I serve as a planning commissioner for my city, and my city just recently tried to overhaul our zoning code to allow for more affordability and better economic outcomes for our citizens and future as a city. Here is what I have learned:
In the US, few people participate or care about local laws, zoning, and elections, or even understand why participation may be important. In a citizen ballot to determine if we should cap housing construction, 10% of the population voted. 5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state. Among those voters, most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses.
Most people do not realize how zoning impacts the daily life of everyone in an area, and how it impacts personal finances, which businesses will thrive, and public finances. Where I live, we have an absurd number of chains, and local businesses struggle. Part of this is out of our control, but the part that is (minimum parking requirements, single use zoning, etc) continuously gets upheld against changes that would help local businesses.
I think we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally. Many young people will protest national or state policies and be engaged at those levels, which is great, but very little time/energy is spent where they could directly see meaningful impact on their lives.
Protests come when people are pushed into a corner with little other choice. Participation is more prevalent when people have free time in their lives. Our economics has systematically squeezed free time out in favor of more work to most of our workforce, and particularly hard for young people.
One reason so many local city policies favor the old, is that they're retired and have the time to participate
Probably never, except maybe during the period when only white male landowners could vote and so the "we" was a much smaller and wealthier group. Voter turnout is pretty high these days though.
Young people seem to have plenty of free time to march around the streets protesting, chanting and banging drums (which has pretty much zero effect on policy), but they aren't able to find the time to attend a city council meeting, or even vote, for that matter.
Pretty sure the young people protesting are the ones also voting. But that’s only a small fraction of the total young people.the rest are too busy on TikTok :/
In the latter half of the 20th century, while many things were much worse than they are today, it was genuinely possible to support a family on a single minimum-wage job in many parts of the country.
Now, that doesn't mean that everyone used the extra time for civic participation, but when you compare that to today, when far too many people have to work two or three jobs per adult just to keep the lights on, I think it's fair to say that there was more free time.
This. I fought against a zoning exception (ironic comment) that would allow an asphalt plant near my children's school. When we showed up at meetings, they were canceled and rescheduled at different times for 'reasons'. I managed to get people there every time, but it was tough for parents to get there, and it seemed like the process had been weaponized against our participation.
Protesting is basically "doing nothing, loudly." It looks virtuous but has almost zero actual affect on policy. Does any politician actually look at a protest and say "Oh, my, look at that, people don't like what I'm doing! Looks like I have to change my mind."
They never change their minds, that's because the police are willing to beat the protesters for them. The Civil Rights movement is an example of (mostly, but not always peaceful) protest that changed things within living memory. Gay rights advances in recent decades definitely owe a lot to demonstrations and public organizing that put the issues into public conversation. Women's suffrage movements also featured many protests. Policy effects are everywhere.
What has no effect pretty much ever is protesting foreign policy, because the majority of people in any country neither care nor know what happens anywhere else.
Politicians are like ROM. You can't change them once they are programmed. If you want a different function, you need to swap them out. Yelling in the street is not going to get you anywhere.
The reason Civil Rights, Gay Rights and so on got traction was not through protestors changing politicians' minds. It was through the masses changing their minds and actually going to the ballot boxes to replace their (essentially robot) politicians.
Note that I'm not saying you, yourself, are a proponent of the status quo, deliberately spreading propaganda.
But protests are absolutely not useless.
"waaaah they don't change Trump's mind after a single protest waaaaah" of course not. That's not what they're there to do. That's the win condition, not the only move in the game.*
Protests have a variety of important effects, but let's just focus on two of the big ones, which are closely linked:
1) They tell the other people who disagree with what is going on that they are not alone. That there are others like them out there, and that if they do try to do something (whether that's go to a protest themselves, call their congresspeople, or whatever), it won't be just shouting into the void.
2) They tell the people who agree with what is going on that this is not over. They can't just expect to be greeted as liberators; there are people in their own hometown who think that this is not OK, it shouldn't be allowed to continue, and anyone who supports it can expect at least a side-eye at the supermarket, if not much more serious social shunning.
And no: neither of these lead directly to a change in the policies that are being protested. But that doesn't mean that they're useless, any more than it's useless to, say, release wolves into Yellowstone, if what you care about are some of the myriad downstream effects of a trophic cascade.
* Not, I would note very firmly, that it's a game. This is merely a convenient metaphor.
Some politician in Japan pushed zoning away from cities up to the prefecture and national level. So locals do not get veto rights over new construction.
It's an archetypal social coordination problem that can't be solved at a local level. If relaxed zoning pushes all new buildings into my neighborhood, because all other vote against it, then I'm going to end up with 20 stories of balconies hanging above my property but see no benefits, not even indirect ones like lower rents leading to lower inflation and prices etc. Some developer will simply capture that rent - both in the rent extraction sense and the real estate rent meanings.
A smart central planner can act for the shared benefit, they are sensitive to the votes of renters in some other high density area that also can't solve the problem locally etc.
if your neighborhood gets denser you will see the benefits
if you want to live there you can pick from more options
developers capture value, but the buildings are there
obviously the usual problem is that the land value goes up, and thus the rent goes up too (because suddenly the neighborhood becomes more desirable - which again is a sign of benefits for those who already live there)
My state did something similar recently as well for land within a quarter mile of transit, they have to be zoned for a minimum number of housing units, and parking minimums cannot be enforced in that radius. Some of the municipalities impacted are suing the state.
A good start would be to allow everyone living in the city to vote. I don't care about politics, zoning or planning if I am not allowed to vote or participate. There isn't anything I can do, so why bother putting effort into it?
I've lived in various European cities where I was not able to vote for various reasons. Such as living hotel long-term, living in a holiday home, being semi-homeless, sub-letting, crashing on someones couch. Seasonal workers, migrant workers or people with unstable employment are typically in this situation.
I get the sentiment about "why would I let people who aren't going to stay long term decide how the city is run?" but in the end it creates a city that is indifferent or even hostile to people in that situation. It ends up disenfranchising a population that will always be there, even if the people who make up that population is constantly changing.
Thank you. I know people who have lived in Amsterdam for over five years but can't vote for local politics because of their legal status or because they are illegally subletting due to the shitty housing market in The Netherlands.
Don't complain about people not being engaged with local politics if you don't allow them to vote.
The ones who will “always be there” can get their papers for permanent residence done and vote. If they don’t want to (or can’t since they don’t have the legal grounds to even stay there for longer), then they shouldn’t have a say on decisions that can permanently change things about the place.
There will always be the population of people who will be in short term housing or similar situations, but due to their circumstances the individual people will come and go. 5 years from now the makeup of the itinerant population may be almost entirely different, but the people in that population are in the same circumstances, especially if they don't have any political representation.
Who is going to speak for the people who aren't allowed to vote?
In my country, citizens without a permanent address (which is very few people, those who have no place of theirs mostly register at someone elses for easier administration) can still sign up and vote, so that leaves us with just the people who don’t have the permits to even stay here permanently.
I’m also not expecting to fly to country X, book an airbnb for 6 months or get a summer job, and then just somehow be entitled to vote there.
That is only possible with stable and legal housing. Not everyone is privileged to be in that situation, especially not with the housing market in many countries.
With your thinking you are creating a class of subhumans where you enjoy the benefits of their labour but you are not allowing them to vote. Like African Americans in the US not that long ago.
What do you think makes someone who’s pretty much just passing by entitled to push their opinions on the locals who’ve lived there their entire lives? Especially when that person
likely won’t suffer the longterm consequences of it
A yes, why didn't I think of that! Let me just completely ignore the broken housing market, the 15+ year waiting list for social housing and scrape together... lets checks... €400k for a small appartement with a 45 minute commute to work.
Do you have any clue how privileged you sound here? This is peak "have you tried not being poor" attitude.
While I don't know about European countries, given this is an article about America it's worth pointing out that you can, in fact, vote in the US while homeless[0], using a friend/family's home, shelter, or religious center as your address.
Actually yes, that is by design. There is a reason the US had property ownership as a requirement to vote in the constitution. Whether removing that requirement was correct or not is up for debate. But there is a distinction in a democracy between an active citizen and a passive citizen. An active citizen is someone that has skin in the game and is a willing participant in the process. A passive citizen is someone that does not engage in the process, or does not actively have skin in the game. The thought espoused in the enlightenment was that someone with property would be tied to the location long term and would therefore have interest in the long term success of that town/state/nation. Someone who is only in a town for a year doesn't meaningfully have stakes in the town. They don't really care if the schools aren't funded well enough, or if the roads don't have long term maintenance budget, they are only going to care about immediate needs. Someone with a house, that has children or grand children, they are going to not only care about now but 30 years from now as well.
Everyone affected by the laws passed have "skin in the game".
Someone renting an apartment and working a job in a community definitely has skin in the game in regards to local tax rates, building regulations, public amenities, etc.
Sure but there’s degrees to this. If you’re a day laborer renting a room at the local motel, it’s a lot easier for you to say “screw this place I’m going to the next town over” than for someone who has their kids enrolled in the highschool and a mortgage.
Everyone has skin in the game but some have way more.
It was because they thought that landowners would direct the votes of the people who lived on that land. The same reason was given for not allowing women to vote. https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1645
Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
Yeah I know. My point is that in the US, in 2026, whether voting should be restricted to property owners is not "up for debate," except maybe among a certain set of cranks.
Eh, a growing set of cranks. The diversity of political opinion in America seems to have exploded over the last decade. Cranks are now serious contenders for power and influence.
> Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
This is such bullshit. Pre-literate societies were not ignorant societies, they were not stupid societies, they were not issue-free societies. The printing press gave rise to literacy which then gave rise to both books and print-based issue campaigning. But the idea that before people were able to read they were also unable to understand "the issues being voted on" is ridiculous. People ate, built, got sick, got hot, got cold, got injured, were richer or poorer ... everyone had a framework in which to understand "the issues being voted on".
You could argue it wasn't an educated understanding, and that might be correct depending on your understanding of what "education" is. But the idea that people couldn't actually understand stuff until literacy arrived is just ridiculous.
