Japanese zoning

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

by nkurz • 12 years ago

196 68 12 years ago

urbankchoze.blogspot.com

desdiv• 12 years ago

I was as giddy as a school girl when I read the phrase "euclidean zoning", but alas, it has nothing to Euclidean geometry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Euclid_v._Ambler

mrschwabe3• 12 years ago

The difference in zoning practices is super evident the moment you walk down any city street in Japan for the first time. In Japan, there are little shops and mom & pop restaurants on just about every street corner amidst even the most heavy residential areas. In many cases, the business owners live in the dwelling above.

As a north american, I found this odd initially; but came to really appreciate it given all the excellent options for eating nearby!

themodelplumber3• 12 years ago

Same here. When I left Japan to move back to the U.S., some of the things that seemed really odd to me were: 1) sweeter food, 2) obese people, 3) old cars driving around, 4) having to drive everywhere, even just to get to a small store, and 5) arriving via car at stores that sold things like electronics and office supplies that looked like throwbacks to a bygone era compared to what they had in Japan. As a small example of the latter, in 1997 I was using the Hi-Tec-C pen and I'm pretty sure I didn't see it for sale in the U.S. until 2007 or so.

sampo3• 12 years ago

4) having to drive everywhere

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?

cpitman• 12 years ago

As far as (4) and (5), that probably speaks to where you were in Japan. Outside of the major cities there is plenty of driving going on. Like in Hokkaido, where Sapporo has a nice transit system but outside that is a vast expanse of roads. (1) is fun, because to someone with an American sweet tooth it was easy to just suck on their candy nonstop.

obviouslygreen2• 12 years ago

Yep. I really, really dislike cities in the US (where I'm from), but now I live in Shinjuku, and it's great! Being able to just stroll down any alley and find an incredible amount of varied restaurants and shopped stacked on top of each other is brilliant. Definitely one of the reasons I like it here.

mrschwabe3• 12 years ago

Indeed. Small business is literally woven into Japanese culture :)

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.

pouetpouet• 12 years ago

I live in Europe, and love the bakeries within walking distance. I can walk to the movies or the opera house in a city of 300k.

bemmu2• 12 years ago

One downside I've noticed in Japan is that when the owners get older, even after stopping work on the shop they might still want to continue living in the space above, but reluctant to let anyone else use it as it is directly connected to their living space. This can result in shopping streets with many small stores that are permanently shut down.

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.

mrschwabe3• 12 years ago

If they own the shops and/or the dwellings above then I guess it's their right to retain the property even after they retire. If those younger people want to use those spaces, it's on them to make a compelling offer to acquire or rent or lease or however they want to structure a deal. Creative negotiation!

sfall2• 12 years ago

Zoning on a national level in the US would be horrible. I bet it can have some draw backs in Japan when you are trying to get something rezoned.

themodelplumber3• 12 years ago

Japan is notorious for bureaucracy. Just entering a government center and asking a simple question is sometimes enough to start a (figurative) three-ring circus.

esfandia• 12 years ago

See Ikiru by Kurosawa for an admittedly fictional and old example.

azernik• 12 years ago

Possibly, but probably outweighed by the flexible nature of the zoning system, where more is allowed for a given zoning classification and there are fewer classifications. i.e. developers probably end up dealing with the zoning bureaucracy and politics less than they would in the US.

twic• 12 years ago

Why would it be horrible?

How about zoning at the state level?

sfall2• 12 years ago

a regional or state level would be much accurate comparison.

WildUtah4• 12 years ago

It's worth nothing that bigger cities in most first world countries generally have more expensive housing, rent or buy. Wages rise in bigger cities, too, but not as fast as housing prices.

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

maratd• 12 years ago

Wages rise in bigger cities, too, but not as fast as housing prices.

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.

liveoneggs• 12 years ago

this is false and boston proved it

kjs3• 12 years ago

I wish folks who got a B in Econ 101 would quit thinking that class explained all economics everywhere.

cperciva• 12 years ago

bigger cities in most first world countries generally have more expensive housing

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).

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

Vancouver is a distorted market...Any market that is inudated with Chinese speculators is.

twelvechairs• 12 years ago

As always comparing cities is problematic as there is no good way to determine what a city's boundaries are. The economic and transport autonomy/independence of outer areas of each 'city' varies wildly (as well as density). Some of these cities will include vast areas which may be comparable to, but excluded from the other.

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.

