We need to federalize zoning just like Japan. You should be able to build anything permissible on your land - and if your neighbors aren't happy with that they should buy your land to stop it, or move. Exceptions to this policy should be meaningful enough that you need to get the federal government involved.
I think state-level zoning hits the sweet spot— the US has some wildly different climates and geography, and I do appreciate that zoning in, say, Rhode Island, Nevada, and California have distinct enough geocultural situations to have their own codes. I don’t expect federal lawmakers from Ohio to worry about the California coastline, for example.
However, I don’t see any reason why Atherton gets to have a different zoning than San Francisco, or Santa Monica/Beverly Hills an entirely different code than Los Angeles.
Theoretically, it would be amazing to have a singular state zoning board pooled from all of the resources of smaller municipal offices, with one standard application and one process.
Right now it’s crazy that Los Angeles and Beverly Hills have two completely different zoning codes with two completely different processes— so much time wasted on two different bureaucracies (and sometimes, both! If the project is big enough) based on if something is one block over or not.
State level DOTs have shown, in a way, how effective this approach can be (though rather than encouraging sprawl, we do the same for density). If we built housing anywhere as fast as we do highways, imagine how much would get built.
Sorry, no. You don't need state-level zoning, you can do it all at the national level.
Japan has a single national zoning code, and Japan also has wildly different climates and geography: snowy Hokkaido is nothing like tropical Okinawa. The zoning code is very simple, so there's no reason to make it different based on geography. Here's a nice blog posting about it:
To be clear, I would love a simple Japan-style federal zoning code.
I just don’t think that it’s politically feasible nor practical— like most everything at the federal level, including things as fundamental as the IRS tax code or debt ceiling, it would be subject to large changes every year.
“We won’t approve this tax code unless no new housing in California is allowed but also multi-family is banned in many these states” would now be a possible (even likely) debate.
At least California/Texas/whatever representatives are beholden to their own state enough that they won’t actively sabotage their constituents to gain political points. We saw this with the SALT tax repeal under Trump as a specific way to hurt populous blue states and do essentially nothing to rural red states (except Texas, which ironically was a big benefactor of that policy due to its high property taxes). Why wouldn’t federal zoning fall into the same trap?
Furthermore, from a constitutional perspective, there’s no way barring an amendment for the federal government to control how non-federally-owned land is used. The whole purpose of states is to govern matters within their borders, and the federal to govern matters which exceed any one state’s borders. Even the Federal Highway Administration, arguably the closest analog, is not in charge of building or planning highways directly— it just funds plans it approves, but it doesn’t dictate what those plans are, instead leaving it up to the states to grapple with routes and ROW.
> To be clear, I would love a simple Japan-style federal zoning code.
Japan doesn't really have a "federal zoning code", because Japan isn't a federation, it is a unitary state. Japan's prefectures aren't states. In a federal system, such as the Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland or the US, the constitution grants certain powers to the federal government and the states generally retain the rest. By contrast, in a unitary system, the national government retains all power, but may choose to delegate certain powers to subnational divisions, such as Japan's prefectures. Japan's prefectures are delegated responsibility for certain functions. They don't have general powers of legislation, only the power to make subsidiary laws on certain specific topics where national law grants them that authority. Japan's prefectures are actually just the first tier of Japan's two tiers of local government. There is a proposal to convert Japan into a proper federation (Dōshūsei, 道州制), by creating states/provinces as a new level of government in between the prefectures and national government (except for the prefecture of Hokkaido, which would become a state/province). However, although there is somewhat of a consensus in Japanese politics in support of this idea in principle, in practice not much progress has been made–I believe in part due to disagreements over exactly how many states/provinces to create, what should be their boundaries, and exactly what powers they should have.
The distribution of powers between the state and federal levels is different in every federation. For example, in Canada, Germany and India, enacting criminal law is a federal responsibility, and states lack the power to make their own criminal law, but they still play a major role in its enforcement; by contrast, in Australia and the US, every state has its own criminal law, with state and federal criminal law working in parallel. So there is no reason why, even in a federal system, you couldn't give the federal government powers over zoning. In practice, however, I'm not aware of any country in which that has happened. In most federal systems, zoning law is a state or local responsibility, and a constitutional amendment could be required to transfer that power to the federal level.
In Australia, there is a process called referral by which states can voluntarily transfer certain powers to the federal level, without requiring a constitutional amendment. In principle, Australia could adopt a federal zoning law, without changing the constitution, if every state passed a law referring that authority to the federal level. A state can unilaterally take back the power at any time by repealing its referral law. Never been used for zoning, and I doubt it ever would be, but it has been used in some areas of law – for example, it was used to establish Australia's uniform national corporations law. However, I don't know if that would work in the US, since while Australia's constitution explicitly says you can do this, the US constitution doesn't. Even were the Supreme Court to rule that "states can voluntarily delegate powers to Congress even without an explicit constitutional provision to authorise it", it is a lot easier to get every state to agree on something when you only have 6 as opposed to 50.
Another option would be a uniform law, instead of a federal law – in which every state voluntarily chooses to enact the same law. A famous example in the US is the Uniform Commercial Code. No reason in theory why you couldn't have a Uniform Zoning Code to go with it, but I doubt you'd ever get all 50 states to agree on its contents. Consensus is much easier in commercial law because it is the kind of dry legal area in which few people really care about the details, and few people would be impacted by different options as to what those details are
Nit-pick: Japan does not have "federalized zoning", or federalized anything. Japan does not have a federal government; nor, does Ireland, nor most other countries in the world. This is an Americanism (though it applies to Germany too). In most countries, which have unitary governments, the top-most level of government is the "national government", so what you want is "nationalized zoning".
Anyway, yes, Japan's nationalized zoning is great. We're not having the ridiculous housing problems I keep reading about in western nations. However, it does have its detractors, like westerners vising Japan and then whining about how all the buildings look so different from each other and there's no "character". If you want historically-preserved neighborhoods, or neighborhoods where all the buildings have the same theme and architectural style, you won't find it in most of Japan.
What about historic districts? I noticed some unified styles around Asakusa (noticed while walking home drunk from Uueno, lively red lanterns everywhere and no high rises, just row homes), and definitely in Kyoto’s old town. I’m guessing this is mostly for the tourists, however.
You're not going to find a huge high-rise right next to a bunch of row homes; there's rules against that. High-rises have to have a certain amount of space around them anyway, but also there's rules about how much you're allowed to block your neighbors' sunlight. Basically, making taller buildings is allowed, but they can only be so much taller than the surrounding buildings. Over time, this means things could get very tall, but not quickly.
As for unified styles, there's no laws about that AFAIK. They're probably just like that because the landowners want it that way. Lots of stuff in Japan is done (or not done) without any formal laws or rules, but rather because of social pressure and consensus. It's possible that some very unique or culturally-important districts do have certain rules though, which is why I wrote "... in most of Japan".