So are the justifications of Adams and Blackstone. Literacy was the justification given by early Greek democracies with written legal codes, though some, like Athens, later broadened eligibility.
There people have residency, they just don't live in a stable form of housing that allows them to register as living in the city. But some of them have lived in the city for years.
Whatever idea you have about how black Americans live is bizarre. And despite being ignorant of us, you attempt to silence discussions by acting like you are us.
I saw your other comment with regards to the Netherlands. If that’s where you’re located, you only need to have a stable location once. Then you can register. Another person can’t unregister you from there, so you can vote even if you then move to a hotel.
Only question remains is how you want to deal with mail, but there are workarounds for that.
...and sorry: Thats absolutely OK. I do not want strangers stopping by for 3 - 4 years to be able to influence the politics of my country? Thats totaly understandable?
I would never to ask to vote at a remote place where I do not live permanently, yet where I even not a citizen?
Somebody who spends 3-4 years in a place has an immense interest in how it's governed. Their view is 100% as valid as yours, and they should have equal voice, if we are going to judge people based on how long they live somewhere.
I live in a college town. Why shouldn't student voices be represented, when they are a huge chunk of our community?
Maybe I'm too US focused, and have been accused of that a lot recently, but your views are fundamentally at odds with basic democracy as I see it as a US citizen.
There's a massive difference between "will be in a place for 3-4 years maximum, then leaving" vs "has been in a place for 3-4 years but is planning on staying permanently." In the former case their interests are going to be short-term and might not align with long-term residences. Per your example, university students would vote against allocating funds toward schools or playgrounds, because they know they're not going to be raising a family there. Or more globally, you have the population of "digital nomads" who are working in Vietnam/Thailand for a few years before they come back to the US.
It's pretty debatable if these temporary residents should have the same voting rights as permanent residents, since their interests are going to be at odds with long-term residents. I would not be happy if schools got defunded because university students who are only going to be there for a few years wanted to lower alcohol taxes.
Permanent residency/citizenship being a prerequisite for voting is used as a (very imperfect) screening for this.
Because people do not vote "for local interests" but for "the interests they are carrying with them according to their believes", which are usually not on par with the interestes of the long-term-resident local community.
That is OK but OP should not be complaining about people not being engaged with local politics if you are excluding a large part of the people living in the city from voting.
Are a large part of the people living in a city the kind of semi-transitory-but-also-there-for-years people you describe?
I'd wager that's a small proportion of almost every city. Most cities will have tourists who are visiting for a few days or weeks, and long term residents who have a permanent address there. The percentage of people living full time in hotels or airbnbs must be tiny. Perhaps in high cost of living cities there's more "hidden homeless" living on couches, but even then it's not going to be "a large part" of a city.
I don't have sources but for cities like Amsterdam I wouldn't be surprised if 5% of the population isn't registered with the municipality for various reasons. But have been living there for years. Plenty of people I know would sublet empty rooms of their social housing apartment, which is highly illegal but for some people the only way to find a place to stay. But you obviously can't register because then the person subletting would be kicked out.
Among those that are registered to vote locally, most don't. Regardless of whether or not people should or shouldn't be able to vote, many of those currently with the ability to do not.
There’s a lot you can do. Voting is the entry stake. You can make a big impact with a very low level of political engagement.
Allowing popular referendum for everything just invites a particular and usually really dumb level of politics. You can influence a board’s decision and get some or all of what you want.
IMO one of the biggest problems with society is that you have this view that politics is this idea that it’s some sort of magical thing that is done to you. I can get my city councilman on the phone easily. Probably would get a meeting with my state senator in a few days if need be. Just show up and work with people.
People who live in the city for the majority of their time. They should be able to vote. Regardless of their housing situation. In basically all of Europe, voting for local elections is tied to having stable housing.
I don't disagree with you per se, but how would that work in practice? How could you actually tell someone lives there if they don't have an address to back up that claim?
Yes, because they don’t legally permanently live in that place. Sorry not sorry. Why do
you think anyone can just sign up for some local elections and vote for a town they’re not even legally permanently situated in??
Then change the fucking system so that people who have been living in a city for years can legally do so. Or kick them out. But don't have this vague system of sub-humans that are not allowed to influence their surroundings by voting.
I'm not saying GP was implying this, but my read of their comment is that it would be a bad thing for everyone to start to voting. If a person doesn't know what they're voting for, they're not more likely to make good decisions. They're just more likely to cancel out the vote of someone who did educate themselves.
It's touched on in this article, but there's a lot more than just zoning that makes it impractical to operate businesses like the ones being talked about. Tax code, health code, ADA, etc. not to mention the complete lack of density in the majority of the US.
As much as I'd love to have something like Matsuya in the US, it's just not practical here. I'm surprised it hasn't been talked about yet, but zoning is also a major factor in the spiraling of housing costs.
5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state.
FWIW, it is a learned behavior that voting doesn't change much. It doesn't help when elected officials obviously ignore the will of the people (nationally, see polling data on legalizing, or even at least decriminalizing, marijuana, as one example), or when things just get overturned by someone else. My neighborhood "votes" on zoning, but the vote literally means nothing. The city council has to hear how we voted, but they don't have to take the vote into account.
I get that it's easy to scold people that don't vote, but it is more important that people with power do something to earn our votes. Hold them accountable. They're failing us more than our neighbors who have either been taught that voting doesn't matter especially when sometimes voting laws make it harder than it should be to vote anyway.
I think there is a snowball effect with zoning. I specifically sought out a place zoned with no building code checks and hardly any zoning. I value my right to die in a fire a lot more than I value my right to have the jack-boot enter my own property and tell me he knows best.
People like me go to places with fairly free zoning. The jack boot lickers go to places with restricted zoning. Once one has a majority it just snowballs and pushes harder and harder in the direction it is going, because no one wants to buy/build a house in a place that will flip from the one strategy to the other.
That's the simplistic view but not true in reality. Where I live the zoning law itself creates code exceptions -- for instance where I live my zone explicitly says there is no enforcement mechanism for codes, which effectively makes the building code (redefined as, essentially nothing) part of the zoning.
So zoning can turn de jure code requirements into de facto nulled or altered.
In "communism works because the cows are spherical, friction is 0 and gravity is 10" example land sure.
In reality building code is how a huge amount of back handed regulation is done. When the powers that be can't make a particular rule, because of other laws, or because of precedent to the contrary, or because the peasants wouldn't stand for it, what they do is they adopt a ridiculous code and then slap a "can be waived at the discretion of board X" on it. This way they can make the thing they don't like a non-starter economically for most people.
In my city you can park a semi trailer as storage. But it counts as a "structure" and because it's not a commercially manufactured shed, car port, stick framed garage or litany of other exemptions you have to go through the "everything else" process which includes all the "normal code shit" that any other non-exempt structure would hav to go through like an engineered foundation and snow loads and all sorts of other stuff that's just inappropriate. They have a similar set of BS they use to prevent DIYers from erecting kit buildings.
I can't imagine I'd ever want to buy a house from someone who makes a point to live someplace where they can install sub-par plumbing and wiring, that this lack of code compliance was the selling point of where to build.
Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
It's not about not meeting the standards of the town's health department, it's about having a 1-size-fits-all health standards.
If you make a 5-seat japaneese-style neighborhood micro-eatery conform to the same cross-contamination standards as a 800-people-per-hour mcdonalds, you're making one of these unprofitable and de-facto illegal.
Yes, lets have health codes. But lets also recognize different risk profiles and encourage all sorts of entrepreneurship. If it's 1-size-fits-all, then the only size is going to be XXL.
Can you be more specific on exactly what kind of cross-contamination standards make it impossible for a small eatery to exist? Do you have any specific rules in mind?
Its been a while since I went through a food safety course, but I don't really recall any that would make it impossible for a small shop to achieve. I follow most of the rules I learned in my own kitchen at home. Stuff like don't use the same cutting board and knife between meat and veggies without cleaning in between, don't wear jewelry while prepping, keep things in safe time/temperature constraints, etc.
Cross contamination standards can't make it impossible for a small eatery to exist, and without standards enforcement businesses will absolutely go full The Jungle. Unfortunately, I could believe that paperwork around cross contamination standards could get there- a chain can spread the cost of the laywering to get paperwork right over hundreds of establishments, and learn it progressively as it gets worse, a single establishment has to do all the paperwork themselves up front.
People who conflate "not actively regulated and inspected with government permission being given before stuff even happens" with "sub par" as if that's not reductive at best is exactly how we got here.
Most people don't make a point to go out of their way to avoid having rules applied if they're intending on following the rules. I don't think its that big of a leap.
You're also misreading my comment. I'm not saying they definitely will do a sub-par job, but that its now an option, that they can do it. And given its the cheaper option (up front at least), it probably will happen more often. And especially when it comes to stuff like wiring, where once the walls are all sealed it can be expensive to inspect later, and yet if done improperly may kill your family and destroy most of what you own.
Just like that restaurant I give as an example, its not necessary they definitely will ignore food safety rules, but they sure make an effort and pride them selves to the ability to ignore them whenever they want.
Once again this is a take predicated on bad assumptions.
If you're just doing something and intend to meet or exceed the rules then dealing with government enforcement apparatus is pure overhead. You were always gonna do the right thing so you gain zero upside and have to deal with a potentially capricious and unaccountable (in any practical way) enforcer which is a huge downside.
Second, the rules are chock full of 10,000ft ivory tower view type stuff that makes statistical sense but is inefficient compared to using judgment. But you can't use judgement because the whole point of code is to make everything quantitative so that idiots can inspect other idiots and parties can more efficiently bicker in court and whatnot.
There's a lot of upside to the fact the next owner isn't going to have to question if things were done properly, that insurance isn't going to be able to push back when something does go wrong.
Well that's luck for you, because I built the house I live in, and I'm not selling it. Although since I actually have to live in the house, the wiring was designed by an electrical engineer and installed at or above NEC requirements. But there was no one to look over my shoulder when I did it.
If there were regulations house would have cost at least double. Because I have a day job and no time for inspectors, nor any trade license.
>Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
Lol having lived in the third world I've eaten from probably a hundred of these. Very tasty. Not much different than the US where inspector is basically never there so you still must apply all the food sanitation rules in deciding regarding buying food from a vendor.
> most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses
So the voters are wrong? You know what's "better" for them, right? Whether they want it or not, right?
> we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally
Because they are more in line with what you think?
PS
I'm being downvoted - but what is the point of local administrators, except to follow the voters demands? Sure, if you are a local politician, make your case, but local administrators ought to be doing whatever-it-is that people voted for. That's the whole point of voting, as I understand it.
The point is NOT to make people keep voting until they get it right, according to the administratots. That's the wrong way around! The administrators should be enacting whatever the voters want.
This sort of citizen engagement is cute, naïve and ultimately pointless. Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things. I’m not being sarcastic.
Glendale, Colorado is the quintessential example of this. Like 2,000 people live there due to insane gerrymandering, but there are tons of businesses and money moving around. The mayor gives crazy zoning benefits to his wife (strip club and dispensary on the main road, right next to target and chikfila) among other controversy. Dunafon controls the county with the help of other powerful players.
Lack of engagement in local elections and politics is a major issue in the United States, there is a huge amount of low level corruption like this because its really easy to game things when 20 people vote.
I find it curious that I earned -2 points. Perhaps my points in the post were too pointed for some people. That, or some people really love civics theatre.
Yep, largely the same for me. Half the city council and most of the planning commission seats are held by real estate people or developers. The state government is heavily influenced by the Realtors Association, and will frequently override local ordinances at the state level when they don't go favorably enough for the real estate industry. It was pretty disappointing to discover.
> Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things
Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.
The point of the OP post, AFAICT, is that even in places where there are no powerful billionaire-backed campaigns and lobbying, and people can have their way with simple, effortless voting, too few people even care! And those who act, do so cluelessly, or in a narrowly selfish way.
The most powerful weapon the powerful have against the majority of "ordinary people" is to propagate the idea that all this local stuff is boring and ultimately decides nothing. To make people stop caring.
"We can't do anything because the billionaires" is such dumb cynicism. Actually, local government has a say in zoning almost everywhere in the US. If more people participated, they could make a real difference.
The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default, regardless of local density levels. This post does a great job illustrating the difference this makes:
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
For comparison, even our best-case scenarios for urbanism here in the states (like NYC) have incredibly convoluted zoning rules, which in turn make it impossible to build anything new without intervention from the city/state:
https://zola.planninglabs.nyc/about#9.72/40.7125/-73.733
> The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default,
Also, Japan generally has good mass transit throughout their cities, which essentially doesn't exist in the US. Less mass transit -> more cars -> need for parking -> larger buildings with setbacks to include parking -> less density -> less mass transit... Land use and transportation systems in the US have been co-evolved to the present sub-optimal state we have now.
This is a big misconception. The core neighborhoods of the big Japanese cities are dense, mixed-use, and have good mass transit. But as soon as you move a bit further away, they degenerate into endless urban sprawl like American cities. I know because I live in a small Japanese city, and it is just box stores, small detached houses, and two-story apartments.
They are both called mixed use, but are very different in terms of implementation.
In Japan, you can start and run your own business in your your own house (like your garage), within certain limits. This is why there are businesses in Japan like tiny cafes and shops that are nonviable anywhere else.
Where you and I live, the commercial section is a completely separate unit which is usually quite large, must be rented separately, and comes with a lot of regulations.
So many odd questions raised in this article. Literally each section seems to just hand wave a lot of things.
And, look, I am all for attacking some regulations; but I have to confess the requirement for multiple sinks is going to be far down my list of regulations that have to go. Odd to see it be one of the top mentioned ones, here.
The biggest question, for me, is raised when the complaint is dropped that we spend about an hour in the kitchen. I cannot believe that that is an meaningful number to compare between city and urban/rural living. Which, at large, is a big part of the problem with looking at anything from places like Tokyo. They have density that many in the US just don't understand.
The article even largely acknowledges this by comparing Manhattan pizza shops. A business model that you just can't magically make work in less dense cities.
Density is also a problem caused by zoning/permitting regulations. SF, LA, and even NYC should all be more dense than they currently are. Not being able to increase their density just means that prices have gone up instead.
I can get behind that message, to a large extent. The rest of the complaints are largely all downstream of that, though? The reason places don't have the same cheap food options that denser locations have is pretty much fully down to the density question.
And sure, we can tackle making places denser. A large hurdle there is that people want both the space that they currently have, along with the benefits of higher density. And that just doesn't work.
What a trash article. Why is the only photo, used to illustrate the point about narrow buildings, a photo of Manhattan instead of anything in Japan? When "our zoning laws" are enumerated, where are they talking about? Last time I checked there were no US federal rules on parking spaces. At least they acknowledge that multiple jurisdictions exist when talking about health codes. And as per usual when talking about Japan, they ignore the fact that Japan also has car-dependent suburbs and rural areas, where it is quite common for restaurants outside of city centers to need to balance costs with the need for a larger footprint and a parking lot. The role of culture in eating habits is also ignored, Americans take more pride in the self-reliance of cooking their own meals.
UK is famous for having extremely tough zoning laws, with many, many buildings being listed / landmarked. Something that does run very well in the UK are stores like Greggs which are usually classified as small shops (cat. E) without a kitchen. So the analysis applies there as well.
>don’t have such stringent don’t have strict zoning laws
I thought the planning process in UK is even more perilous because of the lack of zoning laws? Everything is up to council review, which basically means vibes based instead of something that's codified.
You can get pre-packaged sandwiches in the US (and a bunch of other stuff too, including hot food). I don't buy them and don't know the exact price, but they aren't expensive, definitely under $5. Eating from corner stores and gas stations is just usually looked down on.
Pre-packaged sandwiches in the US are typically more in the $8-10 range, and that's just for the (sad) sandwich. It also tends to be much more depressing than what you'd get in the UK. Barely edible.
* optimizations. Some of these restaurants don’t have a counter, or any customer facing staff. Select your meal and pay at a vending machine, get your ticket number, wait for your order to be called.
* onsen/community center: it’s entirely feasible to own less things and have fewer sq/ft at home if you can go to your local rec center to shower/spa, watch tv, sit on the couch, eat dinner, hang out with friends, etc. as a tourist my meal+spa+etc was maybe $10?
* public transit: a lot of these shops are viable in Tokyo because rails move people en masse quickly
Or basically all of Europe. Haven't seen $4 lunch bowls (adjusted to local wages) anywhere. Spending "nearly an hour a day cooking" is the norm in most countries here. Eating out is expensive anywhere.
Here in Seattle, it's wildly expensive to go out and we rarely do. When I lived in Portland it was inexpensive (and amazing) so almost everyone went out regularly which supported a ton of restaurants that completed against each other. Not sure what was different but the difference was night and day.
Curious what time period this was. For example, if you lived in Portland in 2019 and Seattle in 2023 it could just be inflation causing people to go out less.
Great point. Temporarily separated samplings would have that effect. However, I moved directly from Portland to Seattle. Further, I have returned to Portland and found it to be just as wonderful a place to eat out as before.
What’s missing from the writer’s analysis is also the desire from the population to create such businesses. Having lived in Asia for a bit, most of these small businesses are not wildly profitable and not everyone is willing to put in the hard work and effort to running these affordable restaurants.
You are oversimplifying the writer's position. They mention zoning as one reason but also other regulations, health codes (minimum sink counts!) and other things like parking minimums (which houston has had, though they've been removed recently in a lot of cases), reliable and ubiquitous public transit, etc.
If you want a fast, healthy, balanced meal for $4 or less, the obvious choice in America is a frozen meal (aka TV dinner).
You can microwave it in 4-6 minutes; ingredients are often flash-frozen, locking in nutrients; and food-safety concerns are addressed at scale, rather than in a hit-or-miss way in a tiny storefront.
So perhaps, instead of advocating for more tiny restaurants that would likely need to skimp on safety considerations, we should be advocating for more microwaves available in grocery and convenience stores, so people can select a frozen meal, heat it up, and be on their way.
Not sure I can accept most of your assertions, but anyway, I left America in 2008 and IIRC there were microwaves available in every 7-11 even then?
There were't any $4 healthy bowls of anything, but there were $2 "red hot beef & bean" (& fake soy filler) burritos which hit the spot if you'd failed to find a way to eat real food...
The problem with the microwave solution, I think, is that pretty much only burritos and pasta can be packaged in a microwavable way that still tastes good? And maybe like a few kinds of vegetable side dishes.
I've been to the US a couple of times and most restaurants I visited did not have any parking spots at all. I have also seen plenty of food-carts operated by a single person, comparable to the Japanese mini-restaurants described here.
It's not federal. It'll come down to the state and municipality. If you were in a denser city, it's likely they didn't have that requirement. Lots of New York City doesn't have this kind of requirement, but you may see that if you were in a more suburban area
I'm guessing you stayed in a major city and didn't drive anywhere outside of it? If you flew in and didn't have a rental car, odds are your itinerary was biased towards places that didn't need a car?
America is going in the opposite direction with instant food delivery. Your $11 meal is delivered to your house within 30 minutes. But, there's a service fee of $5, a delivery fee of $6, and a 20% gratuity.
There’s something very weird in the US, it’s like we intentionally set things up to accelerate convergence to obviously dumb local optima and then don’t explore any options to get over those barriers.
I think we just lack the ability for self-critique as a country. If you try, you get a bunch of loud morons yelling at you for being un-American or some other nonsense.
I'm probably the only person here who has been in a Walmart in the last year or two, but recently I found that my local Walmart offers a warm counter with freshly prepared small bites, and you can get a respectable chicken sandwich for $2. It's a decent small meal, and the same item would probably be $6-$12 at a fast foot joint. I guess each individual Walmart is big enough to offer these bites to their shoppers.
"Respectable" is not something I care about in a sandwich. Beyond your disdain for things from Walmart, how is a filling, tasty sandwich not "respectable"?
