
Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build - barry-cotter
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable-housing-strategy-build-build-build/
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barry-cotter
> Like so many other global first-world cities, Tokyo is experiencing
> explosive population growth, increasing by 1.6 million people since 2000.
> And unlike practically every U.S. city, it has almost no empty land. So it
> has responded through vertical growth, tearing down old structures and
> replacing them with high rises at a pace light-years ahead of anywhere in
> modern America. As FT’s Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the
> article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “more than
> the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population
> 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England
> (population 54.3m).” Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new
> residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units
> started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in
> 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area.

> This has stabilized Tokyo’s housing prices, wrote Harding, and has kept them
> far lower than in many U.S. cities.

