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If the Tokyo we know didn’t exist because long ago they enacted single-family-houses-only zoning, I’m sure we’d see a comment like this explaining why it would
by raldi 5y ago
If the Tokyo we know didn’t exist because long ago they enacted single-family-houses-only zoning, I’m sure we’d see a comment like this explaining why it would be impossible to scale its metropolitan-area population to 14M people, or find 14M people who would want to live there.
- thaumaturgy 5y agoI put about an hour of effort into gathering the numbers and citations for my comment. Flippant low-effort replies like yours really discourage putting any effort into commenting on HN. I suppose I should have instead just said, "if raldi were right, the whole world would be Tokyo by now, wouldn't it?" and left it at that.
- raldi 5y agoI appreciate your enumeration of some of the things that have to happen to make a city grow, but I don’t understand how you bring it to conclude that any of these would be insurmountable or unprecedented. Every major metropolitan area in the history of the world went through a process like this. Sometimes within a single generation. If demand tapers off at some point, growth will stop too. That doesn’t seem like an argument against letting it happen. As for “if raldi were right, then why isn’t the whole world Tokyo?”, the answer is that there are precious few places that people really want to live in (barring a state-created housing shortage making it unaffordable). Tokyo is one; California is another.