Zoning performs some important functions, but is often used to set up barriers-to-entry. I somewhat doubt that zoning is the problem here because there were plenty of cheap restaurants before the recessions, covid, and trade-war inflation. The US population is low-density, low-engagement, and low on disposable income. The food service industry has adapted by targeting the wealthiest, who have plenty of disposable income and are much more willing to spend than low-wage workers who can barely afford eggs and milk from a grocery store.
Japanese fans also will stay to clean up a stadium after the game so I'm not sure how many examples from Japan can be applied to the US without taking step #1 of changing the entire culture, character, and conscientiousness of American society.
I have been living in Japan for years and I would like to know where you can find a lunch bowl for 600 yen which is not a company cantine or industrial konbini shit.
>Individual regulations, each reasonable in isolation...
Every single one of these rules that amounts to death by a thousand cuts preventing these sorts of businesses (as well as many others) will be rabidly defended by many/most if presented in the abstract. That sort of inability to reason about the forest based on what you're doing to the trees is the root problem. And it's a social/ideological/moral one, even if it expresses itself via governments.
It's no more "reasonable in isolation" to peddle rules than it is to justify littering in the park because they don't take effect in isolation. If everyone does it everything goes to crap and we all know it so we don't let anyone justify littering in the park using the effect in isolation.
I really enjoyed Lex Fridman's interview with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on this topic, as part of their book tour for Abundance. Even if I disagree with some of their proposals, I really liked their focus and clarification of the issue. We should be mindful of the POSIWID principle and be talking a lot more about the results of our policies.
This is why the "let's slash regulations and cut the size of the government to let business prosper" pitch seems so appealing, and yet never seems to work in practice. The problem is, these kinds of deregulatory pushes always imagine that there are a bunch of price-increasing regulations set up by unaccountable bureaucrats somewhere, and that we can tear those down while making the system simultaneously cheaper and more democratic. A win-win! Supposedly.
The problem is, that's not really how it works. There are a bunch of regulations made by bureaucrats, but those tend to be the pretty arcane ones which are necessary but aren't adding a lot of cost (think "what color do the flashing lights on radio towers have to be so planes don't crash into them"). And simultaneously, there are a bunch of regulations which are actually driving costs up, but those are the ones either broadly supported by the public, or supported by one particular interest group who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it because their livelihood or home equity depends on the rent extraction.
To actually cut costs with deregulation, you need to fight ugly political battles often against sympathetic groups (homeowners, doctors, teachers, construction workers etc.), which no politician wants to do, so they instead try to pretend that "bureaucrats" (who could be less sympathetic than bureaucrats?) are to blame.
That's exactly right. I have so many frustrating stories from local politics that go exactly like you described.
There is hope. Scott Wiener is a California politician who saw that these problems can't be resolved at the local level and got himself elected to the state legislature. He is smart about how he sets up the battles so he has had very good results incrementally improving California's zoning - and other things - by gradually restricting local zoning authority when it's abused.
We are not yet at the "convenience store at the subdivision corner" stage, but give him time.
This needs more detailed data that normalizes for the amount of food (price per calorie or price per weight or something like that).
Yes, a bowl at chipotle in the US might be 2x the price (more, probably) of a Japanese bowl, but it matters if I am getting 2x the calories also.
And there are foods in the US that are technically as cost effective, although maybe not as nutritious, like pizza which they mention, that can be around $1-$3 per slice. (Not my first choice for a lunch, but I could pickup a large 3 topping dominos pizza for $10 and make 3-4 lunches out of it, for example)
I'm not sure what your point is. Is it about the lunches being specifically healthy?
A rice bowl at Chipotle, for example, is not unhealthy (rice, beans, meat, vegetables). Plenty of restaurant food in the US is perfectly healthy (or, you can look at nutrition facts to know if it is). And if I can take a single US portion size and split it into two lunches that are Japanese-sized portions, then maybe we're getting the same amount food per dollar.
And on the "healthy" point: The article doesn't discuss nutrition facts at all or refer to any specific meals or dishes.
They link to an article concerning the price of Japanese bowls, that mentions "a regular-sized bowl of rice with beef from Japanese fast food chain Yoshinoya, which costs around 468 yen (S$4.25)." I don't know Japanese so it's hard for me to find nutrition information about that particular dish, but I suspect that a beef bowl is high in saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium (because most stir-fried beef is higher in these things). Is that healthy? Japan as a country has higher sodium intake than the US. Is that healthy? And so on. I suspect a big factor of the "health" of these lunches is that portion sizes are just smaller than in the US (but I have no data).
I think just statistics about how many people are overweight and obese in both countries can already paint a picture that probably japanese food is more healthy. And optimizing for how many calories you can get for $1 is probably also not the best metric to aim for.
The parking thing caused us not to buy a building. Not enough spots, not enough handicap spots too.
The annoying part is that we lived 4 houses down from the building. We would never drive there ofc. The other thing is that the parking lot was so small, all spaces could be seen as Handicap accessible.
Instead we rented in a different area and the handicap spaces are significantly further from the building.
Maybe it ended up working out since our company grew and I know that space would not have been big enough.
Visited Japan for the first time in December. I stayed at Airbnb's in Tokyo and Kyoto.
There were no $4 lunch bowls nearby, but I didn't need that to appreciate that I could walk to six restaurants, two wine shops and three cafes in less than three minutes. It was wonderful.
Just having visited Japan, another thing that's immediately apparent though is that there are other well-intentioned laws that prevent this from happening. My favorite breakfast was like $8 (which was better than American breakfast by an order-of-magnitude) was in a tiny shop that had a tiny curved staircase that could scarcely fit tall people, definitely not obese people, and don't even pretend handicap people.
Frankly I think alternative laws should be applicable (you don't need to be able seat wheelchair people if you're willing to bring the food to them to-go) since I just think it's not worth losing that efficient density and cost-effectiveness for a tiny tiny fraction of the population.
There are still requirements for the types of use classifications (including things like parking minimums[0]), there are still food safety regulations, etc.
The lax zoning laws doesn't mean there are no rules, just that there are no rules preventing you from having an eatery right next to an active oil and gas well right next to a townhouse right next to a liquor store right next to a welding shop.
reducing everything to zoning laws is lazy analysis. nobody will ever sell $4 lunch bowls in SF because the rent is too high. so these market incentives will influence/force the proprietor to sell them for more!
if you are going to have a rebuttal, at least give a little bit why my take is lazy analysis. (and i'm aware your argument exists, and it's also wrong!)
the rent is too high because of the market incentives. zoning laws are one of several dynamics that influence the market.
we've built a ton of structures with existing zoning laws when the economy is good, more than we've built during this deregulation paradigm. we stop when the economy or market is bad. very simple concept.
SF has a relatively high ratio of housing units to population compared to other cities in the US and a 9.7% vacancy rate. By the numbers, it has an oversupply of housing.
That is not a valid interpretation of the data. The ratio you cite, which is a pointless one, is mostly influenced by household size. SF has a relatively small household size compared to the state and nation. The vacancy rate you cite is also not a useful one that people generally understand. There were 19000 units for sale or rent during the last ACS survey, out of 418000 physical dwellings, and that's only 4.5% which is very low by historical standards.
How do you square this bizarre and obviously false hypothesis with all the times that San Francisco did not have high cost of living, had declining population, etc?
I wonder if you could partially get around this by using the "ghost kitchen" model. Offer food only for delivery, but then "hire" customers to deliver their own meals if they want it cheap.
Delivery apps eat into revenue way too much. Also most ghost "restaurants" aren't small businesses, they're a second (or nth) brand for an existing restaurant.
Pay Japanese salaries, get Japanese prices [0]. That $4 kombini bento feels like a $13 burrito or Cava bowl when on a Japanese salary.
Japan only appears cheap if you earn in USD, GBP, and Euros. For most Japanese households, costs have risen higher than salaries [1][2] and they are now facing inflation due to tourist spending [7][8][9].
It also doesn't help that the median household income in Japan is around $25,000 [3] compared to $83,000 [4] in the US. Even Koreans (who used to be Japan's "Mexicans") now earn more in Korea than in Japan, which is a massive psychological shock in JP.
This is why you've starting seeing the rise of populist far right parties like 参政党 in Japan campaigning on an anti-tourist and anti-foreigner plank - it's overwhelmingly young Japanese (18-34) who are facing the brunt of tourism-induced inflation and a bad job market, and have as such shifted right [5][6]. And mainstream Japanese parties like the LDP have had to shift further right as a result.
Besides what all these other commenters are saying, probably many of the people running these small lunch shops in Japan are the owners, not waged employees. On top of that, that business probably isn’t viable for 8 hours per day.
> But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.
Lets napkin-math this. If we assume a food truck has margins at the upper end of the fast-casual industry of 9%, then each $18 burger-and-fries nets 1.62 in profit.
$28,276 / 1.62 = 17,454 burgers-and-fries.
If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
And that doesn't cover any of the other fees and expenses a food truck might have.
Those are brutal economics. I'm impressed it's only $18!
> If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
This looks crazy because it is incorrect. In your premise, that 9% profit margin includes the regulatory costs for a brick and mortar restaurant already. The only way your logic works out is if truck regulations are on average $30k more expensive than a regular building, which they almost certainly are not.
You can’t even begin to do the calculation without knowing the breakdown underlying the profit margin you cite.
Yea, if people are thinking you can just grab a truck and park it wherever you like, they are in for a big wake up call. The last city I lived in had the brick restaurant owners lobby and fight like hell to stack up every regulation they could on food trucks.
Dude when industry wide margins are considered it's net margin. Gross margin on food is typically 70%. Of course, that margin does still get eaten up by a million things and the business is still brutal but they're definitely making gross margin of way more han $1.62 on burgers.
1. food trucks are subject to lots of regulation and fees too
2. burrito trucks sell their burritos at the market clearing price for a burrito, which is $18 because most of that burrito truck's competition is brick-and-mortar restaurants with expensive rent because of zoning laws.
A lot of the interesting food trucks around me are routinely more expensive than the brick and mortar stores around, often due to the novelty of the cuisine.
