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by ortusdux·8y ago·view on hn ↗
I really like the idea of Japan's zoning laws. They have 12 zones nationwide, and they restrict by maximum allowable nuisance. Industry is considered the highest nussicance and low rise residential the lowest. You cannot build a business in a residential area, but you can build apartments in a commercial zone. I feel this opens up many more options for growth while maintaining the spirit of American zoning laws. Here is a good explanation:

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

4 comments
Japan also has an entirely different relationship with residential buildings and real estate than we do.

It’s so foreign to me that I have a hard time even believing it and I can only vaguely describe it. But, effectively, houses don’t appreciate in Japan and they don’t like moving into houses other people have lived in before. It seems wasteful at first, but they also build very different types of homes. And, their homes are more optimized for the particular people living in them. And, the economy seems to greatly benefit from the adaptability this provides.

But, please do your own research. I have visited and seen it for myself but still have a hard time comprehending all the differences.

Residential houses are often built using wooden frames, or a metal frame with everything else made of wood. Japan is humid, so if there's poor drainage the wood rots. Japan has Earthquakes, I guess that causes subsidence and other structural issues. Construction is of varying quality. I've seen houses in the countryside (Showa era, maybe 70s 80s?) which literally look like they found a nice rock and decided to use it as a foundation for a house.

Mostly the foundations are not as I'd expect to see them in the UK (where I'm from). If you remove the Tatami flooring, there's a thinish piece of wood, under that there's Earth.

So what it comes down to is that because many houses are made of wood, and because of Earthquakes, houses kind of get structurally unsound over time. At some point it's just more economical to pull the house down and build a new one than it is to renovate it. This is my understanding anyway.

I don't understand planning permission in Japan well, but it seems easier to get than I'm used to seeing (in the UK). Perhaps that helps depress land value.

People seem to find moving not wanting a house someone has died in weird. I think it's more understandable with houses that last a relatively short time... deaths, and suicides that have occurred in a house need to be declared when the house is sold. It decreases the value of the house somewhat.

Somehow all of this has contributed resulted in much more (to my mind) reasonable housing prices, at least outside central Tokyo.

I've just bought a house in Japan (with my wife) so a lot of this stuff is on my mind. If anybody would like to talk further, my email is in my profile.

This sounds really fascinating--do you have any links or search terms to use to learn more about the differences in homes there? I'm particularly curious about the optimization for the people who live in the homes. What would drive that difference in attitude and behavior?

I've also heard that Japanese homes aren't built to last and that they get rebuilt rather frequently by Western standards, although I'm not sure how true that is.

They don’t particularly like old things, and so a building built in the 1980s would be considered an old house.

As a result new buildings get built all the time and everything is nice and newly renovated everywhere you go, including the subways.

One great example is stepping into the Ginza subway line, which is the first subway line in Tokyo (circa maybe 1920s or 1930s), and comparing it to the dungeons of some older NYC metro stations or London’s tubes.

Japan is fond of its old temples though.
Old temples yes, old temple buildings - not necessarily.

The country's most holy Shinto shrine at Ise is ceremonially torn down and rebuilt every 20 years.

Most other temples need parts of the building (like the roof) replaced every now and then, and have burned down a few times over the centuries.

There's really only a handful of temple buildings that have parts that are more than 500 years old.

This is about the macro-effects of Japanese housing customs, not the optimization aspect you asked about, but it's an interesting and relevant article.

https://www.nri.com/global/opinion/papers/2008/pdf/np2008137... [PDF]

Sorry I don’t have links. When I visited many areas in Japan about 8 years ago, I just spoke to as many people as I could about it, which wasn’t many. Hardly anyone else found it so interesting as I did but I have failed to do much research since. The Japanese people I spoke with found the American system to be the strange one. Not surprising.

As for the architecture, it’s very creative! Neighborhoods don’t really have the conventions of conformity like we have. Each house is free to be whatever it wants, but they are all very small compared to American houses. Most norms in Japanese culture seem to favor the group, cooperation and environments of mutual respect.

I do remember pointing out that a few (very few) of the houses looked pretty old and they told me those people have probably lived in them since they were built and just haven’t wanted a new one.

Here is Freakonomics coverage on the practice: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-dispo...
What do you mean by "not sure how true is that"? From the article: "Traditionally, Japanese homes were demolished and rebuilt every 20 to 30 years, to implement improved earthquake-safety technology, to provide jobs for government-favored construction companies or simply because Japanese people demanded nice new houses. As a result, there are relatively few Japanese homeowners trying to prop up the value of their houses by lobbying the government to restrict supply."

Did you read the article?

