Urban K. Choze

The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default, regardless of local density levels. This post does a great job illustrating the difference this makes: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html For comparison, even our best-case scenarios for urbanism here in the states (like NYC) have incredibly convoluted zoning rules, which in turn make it impossible to build anything new without intervention from the city/state: https://zola.planninglabs.nyc/about#9.72/40.7125/-73.733

I thought that's what "single-family zoning" means: a requirement to have nothing else besides single family houses. Eliminating this category of zoning means you can no longer mandate "only single family houses". I'm unsure if zoning laws behave radically differently, but I'm thinking the best model is what they have in Japan: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html Things that can only be built in "low rise residential" zones can still be built in "neighborhood commercial", etc. See chart: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sV5ETXDs_8M/Ux-axBTuF2I/AAAAAAAAAsE/E6gs6uJr…

The remedy would be taking every city over a certain population, slam dunking local restrictive zoning and permitting straight into the trash, and replacing it with permissive "shall issue" zoning at the state or national level, in the style of Japan [1]. There's no great mystery here. There just aren't enough housing units in the places people actually want to live, and local cities are keeping it that way. [1]: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

The Japanese have an excellent method for zoning that prevents the worst cases (industrial next-door to residential, for instance) but doesn't limit things like corner stores below an apartment. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Yup -- there was a great article on HN a while back about why zoning in Japan works so much better than zoning in the US: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html TL;DR: You can build housing almost anywhere if there exists demand.

Excellent blog about Japanese zoning: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Japan has fantastic zoning laws. Here's[0] a great blog post about it. [0]http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

This blog post is based on posts from the Urban kchoze blog, which has been linked on HN previously. I liked it so much I read the entire archive. One great post is about a possible remedy to American zoning: dynamic zoning. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/05/how-to-make-urban-housing-more… It doesn't provide a direct route to move to Japanese-style zoning, but it would allow densities to increase organically based on demand in areas, which is a major component of Japanese zoning that is missing from American zoning. If you are interested in these topics, I recommend the entire Urban kchoze archive.

If people would like to learn more about Japanese zoning (which isn't a lack of density zoning, but rather more of an "up to this" rather than "restrict to" zoning), there's this post on my favorite urban design blog: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Very much agree. Would be great to let neighborhoods or cities experiment with alternative zoning and planning policies, but sadly it seems every place is following the same templates. Some random pointers for those interested: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://narrowstreetssf.com/

The blog that this article references, Urban Kchoze, is the best collection of urban policy analysis I've ever found. The author uses great diagrams and examples to really effectively illustrate his points. Here are a few really good articles: - Why we should tax property by street frontage: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/07/city-taxes-as-urban-growth-poli… - Advantages of one-way streets: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-case-of-one-way-streets.htm… - Impacts of commercial density: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2015/11/commercial-or-residential-densi… Strongly recommend it! It's my favourite urbanism blog, although there aren't usually that many posts thanks to the long length and high quality

I'm not sure what people are getting out of this post. It's made up entirely of quotes from a very good blogpost [https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html] about Japanese zoning (that was also posted here years ago) wrapped in completely unsupported declarations of that system's superiority, followed with some odious racial conspiracy theories in the comments, which are dominated by a pretty well-known white supremacist. This link isn't value added over the original post, it's value subtracted.

A while ago someone posted a great article about Japanese zoning laws. Those make so much more sense: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

In areas where people want to get off at many exits, a network of surface arterial streets has better commute-time throughput than a highway. Highways are great for long-distance trips to sprawling suburban destinations. They don’t really mix well with dense cities though. Highways have high speed but low capacity relative to the amount of space they take overall, in comparison to surface streets. When they reach a certain traffic density, highways get blocked up, even if you add a lot of exits. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/07/is-induced-demand-really-about… (I think that blog may have better posts on this topic, but that’s the one I could find in a quick search.)

"But small-scaled urban spaces and a culture of walking and transit use also foster safety and, perhaps just as important, the perception of safety." I thought of this while I was watching the video. Japanese suburban fabric is much more compact, fine grain, mixed-use and more spatially coherent than North American equivelents. These contribute to the'eyes on a street'[1] condition in which neighborhood stores and residences look out onto public streets and reinforce communal saftey. The cul-de-sacs and degenerate grids of North American suburbs not only make walking incredibly inefficient[2], but also increase the isolation and community-orientation of the streets. [1] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities [2] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/10/bad-habits-of-north-american-ci…

Lets make a car analogy: If you restrict a Japanese car seller to only export 10k cars to the USA, that car seller will inevitably export 10k luxury cars. The reason why they do this is because the demand for luxury cars wont be exhausted by such small numbers. Once they can sell unrestricted, they will definitely go for the far more profitable median market cars, because they can sell far greater volume of them. If you want to prevent gentrification, you would allow massive density increases. The middle class out buy the rich in aggregate. This blog article gives a better overview of the concept: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/06/how-density-limits-bring-about.…