Dude, there's a million regulations for food trucks. Not only do zoning laws typically still apply to them (of course it varies a lot by municipality) there's usually extra regulations on top of that (can't park within X metres of a restaurant for example) and cities often have extortionate fees for permits. It's often tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in permits...
Honestly, at this point, may be someone can collect a bunch of like minded individuals and build a city from scratch that ticks all the boxes instead of fighting existing vested interests. Then, hopefully it can be a model for others to review and check.
The problem with US or any other country is that too many things that should not be ideological become ideological. So many people would be happy to live in a 1400 sq ft 3 bedroom house over 2500 sq ft single family homes if a lot of other things were provided.
Building a city from scratch has been attempted a few times. Disney tried to make a city once and now Musk is trying to do the same. They don't work out.
you don't have to build new city from scratch just do city planning and dedicate one outside part of city to high density, high tower residential buildings then let me people decide where they want to live.
The article's diagnosis just doesn't seem connected to the facts. It has nothing to do with "restaurant tiers"; as the first link describes, the "healthy lunch bowls" are provided by the fast food chain Yoshinoya, which sells the same bowls in their US locations for $9.
This is missing the forest for the trees a bit. Our zoning laws do prevent lower footprint businesses, but in reality the problem is less zoning laws and more landlords and rent. If you compare city to city (ignoring other societal issues), cities in Japan have a far lower vacancy rate compared to cities across America.
In Seattle I've seen a ton of smaller spaces become vacant and stay vacant for years because landlords aren't interested in lowering rent prices; they're holding onto the building/land itself because it'll appreciate over time and there's little to no cost to them to hold onto empty space. Roosevelt Square here is a great example of what I'm referring to, because you've got prime restaurant and retail space located right next to public transit that's increasingly going empty.
It sort of is. When a property owner has loan against a commercial property, the lender uses the monthly rent to calculate how much they will loan you. The rent number they use is the last paid rent.
So you, the property owner, end up in a situation where if you lower rent to attract a new tenant, the bank will recalculate your loan, potentially ending in a margin call.
Because you are a heavily leveraged house of cards, a rug pull on a few of these loans could cause a cascade liquidating your commercial inventory. Your business is buy a property, take a loan against it, use that loan to buy a property, etc etc.
Therefore it becomes worth it to carry vacant properties, because they are acting as the stilts holding up your money making properties. The vacancy becomes a cost of doing business, and gets factored into the rent of places that are getting leased.
The current location my office is in, was vacant for 12 years before we signed a lease, owned by a big name commercial real estate firm.
Given what seems like a high rate of vacancies in a lot of markets maybe its time for those landlords to be wiped out, the loans defaulted, and the buildings sell to get back to their real valuations.
But no, we can't have wealthy people lose some money or the banks take a loss, that'd be terrible. We'll just continue crushing the middle class and poor with high rent costs and empty properties.
In an ideal situation, cities should be placing pressure on property owners and businesses to lease out vacant space because otherwise they are effectively offloading the negative externalities of empty space to the city and its tax base. If the city isn't going to outright buy vacant property for the sake of development, then it should heavily tax property owners for leaving said property empty or undeveloped.
That might help a little, but you won't notice. Beating such taxes is done with low value businesses. A mattress store is a typical case, good for holding larger spaces with almost no capital cost: a low overhead business used to hold a retail property until values appreciate. Smaller spaces are held with little clothing stores nobody shops at, or wire transfer shops and such. There is a plethora of such operations holding real estate everywhere, barely breaking even or losing modest amounts of money.
It's compelling to imagine there is some brilliant tax fix for every ill, but investors are a lot more agile than tax authorities; they make their living solving these impediments. Handling food is one the costliest ways to hold a commercial property, so that's rarely how its done.
I don't disagree, but even a low overhead business is still going to be better than an empty storefront (since it means creating some business and employment than none) and a reasonable % of said vacant businesses will be turned into decent value for the community. It's something especially apparent because even the local mattress stores have closed and left said space vacant.
Ok, but you're not going to get a nifty $4 lunch bowl shop. The properties are held until Starbucks or H&R Block or whatever wants to expand. Maybe said tax makes the mattress store reopen with its one minimum wage cashier poking at their phone all day, but you won't get more than that. The investors are holding out for the big money.
The business model works because when a buyer appears looking for numerous sites for expansion, they can deal with a professional investor group that can close deals in a cinch. This greatly lowers costs, because otherwise said buyer has to employ a small army of expensive people and take years to acquire or develop properties themselves. The buyer pays a premium for the value of foregoing all that. The price covers all the years of expenses; minimum wage labor, taxes, upkeep, and a good deal of profit, after years or even decades of squatting.
Nowhere in any of this is there someone with dreams of $4 lunch bowl shops.
Restaurants will charge what people are able to pay. My office is on the third floor of a century-old parisian building, in the heart of the city. The street is filled with tiny restaurants, some of which serve these "healthy lunch bowls" that the US apparently lacks. Except they're 14€ here (without drinks or desserts), because people have the money to pay for it, and do so. You can relax zoning laws, but no one will price their bowls at $4 in the richest country on Earth, obviously.
I used to be able to get $3 breakfast and $5 lunch (ok, tipping rounds those up, but the base price is there) at nearly any Coney Island in the Detroit metro. It's not about richness or zoning, it's all about population density and disposable income. People in the US are poorer than we used to be, so restaurants only target the rich. US cities are remarkably fluffy and often less dense than suburbs in other countries. It's that simple.
No one sells $4 lunch bowls in the US because no one wants to work for minimum wage for 12 hours a day. The article makes it seem like a great idea, but people in Japan who run these stores work like dogs and live in poverty for their whole lives.
Uber isn't exactly cheap, just cheaper than taxis, which are super-expensive. Kitchen work generally requires some kind of training, often some kind of licensing or certification, and is rarely the cheapest type of labor.
Anyway, the main issue here is population density, not labor availability. If there tens or hundreds of thousands of people working and living in a quarter mile radius and average foot traffic was in hundreds or thousands per hour rather than dozens or less it would likely be easy to sell $4 bowls and make a profit - most of the US is vastly less dense and walkable than that though, even in cities.
You’re not getting $4 lunch bowls in Seattle when minimum wage is more than $20/hr. You aren’t getting affordable anything when labor is so expensive. (You also aren’t getting your 16 year old their first job either when labor costs more than your kid is worth but that is another topic entirely)
I serve as a planning commissioner for my city, and my city just recently tried to overhaul our zoning code to allow for more affordability and better economic outcomes for our citizens and future as a city. Here is what I have learned:
In the US, few people participate or care about local laws, zoning, and elections, or even understand why participation may be important. In a citizen ballot to determine if we should cap housing construction, 10% of the population voted. 5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state. Among those voters, most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses.
Most people do not realize how zoning impacts the daily life of everyone in an area, and how it impacts personal finances, which businesses will thrive, and public finances. Where I live, we have an absurd number of chains, and local businesses struggle. Part of this is out of our control, but the part that is (minimum parking requirements, single use zoning, etc) continuously gets upheld against changes that would help local businesses.
I think we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally. Many young people will protest national or state policies and be engaged at those levels, which is great, but very little time/energy is spent where they could directly see meaningful impact on their lives.
Protests come when people are pushed into a corner with little other choice. Participation is more prevalent when people have free time in their lives. Our economics has systematically squeezed free time out in favor of more work to most of our workforce, and particularly hard for young people.
One reason so many local city policies favor the old, is that they're retired and have the time to participate
When in American history have we had more free time for civic participation?
Probably never, except maybe during the period when only white male landowners could vote and so the "we" was a much smaller and wealthier group. Voter turnout is pretty high these days though.
https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
Young people seem to have plenty of free time to march around the streets protesting, chanting and banging drums (which has pretty much zero effect on policy), but they aren't able to find the time to attend a city council meeting, or even vote, for that matter.
Pretty sure the young people protesting are the ones also voting. But that’s only a small fraction of the total young people.the rest are too busy on TikTok :/
I think the problem is more like:
When in American history have we had more things that are more engaging¹ competing with civic participation for our free time?
¹: and I think the terrifying answer might be:
In the latter half of the 20th century, while many things were much worse than they are today, it was genuinely possible to support a family on a single minimum-wage job in many parts of the country.
Now, that doesn't mean that everyone used the extra time for civic participation, but when you compare that to today, when far too many people have to work two or three jobs per adult just to keep the lights on, I think it's fair to say that there was more free time.
around May, 1886
and a lot more after
July 2020.
This. I fought against a zoning exception (ironic comment) that would allow an asphalt plant near my children's school. When we showed up at meetings, they were canceled and rescheduled at different times for 'reasons'. I managed to get people there every time, but it was tough for parents to get there, and it seemed like the process had been weaponized against our participation.
Protests are also largely useless.
Protesting is basically "doing nothing, loudly." It looks virtuous but has almost zero actual affect on policy. Does any politician actually look at a protest and say "Oh, my, look at that, people don't like what I'm doing! Looks like I have to change my mind."
They never change their minds, that's because the police are willing to beat the protesters for them. The Civil Rights movement is an example of (mostly, but not always peaceful) protest that changed things within living memory. Gay rights advances in recent decades definitely owe a lot to demonstrations and public organizing that put the issues into public conversation. Women's suffrage movements also featured many protests. Policy effects are everywhere.
What has no effect pretty much ever is protesting foreign policy, because the majority of people in any country neither care nor know what happens anywhere else.
Politicians are like ROM. You can't change them once they are programmed. If you want a different function, you need to swap them out. Yelling in the street is not going to get you anywhere.
The reason Civil Rights, Gay Rights and so on got traction was not through protestors changing politicians' minds. It was through the masses changing their minds and actually going to the ballot boxes to replace their (essentially robot) politicians.
Not when they’re accompanied with large scale strikes as Europeans have found.
You mean French.
This is status quo propaganda.
Note that I'm not saying you, yourself, are a proponent of the status quo, deliberately spreading propaganda.
But protests are absolutely not useless.
