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As somebody currently living in this area:
Greater Kansai has about the same urbanized km^2 as the Bay Area but around 2x the population https://twitter.com/_kueller/status/1336808309563670528
Greater Kansai has about the same urbanized km^2 as the Bay Area but around 2x the population https://twitter.com/_kueller/status/1336808309563670528
Greater Kansai, like the Bay Area, has a multiplicity of municipalities. Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Amagasaki, Nishinomiya, Takarazuka, Nara, Himeji, Wakayama, and so on. Imagine if each of these municipalities approached zoning the way the Bay Area does
The triangle between Osaka, Kobe, and Takarazuka is already Kansai's favored quarter. If the communities within this region practiced housing policy the way the Peninsula did, living in Ashiya would not just be relatively expensive viz. living in e.g. Higashi-Osaka
It would be as unattainable for me as living in the UES! And the areas between Kyoto and Osaka would be like the Upper West Side, and the area between Osaka and Wakayama like Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn
(Sorry for switching to New York here; being an East Coaster, New York is my benchmark for unaffordablility)
The point here is that, by providing abundant housing, the Kansai area has relatively affordable housing
And the ubiquity and relative affordability of its mass transit networks ensure that there are few places in the Kansai region where it is legitimately difficult to get to work from one's home
This doesn't necessarily mean the housing provided is super luxurious by American standards. My apartment is barely more than 15' x 15'. However, lack of size does not mean lack of comfort
All of that said, however, the point stands: by (a) not legislating in such a way as to make clustering housing around mass transit illegal and (b) not insisting on super-luxe housing for all new construction...
...Japan successfully provides abundant housing for all in a megacity more densely populated than any in America. However they do this because they do not micromanage land use or density the way Americans do
Something else I almost never see addressed in American housing discourse is the rise of overcrowding in the existing housing supply. Overcrowding here means too many people in a unit than the unit can support
To be clear, having "roommates" is not overcrowding as long as there's a clear partition between private space and common space. However, if one has to share their room with somebody they are not intimately familiar with, that is overcrowding
Also a unit too small to stretch one's legs in is definitely overcrowding. When $900/mo barely covers a broom closet, that's a sure sign a lack of supply relative to demand is driving overcrowding
Essentially, overcrowding occurs when either (a) there is no available private space, or (b) the available private space is not large enough to meet one's immediate rest and storage needs
Americans don't really have a clear idea of how little space is necessary to meet (b), which I suspect is why minimum unit sizes in new construction can be grandiose
In the US, I've lived in a room that was maybe 10x10, in one that was around 15x8, and in one that was around 15x10, none of which ever felt cramped to me, somebody living alone. But a studio's minimum size is humongous compared to these!
Microapartments are fundamentally a good idea. Most apartments for single people living by themselves in Japan are "microapartments". But instead of branding the concept, maybe we should be relaxing minimum unit size requirements?
750 sq ft for a studio is a tad excessive
When builders brand their buildings as "luxury", the real luxury is *space*. New American apartments are more than twice the size of their Japanese counterparts, by law
Which probably also has as much to do with faulty comparisons as anything else! I recall hearing in high school once that the average Japanese family lived in approximately the same space as a 2-car garage...
...but at the time it would not have occurred to me that a 2-car garage would make a very comfortable ADU (or even two). I suspect that American autocentrism comes into play here: we don't really think in terms of the space *we* navigate...
...but rather in terms of the space our *cars* need to navigate. From that perspective, a 2 car garage seems like a teeny-tiny space!
So to sum up. Japanese housing is more abundant than American housing, in large part because Japanese housing does not have to fight zoning the way American housing does
And Japanese housing is smaller per unit than American housing, which helps keep construction prices low and hence unit prices low. Before we begin to talk about issues like parking requirements!