> No amount of justification can uphold such federal zoning legislation. Housing is interstate commerce, and the federal government has overruled local zoning rules in the past (satellite dishes in Chicago of all things). It appears to be quite legal, constitutional and precedented. > Moving zoning responsibilities up the chain of command won't fix this, unless your plan is to send in the National Guard. We need to fix the broken relationship between state and city. I don't understand where federal government comes into this. The ideal law would be similar to Japan's model: the federal government says housing is permitted in all zones and sets some consistent rules about what you can build and where. This framework would remove the silly arbitrary rules set up by councils to preclude reasonable land use in lieu of clear, consistent federal rules. Federal government sets the framework, municipalities execute. Worth a read if you're curious what I'd like to see. [1] [1] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Heh, not to be the guy posting urbankchoze links all day but the author has thoughts on this as well actually[0]. The whole article is a good read but the thing that feels most pertinent is the idea of dynamic zoning; instead of zoning an area for single family residential you'd essentially zone areas such that new construction rules would be: - allowed_height = max(2, ceil(avg_area_height * 1.5)) - allowed_occupancy = ceil(avg_area_occupancy * 1.5) And then without the need for zoning exemptions and political zoning fights, you let neighborhoods up zone themselves organically based on demand. Average building two stories? You can build a three story low rise. Average height three stories? You can build a five story replacement. I think lowering the barriers to higher density in-fill would effectively accomplish what you're aiming for while side stepping some of the political issues you've foreseen with raising taxes on people until they're forced to leave their homes. [0]: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/05/how-to-make-urban-housing-more…

Tokyo is a good case study for how effective selective deregulation and zoning policy can lead to more efficient housing construction. In Minato ward — a desirable 20 sq km slice of central Tokyo — the population is up 66 per cent over the past 20 years, from 145,000 to 241,000, an increase of about 100,000 residents. In the 121 sq km of San Francisco, the population grew by about the same number over 20 years, from 746,000 to 865,000 — a rise of 16 per cent. Yet whereas the price of a home in San Francisco and London has increased 231 per cent and 441 per cent respectively, Minato ward has absorbed its population boom with price rises of just 45 per cent. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable-h… It also helps that Japan has a brilliant zoning system: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

> "wealthier people tend to live together more than before and so do poorer people" Some people are essentially told to contribute to this phenomenon when you buy a house in the US. High home values mean good school funding, which means homes will hold their value over time, pricing out people of different incomes. Buy the cheapest house you can in the most expensive neighborhood you can afford for the best return (with the caveat that mixed use zoning is rare). If had a Japanese zoning model,[0] decoupled school funding from local incomes,[1] and ended or capped the mortgage interest deduction, a lot of this would go away. None of those are trivial changes without entrenched interests though. [0] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html [1] I've heard some states do this already. Oregon maybe? I know economic mobility varies a lot based on where you are in the US. http://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356290/study-upward-mobility-no-tough… Would be interesting to cross compare that with some of these policies, see how much they matter. Maybe the effects of redlining can't just be papered over so quickly.

I'm not sure this is true. I know of several communities without strong regulations on what can be built (beyond perhaps size limits), and they tend to be pretty interesting. They also tend to develop their own individual character, due either to engineering limitations or social mimesis. For example, Japanese houses are pretty disposable, but you can build more or less anything you like. (Here's a great article on it. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html ) If you combine this with the fact that Japanese depreciation rules promote 30-year disposable housing, you get a lot of very interesting homes. The result is that a ridiculous fraction of the interesting houses you see on archdaily are Japanese. Or if you look at modern wealthy residential areas in north Delhi, you get a lot of interesting buildings. The neighborhoods again have their own unique character; it's a lot more heterogeneous than typical US suburbs, but it's clearly got it's own character. I can't find many pictures online, but I'll try to take a few next time I go.

American-style zoning is illegal in Japan: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html All zoning is at the national level, with none of the opportunities for NIMBYs to keep new people out of their communities. Shops and offices are permitted in "residential" zones, and rather than specifying what is allowed zoning only specifies what is not permitted.

One of the major differences with the American system is that the Japanese government only has twelve types of zones that local governments are allowed to use. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html American zoning codes get really complicated really fast, particularly around what businesses are considered low-nuisance in what neighborhood. Especially the moment people start getting worried about parking. Particularly home businesses, like daycare, hair salons, even the humble lemonade stand can all be zoned down to a single hair.

Here is a good article on Tokyo zoning: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html You'll notice that the model is additive instead of exclusionary. Basically if a block is zoned light commercial, you can put stores, apartments, or single family homes on it. Here is a nice chart https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Lweabho82d0/U0HCJsQ3tbI/AAAAAAAAAys/Hy-TACJ… Tokyo does zoning right, and the simplest first step to solve housing problems that plague major American cities is to just adopt a model of zoning that is proven to work.

Ah, thanks. My comment was based on this link which I share often on Japanese Zoning. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_land_law Looking it up, I see you're right. They have national zoning laws but even there, things do seem to be getting more complicated.

Japanese zoning is better in another way. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments

Sorry, no. You don't need state-level zoning, you can do it all at the national level. Japan has a single national zoning code, and Japan also has wildly different climates and geography: snowy Hokkaido is nothing like tropical Okinawa. The zoning code is very simple, so there's no reason to make it different based on geography. Here's a nice blog posting about it: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Was it http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html by chance?

The major problem is the artificial limiting of the housing supply; let people build and this problem will be ameliorated. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

One of the many reasons exclusionary zoning needs to die in a fire. The urban housing crisis has been allowed to grow for decades, so we're long past any single solution, but I'm increasingly convinced no combination of fixes can succeed while exclusionary zoning still exists. Japanese-style inclusionary zoning splits the difference nicely between making sure people don't live next to loud, potentially dangerous industry and allowing lots of mixed-use, human scale developments of varying density. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html