WildUtah4• 12 years ago

In the US context, boundaries matter because there is a steep density gradient from center to suburb. There is a technique called weighted perceived density to fix the difference and make cities comparable. [0,1]

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

Xixi• 12 years ago

I'm not completely sure it's fair to compare Tokyo or Osaka to the like of Paris. There are two major differences that impact prices:

- 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.

rtpg• 12 years ago

the waiting for prices to go up is a consequence of zoning laws. There's pretty much a fixed supply of housing in Paris and a rising population, so people just sit on it.

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.

bemmu2• 12 years ago

I see a lot of advertising for "earthquake proof" tech to reduce the amount of shaking in houses. I wonder if this 30+ years = worthless thinking in Japan will continue, or if it is just for this generation of houses.

nandemo• 12 years ago

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.

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.

[1] http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf

abandonliberty2• 12 years ago

Japan has some of the most awesome architecture as house resale value is extremely poor.

jcdavis• 12 years ago

For those curious - this is apparently due to laws regarding depreciation: http://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-hou...

"Collectively, the write-off equates to an annual loss of 4% of Japan’s total GDP, not to mention mountains of construction waste."

abandonliberty2• 12 years ago

This is an awesome article, I recommend clicking on it if just for the pictures.

sidenote: Thanks to Google and people like jcdavis I don't have to remember anything myself

cskau• 12 years ago

I'm not seeing anything in there regarding any law. My understanding of the issue is that it's simply the norm. Expectation is houses only last 30 years, so nobody spends more to make them last beyond that.

JDDunn9• 12 years ago

It's unfortunate that zoning laws seem to keep us far away from our food and nature. The inventor of the skyscraper intended it to allow for high population density and be surrounded by nature. China's trying to do this with Sky City, but it would be hard anywhere else.

_delirium4• 12 years ago

I think this is one case where the law is largely following many people's desires, at least in the USA. I used to live in a city with no zoning (Houston), and yet it was exactly the same thing: no retail or commercial anywhere near the residential area, and very low density. Why? Houstonians reinvented zoning via private-sector contract law. Since many people apparently want to live in residential-only neighborhoods—or at least have fears of what kind of noise/crime/etc. might happen if the alternative were allowed—developers cater to that by putting "residential-only" deed restrictions on new developments, so there are large tracts of land where it's prohibited to use the land for commercial activity. Usually higher-density redevelopment, or even subdividing/subletting, are also prohibited by the contracts.

kiba• 12 years ago

They believe they want to live in residential-only neighborhoods? They believe they want to drive cars everywhere?

Yet, when it did come to living in those neighborhoods, would they change their mind?

WildUtah4• 12 years ago

Houston's minimum parking laws, setback and construction envelope laws, and other suburban style mandates make it impossible to build in the traditional city style of Europe or Japan (or the USA). There's somewhat more flexibility than some other US cities but something close to modern suburbanism is mandated in most cases.

mattm• 12 years ago

From the chart, I probably live in a Neighbourhood Commercial Zone which is weird for me coming from Canada. There are small factories making sheet metal or agricultural products right next door to or across the street from someone's home.

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

po3• 12 years ago

Some anecdotes from my neighborhood in a quiet mostly residential part of Tokyo (All of this is about a 20 minute walk from the famous "Shibuya Scramble" super-busy intersection that you see all the time):

- 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)

minikomi• 12 years ago

Vietnamese embassy? We live very close it seems!

poglet• 12 years ago

Sounds like your describing my area, on the very edge of Tokyo near nothing special.

sdrothrock• 12 years ago

Buildings tend to have walls that are built right up to the street edge forming a 'corridor' feel.

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.

po3• 12 years ago

With all of the prius and electric vehicles, you can't count on your ears to save you anymore anyway.

Tokyo gets a lot of things right about zoning but the way bike lanes are designed here is absolutely maddening.

ajslater• 12 years ago

The lack of bicycle lanes in Japan always seemed odd to me. So many bicycles on the sidewalk.

po3• 12 years ago

Oh! Also, if you're in Tokyo in November, come on out the the Hacker News Tokyo user meetup. We can discuss all of this in great detail in person:

http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/

obviouslygreen2• 12 years ago

This meshes with my impression that the separation here is almost nonexistent; the zones are more a matter of density than category. The lower residential zones can't have quite the same type of commerce in them, but I think most people in Tokyo live somewhere in the quasi-residential/neighborhood commercial/commercial row, so the more limiting zones aren't something you necessarily see a whole lot of.

Too• 12 years ago

Exclusive zoning sounds really odd to me. Not only because you have to travel to get to anything. It also divides the usage of the city into different zones for different times of the day. 7-17: People are in the office or industrial districts. 17-20: People are in the shopping/eating districts. 20-07: People are in the residential districts.

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.

Japanese zoning

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