Tokyo’s Housing Advantage

Tokyo’s Housing Advantage

There’s a 47-story tower in San Francisco at 30 Van Ness Avenue that broke ground in 2022. As of last year, the site was still a hole in the ground.

The original developer froze construction when interest rates moved against them. The project now passes between lenders, attorneys, and the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development trying to find a deal that pencils.

Down the street, 300 De Haro is an eleven-story building that was first approved in 2020. Construction broke ground last year. Five years between approval and a single shovel in dirt, and that was on an expedited track under a state law designed to bypass local resistance. A small ramen shop and a coffee place that occupied the lot got eviction notices. This is what adding housing looks like in a city with a 1.4 million dollar median home price.

Now walk around Setagaya or Suginami in Tokyo. You’ll find pencil houses on lots as small as 33 square meters, four-story apartment buildings tucked between detached houses, six-story mixed-use buildings slotted into quiet blocks. Houses get torn down at thirty years and rebuilt vertically. Tokyo’s housing stock grew 9.2% from 2006 to 2011 while the land devoted to housing grew only 1.5%. The city absorbed people by densifying within the existing footprint.

How? Japan has twelve nationally defined zoning categories. Twelve. Seattle alone has more than thirty. And Japan’s zones are additive: land zoned for medium-density allows everything low-density allows, plus more. The lowest-density zone in Japan still permits multifamily housing, schools, clinics, and small cafes. There is no single-family-only zone anywhere in the country. It does not exist as a legal category.

Tokyo got 100,000 units last year because the rules treat housing as a national-scale technical question about land use, not a neighborhood-scale political negotiation where every project needs permission from people whose wealth depends on saying no.