To fully understand what’s happening here, let’s zoom out and take in the wider picture. San Francisco is a relatively small part of a much larger nine-county metropolitan area of over seven million people. Within this area, governance is fragmented at the county and city levels and it is served by a slew of separate transportation agencies, including six separate but overlapping bus agencies and four regional rail or light rail agencies. There are three major airports, run by separate agencies, and while regional housing policy is supposed to mandate that all municipalities provide their respective shares of housing demand, based on employment patterns, this is often undermined at the local level. Public policy is often not coordinated in any meaningful way at the regional level.
There are at least 10 separate train companies running 40+ lines in Tokyo and yet that seems to work for them. JR, Tokyu, Seibu, Eidan, Toei, Odakyu, Keio, Tobu, ... I'm too lazy to look them all up. There are probably as many bus companies as well.
On top of that in Tokyo there are 23 wards each with it's own laws, taxes, etc.
What's special about California? Why does it work in Tokyo with 25 million people (or maybe it doesn't?) and why doesn't it work in the bay area with only 9 million?
I would argue California has a huge Somebody Else's Problem field.
Much of California public services are provided by local taxes. I'm not sure about Japan, but if it's anything like Canada then much of it provided at the state or federal level. Add in things like Prop 13, "Pay for government?! That's Somebody Else's Problem", and you end up with huge incentives to externalize your costs.
Schools are cheap if all your workers live somewhere else. Low-income assistance is easy if the cheapest place to live is $2000/month for a room-share. Most of the local legislators are home owners and decreasing costs by increasing supply will directly hurt them and their paper gains.
Who says it works for Tokyo? It's one of the most miserable cities in the world as far as housing is concerned. It's so bad there that they have to start opening new types of hotels for couples to have sex because most couples are forced to live in shared tiny apartments. They have even pushers to pack as many people in trains as possible.
Tokyo is not comparable to anything else, really. It works because everybody values that things work out for society. In that environment dissent such as NIMBY is indeed troublesome but never blocking.
If one local wards would take decisions to enrich itself to the cost of others the system would break down. It wouldn't last a day in California.
That said, there are some problems there too, such as the aforementioned quintillion public transport lines. (Source: a few friends who moved there)
The counties and wards of Tokyo don't have the power to impose discretionary zoning on landowners. In fact, they don't have the power to impose any of the kinds of abusive and harmful zoning and parking requirements that are universal in the Bay Area. [0]
Japanese zoning and urban development policy are set by the central national government. That policy is considered the gold standard for simplicity and promoting quality development by planners everywhere in the developed world.
If the quality and honesty of government urban planning that Japan has could be transplanted, life in the Bay Area would improve immensely. No amount of land scarcity or Google shuttles or rising demand or offshore Chinese corrupt officials parking money or anything else would be able to make things unaffordable if local governments were good, honest, and effective. But quality government is simply not possible with the current politics of California.
> That policy is considered the gold standard for simplicity and promoting quality development by planners everywhere in the developed world.
Nnnno, they're not. In fact, Japanese zoning -- which, incidentally, is set at the federal, prefectural and local level -- is widely regarded as batshit insane. For example, there's a giant garbage incinerator right in on the northern side of central Tokyo (Ikebukuro); taxation makes "used" houses nearly worthless and thus encourages building new cheap crap; draconian building restrictions make Japanese apartments tiny; the well-intentioned "sunshine laws" have all sorts of perverse side effects like making it well-nigh impossible to build tall, high-quality residential buildings in the city center but encourage tall but cheap, crappy ones in the middle of nowhere, etc etc.
Seven million people in a nine-county metropolitan area isn't very metropolitan at all. The Bay Area's fundamental problem is that it wants to combine the business growth and jobs of a major urban center with the countryside luxury of exurbia -- and you can't.
To fully understand what’s happening here, let’s zoom out and take in the wider picture. San Francisco is a relatively small part of a much larger nine-county metropolitan area of over seven million people. Within this area, governance is fragmented at the county and city levels and it is served by a slew of separate transportation agencies, including six separate but overlapping bus agencies and four regional rail or light rail agencies. There are three major airports, run by separate agencies, and while regional housing policy is supposed to mandate that all municipalities provide their respective shares of housing demand, based on employment patterns, this is often undermined at the local level. Public policy is often not coordinated in any meaningful way at the regional level.