaganda that would be pushed out to crush any changes to zoning would be on historic levels.

paulsutter 8y ago

Japan and China also have one national building code. A very different issue, yes, but should aimpkify the challenge of construction technology (in the US building codes are localized)

nradov 8y ago
All of the heavily populated areas in Japan have a similar climate and risk of natural disasters. Those factors are much more variable in the USA. A building code that works in San Francisco to protect against earthquakes would be ineffective in Miami where the risks are flooding and wind.

teachrdan 8y ago

Japan is also the unique case of a developed country with declining population. That must contribute to the higher availability of affordable housing, right?

GreeniFi 8y ago
Far from unique. Look at Europe.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  The aging population is countered by powerful forces: - movement into few urban mega-centers (you can't even say "into cities" because there are plenty of cities with little or even negativ population gain) - immigration (e.g. see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-immigration/immigrant-population-hits-new-high-in-germany-idUSKBN1AH3EP https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-immigration/immig...) -- and they mostly want into the already crowded areas, of course - aging population needs different homes than young families

educationdata 8y ago

Is there any data to support that Tokyo has more affordable apartment than New York? I have seen numbers compare rental price of 1/2/3 bedroom(s) in Tokyo to New York [1,2], but I do not trust those numbers, because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. I don't have a statistics for this, but there is an example [3]. OK. I found a table of comparison by sq instead of # of bedrooms [4]. [1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Japan&city1=Tokyo&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/one-bedroom-apartment-rental-cost-london-new-york-tokyo-a7634176.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/one-bedroom-apartme... [3] https://www.lifewhereimfrom.com/lwif-x-ep4-what-is-an-average-japanese-apartment-like/ https://www.lifewhereimfrom.com/lwif-x-ep4-what-is-an-averag... [4] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-tokyo-compared-to-other-world-cities/ https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-tokyo...

elif 8y ago
Tokyo is anomalous to the entire world. There is no city like it in terms of population density. It is literally NYC + LA + Chicago, the largest 3 US metropolises, combined. It would make more sense to use a remotely comparable city for comparison, like Osaka (still larger than any US metro)
captain_perl 8y ago
> because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. No, it doesn't matter to most people. A country with smaller apartments will have smaller appliances, smaller computers, etc. - like Japan.

oliwarner 8y ago

Housing in Japan is culturally unique. The average house depreciates completely after just 22 years. People just don't buy used houses. It's folly to compare zoning rules when the spirit of the law is so different.

maxsilver 8y ago
This is a big difference between the two. I'm totally ok with Japanese zoning, if we get Japanese depreciation and all housing is required to become worthless after 2 decades. However, YIMBYs only want half of that -- they want Japanese zoning, with American infinite appreciation. Which is disastrous to basically everyone who works for a living.
- kcorbitt 8y ago
  > YIMBYs want [...] American infinite appreciation. I'd appreciate a source on this. Most self-identified YIMBYs I've met in San Francisco would be ecstatic if housing prices stabilized or fell – in fact that's one of their primary objectives. Vocal YIMBYs I've met are either (1) young people who don't own property, for whom the current stratospheric prices are out of reach, or (2) employers who have to convince those young people to come and work in the Bay Area, despite the unbearably high cost of real estate.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - oliwarner 8y ago
    Are these really YIMBYs? Do they own the property they want to live in (ie is it their back yard?), or are they renting nearby and want to own a nicer property? I'm certainly not arguing that some markets need resetting, but as parent says, this isn't what the people who want this want. They'll sell progressively crappier and crappier property because that's what property markets will bear when unregulated. The only way to depreciate without lowering quality is area decline. Sounds awful but I honestly think some places need this. If they keep growing, keep sucking in high paid jobs, the lower classes (that the upper classes need) won't be able to afford to live where they need to.