"waaaah they don't change Trump's mind after a single protest waaaaah" of course not. That's not what they're there to do. That's the win condition, not the only move in the game.*
Protests have a variety of important effects, but let's just focus on two of the big ones, which are closely linked:
1) They tell the other people who disagree with what is going on that they are not alone. That there are others like them out there, and that if they do try to do something (whether that's go to a protest themselves, call their congresspeople, or whatever), it won't be just shouting into the void.
2) They tell the people who agree with what is going on that this is not over. They can't just expect to be greeted as liberators; there are people in their own hometown who think that this is not OK, it shouldn't be allowed to continue, and anyone who supports it can expect at least a side-eye at the supermarket, if not much more serious social shunning.
And no: neither of these lead directly to a change in the policies that are being protested. But that doesn't mean that they're useless, any more than it's useless to, say, release wolves into Yellowstone, if what you care about are some of the myriad downstream effects of a trophic cascade.
* Not, I would note very firmly, that it's a game. This is merely a convenient metaphor.
I don't think economics have squeezed out free time -- phones squeeze out all our free time.
Being on your phone doesn't stop you from waiting in line at the polling booth. A job does.
Having two or three jobs is not really conductive to free time.
In the US per official data ~5% have more than one job (and that includes lawyers doing consultancy for example) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
So that would mean 1 in 10 families that are affected on average. Seems like a lot.
concerning
Some politician in Japan pushed zoning away from cities up to the prefecture and national level. So locals do not get veto rights over new construction.
It's an archetypal social coordination problem that can't be solved at a local level. If relaxed zoning pushes all new buildings into my neighborhood, because all other vote against it, then I'm going to end up with 20 stories of balconies hanging above my property but see no benefits, not even indirect ones like lower rents leading to lower inflation and prices etc. Some developer will simply capture that rent - both in the rent extraction sense and the real estate rent meanings.
A smart central planner can act for the shared benefit, they are sensitive to the votes of renters in some other high density area that also can't solve the problem locally etc.
if your neighborhood gets denser you will see the benefits
if you want to live there you can pick from more options
developers capture value, but the buildings are there
obviously the usual problem is that the land value goes up, and thus the rent goes up too (because suddenly the neighborhood becomes more desirable - which again is a sign of benefits for those who already live there)
My state did something similar recently as well for land within a quarter mile of transit, they have to be zoned for a minimum number of housing units, and parking minimums cannot be enforced in that radius. Some of the municipalities impacted are suing the state.
I’ll add that I don’t even know how to paricipate; or likely would if I did (inconvenient times, dates).
This is no accident.
Edit: I’m not young, but I didn’t grow up with any sort of privilege.
A good start would be to allow everyone living in the city to vote. I don't care about politics, zoning or planning if I am not allowed to vote or participate. There isn't anything I can do, so why bother putting effort into it?
Did you not register to vote or something?
I've lived in various European cities where I was not able to vote for various reasons. Such as living hotel long-term, living in a holiday home, being semi-homeless, sub-letting, crashing on someones couch. Seasonal workers, migrant workers or people with unstable employment are typically in this situation.
No, I was not able to vote.
I get the sentiment about "why would I let people who aren't going to stay long term decide how the city is run?" but in the end it creates a city that is indifferent or even hostile to people in that situation. It ends up disenfranchising a population that will always be there, even if the people who make up that population is constantly changing.
Thank you. I know people who have lived in Amsterdam for over five years but can't vote for local politics because of their legal status or because they are illegally subletting due to the shitty housing market in The Netherlands.
Don't complain about people not being engaged with local politics if you don't allow them to vote.
The ones who will “always be there” can get their papers for permanent residence done and vote. If they don’t want to (or can’t since they don’t have the legal grounds to even stay there for longer), then they shouldn’t have a say on decisions that can permanently change things about the place.
There will always be the population of people who will be in short term housing or similar situations, but due to their circumstances the individual people will come and go. 5 years from now the makeup of the itinerant population may be almost entirely different, but the people in that population are in the same circumstances, especially if they don't have any political representation.
Who is going to speak for the people who aren't allowed to vote?
In my country, citizens without a permanent address (which is very few people, those who have no place of theirs mostly register at someone elses for easier administration) can still sign up and vote, so that leaves us with just the people who don’t have the permits to even stay here permanently.
I’m also not expecting to fly to country X, book an airbnb for 6 months or get a summer job, and then just somehow be entitled to vote there.
That is only possible with stable and legal housing. Not everyone is privileged to be in that situation, especially not with the housing market in many countries.
With your thinking you are creating a class of subhumans where you enjoy the benefits of their labour but you are not allowing them to vote. Like African Americans in the US not that long ago.
No, it's actually nothing like us. It's also annoying and insulting that we have to be the symbol for every victim of anything.
Black Americans are not nomads. We're forced out by them.
I’m not talking about nomads. I’m talking about people who live there for years, sometimes decades
What do you think makes someone who’s pretty much just passing by entitled to push their opinions on the locals who’ve lived there their entire lives? Especially when that person likely won’t suffer the longterm consequences of it
Not talking about passing by, talking about people living there for years.
What would you propose as a way to differentiate the two?
Make it so people who live there can vote
I don’t want someone drifting through town in the local motel to be able to meaningfully vote to change the city I am rooted in.
Why would someone actually "drifting through" even bother voting? The odd weirdo might but that's not going to tip any elections.
Even most long term residents legally entitled to vote don't make the effort.
I don’t know man but I also know that loopholes get exploited. I think local voting should be for actual locals.
To your point that so few people actually vote, it doesn’t take much to sway a local election.
These people are locals. They are living there for years sometimes decades
A billionaire buying up housing can do a lot more damage than a persons drifting through town
I'm talking about people who live in the city for years.
Then find a legal place to stay and register and you can vote.
A yes, why didn't I think of that! Let me just completely ignore the broken housing market, the 15+ year waiting list for social housing and scrape together... lets checks... €400k for a small appartement with a 45 minute commute to work.
Do you have any clue how privileged you sound here? This is peak "have you tried not being poor" attitude.
While I don't know about European countries, given this is an article about America it's worth pointing out that you can, in fact, vote in the US while homeless[0], using a friend/family's home, shelter, or religious center as your address.
[0] https://vote.gov/guide-to-voting/unhoused
It’s like that in many countries in Europe as well.
Small apartments are not 400k, that’s average house price for family houses.
Apartments are between 180-250k.
Not near Amsterdam
Ok. That's by design.
It's by design that only people with stable housing can vote? I bet you loved pre-1965 America.
Actually yes, that is by design. There is a reason the US had property ownership as a requirement to vote in the constitution. Whether removing that requirement was correct or not is up for debate. But there is a distinction in a democracy between an active citizen and a passive citizen. An active citizen is someone that has skin in the game and is a willing participant in the process. A passive citizen is someone that does not engage in the process, or does not actively have skin in the game. The thought espoused in the enlightenment was that someone with property would be tied to the location long term and would therefore have interest in the long term success of that town/state/nation. Someone who is only in a town for a year doesn't meaningfully have stakes in the town. They don't really care if the schools aren't funded well enough, or if the roads don't have long term maintenance budget, they are only going to care about immediate needs. Someone with a house, that has children or grand children, they are going to not only care about now but 30 years from now as well.
"the US had property ownership as a requirement to vote in the constitution. Whether removing that requirement was correct or not is up for debate."
Not serious debate.
Everyone affected by the laws passed have "skin in the game".
Someone renting an apartment and working a job in a community definitely has skin in the game in regards to local tax rates, building regulations, public amenities, etc.
Sure but there’s degrees to this. If you’re a day laborer renting a room at the local motel, it’s a lot easier for you to say “screw this place I’m going to the next town over” than for someone who has their kids enrolled in the highschool and a mortgage.
Everyone has skin in the game but some have way more.
It was because they thought that landowners would direct the votes of the people who lived on that land. The same reason was given for not allowing women to vote. https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1645
This comes directly from a historical British restriction on voting rights that in turn is an artifact of feudalism. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_2_1s3....
Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
Yeah I know. My point is that in the US, in 2026, whether voting should be restricted to property owners is not "up for debate," except maybe among a certain set of cranks.
> except maybe among a certain set of cranks.
Eh, a growing set of cranks. The diversity of political opinion in America seems to have exploded over the last decade. Cranks are now serious contenders for power and influence.
> Ancient democracies, including those of Greek city states like Athens, restricted voting to landowners because prior to the invention of the printing press, only aristocrats could understand the issues being voted on.
This is such bullshit. Pre-literate societies were not ignorant societies, they were not stupid societies, they were not issue-free societies. The printing press gave rise to literacy which then gave rise to both books and print-based issue campaigning. But the idea that before people were able to read they were also unable to understand "the issues being voted on" is ridiculous. People ate, built, got sick, got hot, got cold, got injured, were richer or poorer ... everyone had a framework in which to understand "the issues being voted on".
You could argue it wasn't an educated understanding, and that might be correct depending on your understanding of what "education" is. But the idea that people couldn't actually understand stuff until literacy arrived is just ridiculous.
> This is such bullshit
So are the justifications of Adams and Blackstone. Literacy was the justification given by early Greek democracies with written legal codes, though some, like Athens, later broadened eligibility.
Yes, voting requires some form of residency. That's a pretty basic tenant of any stable representative government.
Anything less becomes extremely easy to game.
There people have residency, they just don't live in a stable form of housing that allows them to register as living in the city. But some of them have lived in the city for years.
Whatever idea you have about how black Americans live is bizarre. And despite being ignorant of us, you attempt to silence discussions by acting like you are us.
No, but it should be.
I saw your other comment with regards to the Netherlands. If that’s where you’re located, you only need to have a stable location once. Then you can register. Another person can’t unregister you from there, so you can vote even if you then move to a hotel.
Only question remains is how you want to deal with mail, but there are workarounds for that.
In The Netherlands it is illegal to be register at an address you don't live at.
Not true. Only when you move to a new municipality, or are out of the country for more than 8 months.
Max fine is 325€.
You can also go to city hall and give a temporary address.
