> The problem is all the side issues that come with density, most importantly suicide and other mental health and general wellbeing issue rates. Density in its

> The problem is all the side issues that come with density, most importantly suicide and other mental health and general wellbeing issue rates. Density in itself doesn't drive suicide rates. There's a lot of factors that go into this, and it's reductive to blame this simply on density. > Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1] You're linking to an article about luxury rentals and using that to say Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets, but that's misleading at best. Yes, you can pay a lot of money for the high end apartments here, but you can also find super cheap apartments in central tokyo, near the yamanote (central) line. > No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies. There's government housing, which is super popular, but it's not considerably cheaper than market-rate housing. The biggest difference is the lack of fees and deposits. Government housing is a drop in the bucket of overall housing though. Low-income people live in cheap apartments, or shared houses. > Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2]. Though houses were historically torn down after 20-30 years, that's becoming less frequent as construction quality has increased, and as the current earthquake standards are quite high. This is also not true for highrises and lowrise multi-housing complexes. Zoning does play a large part in this, as Tokyo's zoning laws are considerably less strict, and don't allow NIMBYs to stop construction.