Europe and USA are both huge places so it depends what you mean. If you compare major east coast cities - Boston, DC, and NYC to European metros like Paris/ Madrid/ Lisbon the biggest tax on the citizens is the same in that it’s impossible to build anything so a huge % of income needs to go to housing.

Great point.

Granted I’m approaching it from the perspective of a tourist or business traveler, but 6/6 of the European cities I’ve been in were fully navigable for my purposes via transit. I’d probably guess half or less in the US.

Even in NYC or SFO, the metro areas are so large it really makes the success rates low depending on the trip.

they might mean west of japan ;)

Well, it did at one point, it’s just that the crash that resulted was so nasty it disabused anybody of that notion.

At the peak of the bubble era, just the land underneath the Imperial Palace had an estimated real estate value larger than the entire state of California.

There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.

IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).

From what I remember, Japanese zoning allows small shops (there's a size limit) in any residential zone.

That means no car trips when you run out of bread or milk.

Smartest property of that zoning system IMO.

That's a big part of it. They also do zoning mostly at the federal level, meaning local opposition isn't relevant.

Sometimes permissive zoning laws don’t actually encourage positive urban development outcomes.

Example: Texas

Zoning has to both exist and be well-designed.

In New York, property values go up as they near transit lines. People want the option to use the public transit because it can dramatically improve access to the rest of the city.

I live a 3-minutes walk from a busy train station in Switzerland and I don't even hear the trains. I also happened to live just next to it (my windows facing the rails) and that was horrible. So it's just a matter of some space and noise barriers.

Your citations do not back up your claims. For example [3] was talking about immobility and poverty, but not about living near noisy traffic infrastructure.

Yeah there are all these studies but then the end result is that the Japanese are healthier overall so when the studies and the reality have opposite results you gotta go with the reality.

> Fight densification wherever someone tries to push it.

What do you really mean? On that basis, we all would live on isolated farms on the prarie.

Humans are social animals that live in groups, just like other primates. Humans like living in dense cities so much that they pay far more for much smaller spaces in the most dense cities.

That doesn't make all density good but 'fight all densification' is not a real solution. When is it good and when bad? How much desnity in those situations? Those are some of the real questions.