Japan also has a cultural interest in space that the west does not. Case in point for me was seeing a major japanese house builders website - their top marketing point was a ~1.3m/4.5ft high space in their home. With examples of someone using it as a (sit on floor) workdesk, a childrens play area, a library, storage space etc. This would not fly anywhere in the west.

As noted its also typical to modify a family home over time - maybe one child moves out and another starts a hair salon in their old ground floor room (yes the planning rules allow this)

Demolishing a home is also related to historic cultural use if timber where in the west the wealthy built out of brick and stone for the ages

Also importantly, even the lowest-density Japanese residential zones seem to allow some low apartment buildings and some home businesses, while other residential zones are mixed-use and allow corner stores etc.

In e.g. San Francisco, more than half of the city is zoned to only allow detached height-limited single-family houses or sometimes duplexes, with businesses restricted to designated commercial streets. When you add wide streets with several wide lanes, generous street parking, parking requirements for buildings, long skinny land parcels with (often unused) space for a small yard in the back, etc., land use overall is incredibly inefficient even if you want to preserve the “local character” of low buildings.

Look at the sea of light yellow zones in the zoning map, http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf

And among cities in the region SF has higher density and more flexible zoning than most.

If we upzoned the Richmond, Sunset, and Marina neighborhoods from pale yellow to orange and purple, and added better transit, we could easily double the population of the city without anything taller than low-rise apartments.

paris is one of the highest density cities on earth with virutally no highrises whatsoever.
Yes, because unlike a lot of 'new world' cities, there are huge areas of Paris that are a consistent 2-4 stories high.

See e.g. the Google Maps images in this article [0] discussing Australian vs. European cities.

[0]: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2015/11/30/how-dense...

And there are places in Paris where you cannot drive a modern American style car down the medieval streets. Those boulevards are relatively new.
I'm no sure that's a bad thing at all. I would imagine it encourages people to walk, bicycle, and use public transit to get around?
Oh! Didn't want to reflect the size of the street as a good, or bad, thing.

Just as another explanation why Paris can be SO dense, with buildings that aren't incredibly high - Buildings are packed in close to each other. The height of the buildings are a signature architectural element of Paris, broken only by the Tour Eiffel.

Businesses many times occupy the ground floor, with apartments up top - relatively normal in European cities, but against many zoning laws in the States.

The layout of the city certainly doesn't make owning a personal car all that, say, automatic of a choice. Paris is not a large city. When living there, I may have used the metroonce a month, but mostly just rode my bike to where I wanted to go (cheaper! and usually faster...). You could easily walk half the city in a relatively short amount of time (as I was oft to do after a party!). High speed trains could whisk you to many bordering countries in just a few hours. Ah! Paris: un joli désordre!

man i wanna move to paris now that sounds like paradise.
Americans hate small streets. It's a dumb opinion, but it's widely held.
Yes, another great thing about Paris.
Having upstairs neighbors would drive me batty. I did it — once.

Do they have better soundproofing or am I just too noise sensitive?

Move into a new high-rise built with a concrete structure and strict building code on noise. I have lived in two in different continents and never hear anything.
Which coubtry/state are those for people trying to find out food places to live?
Well one was in NYC and the other in Sydney. NSW has a strict building code that requires acoustic testing (literally hitting the structure with a hammer and ensuring no sound passes through).

I lived previously in a 100yr old brick walkup building in NYC. It was like my neighbors were all roommates in one house. That apartment almost drove me insane with the amount of neighbour noise I would hear at all times.

Concrete really is such a fantastic building material and yet people want to build their houses out of timber for some reason.

Townhouses (side-by-side) rather than flats tend to solve this. You are your own upstairs neighbour.
We know how to build pretty much soundproofed units; it is a matter of cost / priority.
Do they do that in Paris? Or do they suffer there as well?
Not living in Paris, but in Poland we have similar living style. I don't understand a problem. Noise isolation is usually very good in modern apartments. I can organize a party, have 15 drunk people in my apartment talking loudly and after I go out and close the door I can't hear anything. We consider "noisy" a major quality flaw for the building.
If your building is tall enough to be steel and concrete instead of wood, this problem goes away.
In part because Paris apartments are minuscule. A 2-br in Paris can be smaller than an already-small (by American standards) NYC studio.

Think bedrooms large enough to fit only a bed in a corner and a foot of space between the bed and one wall to allow access to it. Or a kitchen measuring 4x5 feet including appliances.

Most Americans aren't willing to accept those living conditions.

A typical Parisian apartment building has 8 floors. Not a sky scrapper by any mean but still a lot denser than most other European cities. In London a typical residential building has 2 or 3 floors.
This is also covered in this video:

How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w

True spirit of opportunity right here