Sounds like you just don’t know Dutch law and options at all tbh.
> You can also go to city hall and give a temporary address.
You can not. That is not how it works.
Sounds like you just don’t know Dutch law and options at all tbh.
...and sorry: Thats absolutely OK. I do not want strangers stopping by for 3 - 4 years to be able to influence the politics of my country? Thats totaly understandable?
I would never to ask to vote at a remote place where I do not live permanently, yet where I even not a citizen?
Somebody who spends 3-4 years in a place has an immense interest in how it's governed. Their view is 100% as valid as yours, and they should have equal voice, if we are going to judge people based on how long they live somewhere.
I live in a college town. Why shouldn't student voices be represented, when they are a huge chunk of our community?
Maybe I'm too US focused, and have been accused of that a lot recently, but your views are fundamentally at odds with basic democracy as I see it as a US citizen.
There's a massive difference between "will be in a place for 3-4 years maximum, then leaving" vs "has been in a place for 3-4 years but is planning on staying permanently." In the former case their interests are going to be short-term and might not align with long-term residences. Per your example, university students would vote against allocating funds toward schools or playgrounds, because they know they're not going to be raising a family there. Or more globally, you have the population of "digital nomads" who are working in Vietnam/Thailand for a few years before they come back to the US.
It's pretty debatable if these temporary residents should have the same voting rights as permanent residents, since their interests are going to be at odds with long-term residents. I would not be happy if schools got defunded because university students who are only going to be there for a few years wanted to lower alcohol taxes.
Permanent residency/citizenship being a prerequisite for voting is used as a (very imperfect) screening for this.
Because people do not vote "for local interests" but for "the interests they are carrying with them according to their believes", which are usually not on par with the interestes of the long-term-resident local community.
That is OK but OP should not be complaining about people not being engaged with local politics if you are excluding a large part of the people living in the city from voting.
Are a large part of the people living in a city the kind of semi-transitory-but-also-there-for-years people you describe?
I'd wager that's a small proportion of almost every city. Most cities will have tourists who are visiting for a few days or weeks, and long term residents who have a permanent address there. The percentage of people living full time in hotels or airbnbs must be tiny. Perhaps in high cost of living cities there's more "hidden homeless" living on couches, but even then it's not going to be "a large part" of a city.
I don't have sources but for cities like Amsterdam I wouldn't be surprised if 5% of the population isn't registered with the municipality for various reasons. But have been living there for years. Plenty of people I know would sublet empty rooms of their social housing apartment, which is highly illegal but for some people the only way to find a place to stay. But you obviously can't register because then the person subletting would be kicked out.
Among those that are registered to vote locally, most don't. Regardless of whether or not people should or shouldn't be able to vote, many of those currently with the ability to do not.
> I do not want strangers stopping by for 3 - 4 years to be able to influence the politics of my country?
City, not country.
good catch
What's the minimum residency you'd accept, because 3-4 years seems quite long to me.
Gettig citizenownership and giving away your former passport.
There’s a lot you can do. Voting is the entry stake. You can make a big impact with a very low level of political engagement.
Allowing popular referendum for everything just invites a particular and usually really dumb level of politics. You can influence a board’s decision and get some or all of what you want.
IMO one of the biggest problems with society is that you have this view that politics is this idea that it’s some sort of magical thing that is done to you. I can get my city councilman on the phone easily. Probably would get a meeting with my state senator in a few days if need be. Just show up and work with people.
> allow everyone living in the city to vote
Who is "everyone" in this case?
People who live in the city for the majority of their time. They should be able to vote. Regardless of their housing situation. In basically all of Europe, voting for local elections is tied to having stable housing.
I don't disagree with you per se, but how would that work in practice? How could you actually tell someone lives there if they don't have an address to back up that claim?
By allowing them to register as citizens of that city
My guess is non-citizens or 'undocumented immigrants'.
Those as well. But even citizens and immigrants with paperwork can often not vote for local elections if they do not have stable housing.
Yes, because they don’t legally permanently live in that place. Sorry not sorry. Why do you think anyone can just sign up for some local elections and vote for a town they’re not even legally permanently situated in??
Then change the fucking system so that people who have been living in a city for years can legally do so. Or kick them out. But don't have this vague system of sub-humans that are not allowed to influence their surroundings by voting.
I'm not saying GP was implying this, but my read of their comment is that it would be a bad thing for everyone to start to voting. If a person doesn't know what they're voting for, they're not more likely to make good decisions. They're just more likely to cancel out the vote of someone who did educate themselves.
It's touched on in this article, but there's a lot more than just zoning that makes it impractical to operate businesses like the ones being talked about. Tax code, health code, ADA, etc. not to mention the complete lack of density in the majority of the US.
As much as I'd love to have something like Matsuya in the US, it's just not practical here. I'm surprised it hasn't been talked about yet, but zoning is also a major factor in the spiraling of housing costs.
5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state.
FWIW, it is a learned behavior that voting doesn't change much. It doesn't help when elected officials obviously ignore the will of the people (nationally, see polling data on legalizing, or even at least decriminalizing, marijuana, as one example), or when things just get overturned by someone else. My neighborhood "votes" on zoning, but the vote literally means nothing. The city council has to hear how we voted, but they don't have to take the vote into account.
I get that it's easy to scold people that don't vote, but it is more important that people with power do something to earn our votes. Hold them accountable. They're failing us more than our neighbors who have either been taught that voting doesn't matter especially when sometimes voting laws make it harder than it should be to vote anyway.
I think there is a snowball effect with zoning. I specifically sought out a place zoned with no building code checks and hardly any zoning. I value my right to die in a fire a lot more than I value my right to have the jack-boot enter my own property and tell me he knows best.
People like me go to places with fairly free zoning. The jack boot lickers go to places with restricted zoning. Once one has a majority it just snowballs and pushes harder and harder in the direction it is going, because no one wants to buy/build a house in a place that will flip from the one strategy to the other.
Building Codes and Zoning are orthogonal concepts. Japan has more lax zoning than the US at large more more stringent building codes.
That's the simplistic view but not true in reality. Where I live the zoning law itself creates code exceptions -- for instance where I live my zone explicitly says there is no enforcement mechanism for codes, which effectively makes the building code (redefined as, essentially nothing) part of the zoning.
So zoning can turn de jure code requirements into de facto nulled or altered.
In "communism works because the cows are spherical, friction is 0 and gravity is 10" example land sure.
In reality building code is how a huge amount of back handed regulation is done. When the powers that be can't make a particular rule, because of other laws, or because of precedent to the contrary, or because the peasants wouldn't stand for it, what they do is they adopt a ridiculous code and then slap a "can be waived at the discretion of board X" on it. This way they can make the thing they don't like a non-starter economically for most people.
In my city you can park a semi trailer as storage. But it counts as a "structure" and because it's not a commercially manufactured shed, car port, stick framed garage or litany of other exemptions you have to go through the "everything else" process which includes all the "normal code shit" that any other non-exempt structure would hav to go through like an engineered foundation and snow loads and all sorts of other stuff that's just inappropriate. They have a similar set of BS they use to prevent DIYers from erecting kit buildings.
I can't imagine I'd ever want to buy a house from someone who makes a point to live someplace where they can install sub-par plumbing and wiring, that this lack of code compliance was the selling point of where to build.
Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
It's not about not meeting the standards of the town's health department, it's about having a 1-size-fits-all health standards.
If you make a 5-seat japaneese-style neighborhood micro-eatery conform to the same cross-contamination standards as a 800-people-per-hour mcdonalds, you're making one of these unprofitable and de-facto illegal.
Yes, lets have health codes. But lets also recognize different risk profiles and encourage all sorts of entrepreneurship. If it's 1-size-fits-all, then the only size is going to be XXL.
Can you be more specific on exactly what kind of cross-contamination standards make it impossible for a small eatery to exist? Do you have any specific rules in mind?
Its been a while since I went through a food safety course, but I don't really recall any that would make it impossible for a small shop to achieve. I follow most of the rules I learned in my own kitchen at home. Stuff like don't use the same cutting board and knife between meat and veggies without cleaning in between, don't wear jewelry while prepping, keep things in safe time/temperature constraints, etc.
Cross contamination standards can't make it impossible for a small eatery to exist, and without standards enforcement businesses will absolutely go full The Jungle. Unfortunately, I could believe that paperwork around cross contamination standards could get there- a chain can spread the cost of the laywering to get paperwork right over hundreds of establishments, and learn it progressively as it gets worse, a single establishment has to do all the paperwork themselves up front.
People who conflate "not actively regulated and inspected with government permission being given before stuff even happens" with "sub par" as if that's not reductive at best is exactly how we got here.
Most people don't make a point to go out of their way to avoid having rules applied if they're intending on following the rules. I don't think its that big of a leap.
You're also misreading my comment. I'm not saying they definitely will do a sub-par job, but that its now an option, that they can do it. And given its the cheaper option (up front at least), it probably will happen more often. And especially when it comes to stuff like wiring, where once the walls are all sealed it can be expensive to inspect later, and yet if done improperly may kill your family and destroy most of what you own.
Just like that restaurant I give as an example, its not necessary they definitely will ignore food safety rules, but they sure make an effort and pride them selves to the ability to ignore them whenever they want.
Once again this is a take predicated on bad assumptions.
If you're just doing something and intend to meet or exceed the rules then dealing with government enforcement apparatus is pure overhead. You were always gonna do the right thing so you gain zero upside and have to deal with a potentially capricious and unaccountable (in any practical way) enforcer which is a huge downside.
Second, the rules are chock full of 10,000ft ivory tower view type stuff that makes statistical sense but is inefficient compared to using judgment. But you can't use judgement because the whole point of code is to make everything quantitative so that idiots can inspect other idiots and parties can more efficiently bicker in court and whatnot.
> you gain zero upside
There's a lot of upside to the fact the next owner isn't going to have to question if things were done properly, that insurance isn't going to be able to push back when something does go wrong.
Well that's luck for you, because I built the house I live in, and I'm not selling it. Although since I actually have to live in the house, the wiring was designed by an electrical engineer and installed at or above NEC requirements. But there was no one to look over my shoulder when I did it.
If there were regulations house would have cost at least double. Because I have a day job and no time for inspectors, nor any trade license.
>Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
Lol having lived in the third world I've eaten from probably a hundred of these. Very tasty. Not much different than the US where inspector is basically never there so you still must apply all the food sanitation rules in deciding regarding buying food from a vendor.
> most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses
So the voters are wrong? You know what's "better" for them, right? Whether they want it or not, right?
> we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally
Because they are more in line with what you think?
PS
I'm being downvoted - but what is the point of local administrators, except to follow the voters demands? Sure, if you are a local politician, make your case, but local administrators ought to be doing whatever-it-is that people voted for. That's the whole point of voting, as I understand it.
The point is NOT to make people keep voting until they get it right, according to the administratots. That's the wrong way around! The administrators should be enacting whatever the voters want.
> So the voters are wrong? You know what's "better" for them, right? Whether they want it or not, right?
It doesn't really matter what I think when 5% of the population are controlling policy that impacts 100% of the population.
> Because they are more in line with what you think?
No, because they will be impacted for a longer period of time, and are less engaged locally.
Not the OP, but I took their implication to be that 5% of the electorate decided the direction future development would take (or not take).
This sort of citizen engagement is cute, naïve and ultimately pointless. Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things. I’m not being sarcastic.
Just 16 people voted in Glendale’s municipal election amid the pandemic
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/21/glendale-election-coro...
Glendale, Colorado is the quintessential example of this. Like 2,000 people live there due to insane gerrymandering, but there are tons of businesses and money moving around. The mayor gives crazy zoning benefits to his wife (strip club and dispensary on the main road, right next to target and chikfila) among other controversy. Dunafon controls the county with the help of other powerful players.
Lack of engagement in local elections and politics is a major issue in the United States, there is a huge amount of low level corruption like this because its really easy to game things when 20 people vote.
I find it curious that I earned -2 points. Perhaps my points in the post were too pointed for some people. That, or some people really love civics theatre.
Yep, largely the same for me. Half the city council and most of the planning commission seats are held by real estate people or developers. The state government is heavily influenced by the Realtors Association, and will frequently override local ordinances at the state level when they don't go favorably enough for the real estate industry. It was pretty disappointing to discover.
> Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things
Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.
The point of the OP post, AFAICT, is that even in places where there are no powerful billionaire-backed campaigns and lobbying, and people can have their way with simple, effortless voting, too few people even care! And those who act, do so cluelessly, or in a narrowly selfish way.
The most powerful weapon the powerful have against the majority of "ordinary people" is to propagate the idea that all this local stuff is boring and ultimately decides nothing. To make people stop caring.
"We can't do anything because the billionaires" is such dumb cynicism. Actually, local government has a say in zoning almost everywhere in the US. If more people participated, they could make a real difference.
The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default, regardless of local density levels. This post does a great job illustrating the difference this makes: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
For comparison, even our best-case scenarios for urbanism here in the states (like NYC) have incredibly convoluted zoning rules, which in turn make it impossible to build anything new without intervention from the city/state: https://zola.planninglabs.nyc/about#9.72/40.7125/-73.733
The best videos on this (in my opinion) which compliment urbankchoze's post:
‣ Not Just Bikes: https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U
‣ Life Where I'm from: https://youtu.be/wfm2xCKOCNk
> The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default,
Also, Japan generally has good mass transit throughout their cities, which essentially doesn't exist in the US. Less mass transit -> more cars -> need for parking -> larger buildings with setbacks to include parking -> less density -> less mass transit... Land use and transportation systems in the US have been co-evolved to the present sub-optimal state we have now.
This is a big misconception. The core neighborhoods of the big Japanese cities are dense, mixed-use, and have good mass transit. But as soon as you move a bit further away, they degenerate into endless urban sprawl like American cities. I know because I live in a small Japanese city, and it is just box stores, small detached houses, and two-story apartments.
Let's move 33% of the US population into an area the size of Montana and we can have the exact same thing!
It’s not that simple. My city in Silicon Valley foists mixed use on most new developments in the form of ground floor retail. Yet it’s often vacant.
They are both called mixed use, but are very different in terms of implementation.
In Japan, you can start and run your own business in your your own house (like your garage), within certain limits. This is why there are businesses in Japan like tiny cafes and shops that are nonviable anywhere else.
Where you and I live, the commercial section is a completely separate unit which is usually quite large, must be rented separately, and comes with a lot of regulations.
So many odd questions raised in this article. Literally each section seems to just hand wave a lot of things.
And, look, I am all for attacking some regulations; but I have to confess the requirement for multiple sinks is going to be far down my list of regulations that have to go. Odd to see it be one of the top mentioned ones, here.
The biggest question, for me, is raised when the complaint is dropped that we spend about an hour in the kitchen. I cannot believe that that is an meaningful number to compare between city and urban/rural living. Which, at large, is a big part of the problem with looking at anything from places like Tokyo. They have density that many in the US just don't understand.
The article even largely acknowledges this by comparing Manhattan pizza shops. A business model that you just can't magically make work in less dense cities.
Density is also a problem caused by zoning/permitting regulations. SF, LA, and even NYC should all be more dense than they currently are. Not being able to increase their density just means that prices have gone up instead.
I can get behind that message, to a large extent. The rest of the complaints are largely all downstream of that, though? The reason places don't have the same cheap food options that denser locations have is pretty much fully down to the density question.
And sure, we can tackle making places denser. A large hurdle there is that people want both the space that they currently have, along with the benefits of higher density. And that just doesn't work.
What a trash article. Why is the only photo, used to illustrate the point about narrow buildings, a photo of Manhattan instead of anything in Japan? When "our zoning laws" are enumerated, where are they talking about? Last time I checked there were no US federal rules on parking spaces. At least they acknowledge that multiple jurisdictions exist when talking about health codes. And as per usual when talking about Japan, they ignore the fact that Japan also has car-dependent suburbs and rural areas, where it is quite common for restaurants outside of city centers to need to balance costs with the need for a larger footprint and a parking lot. The role of culture in eating habits is also ignored, Americans take more pride in the self-reliance of cooking their own meals.
Not convinced, plenty of countries (e.g. UK) don’t have such stringent don’t have strict zoning laws and also don’t have $4 food
UK is famous for having extremely tough zoning laws, with many, many buildings being listed / landmarked. Something that does run very well in the UK are stores like Greggs which are usually classified as small shops (cat. E) without a kitchen. So the analysis applies there as well.
>don’t have such stringent don’t have strict zoning laws
I thought the planning process in UK is even more perilous because of the lack of zoning laws? Everything is up to council review, which basically means vibes based instead of something that's codified.
Unlike the US, the UK's planning system doesn't have exclusive zoning as the default. This is the big difference.
It's totally normal to have shops, restaurants and houses in the same area, and often on the same street.
It is totally possible to get a $4 lunch in the UK.
Basic pre-packaged sandwiches can be had for under $2.
For about $4.75 you can get a sandwich, pastry, and a latte from just about any of the chain corner shops (Tesco Express etc)
It's not gourmet, but it's a solid affordable option that millions of people eat every day. There's no real equivalent of this in the US sadly.
You can get pre-packaged sandwiches in the US (and a bunch of other stuff too, including hot food). I don't buy them and don't know the exact price, but they aren't expensive, definitely under $5. Eating from corner stores and gas stations is just usually looked down on.
Pre-packaged sandwiches in the US are typically more in the $8-10 range, and that's just for the (sad) sandwich. It also tends to be much more depressing than what you'd get in the UK. Barely edible.
A Meal Deal is literally £3.85. What are you talking about?
Missing from the article that also plays a role:
* optimizations. Some of these restaurants don’t have a counter, or any customer facing staff. Select your meal and pay at a vending machine, get your ticket number, wait for your order to be called. * onsen/community center: it’s entirely feasible to own less things and have fewer sq/ft at home if you can go to your local rec center to shower/spa, watch tv, sit on the couch, eat dinner, hang out with friends, etc. as a tourist my meal+spa+etc was maybe $10? * public transit: a lot of these shops are viable in Tokyo because rails move people en masse quickly
It probably isn't as simple as the writer thinks. Houston, for example, has no zoning laws and no $4 lunch bowls.
Or basically all of Europe. Haven't seen $4 lunch bowls (adjusted to local wages) anywhere. Spending "nearly an hour a day cooking" is the norm in most countries here. Eating out is expensive anywhere.
Here in Seattle, it's wildly expensive to go out and we rarely do. When I lived in Portland it was inexpensive (and amazing) so almost everyone went out regularly which supported a ton of restaurants that completed against each other. Not sure what was different but the difference was night and day.
Curious what time period this was. For example, if you lived in Portland in 2019 and Seattle in 2023 it could just be inflation causing people to go out less.
Great point. Temporarily separated samplings would have that effect. However, I moved directly from Portland to Seattle. Further, I have returned to Portland and found it to be just as wonderful a place to eat out as before.
This is not true. The UK has a £3.85 meal deal that is a sandwich + a snack + a drink. It's hugely popular.
Germany has the Döner Kebab, it's now about 5-9€, but the have cheaper options available too. Again, hugely popular.
I'm sure most European cities have these.
A sandwich, snack or Döner Kebab is not a full nutritional lunch.
Are the $4 lunch bowls full nutritional lunches?
The $4 lunch bowls in Japan are indeed full nutritional lunches.
>junk food
>junk food, Japan
I beg your pardon?
Meal deals and Döner Kebab are junk food
Houston has similar regulations that effectively serve the same purpose to determine land use, which is zoning adjacent.
You can get a banh mi for like $5 in Houston
What’s missing from the writer’s analysis is also the desire from the population to create such businesses. Having lived in Asia for a bit, most of these small businesses are not wildly profitable and not everyone is willing to put in the hard work and effort to running these affordable restaurants.
You are oversimplifying the writer's position. They mention zoning as one reason but also other regulations, health codes (minimum sink counts!) and other things like parking minimums (which houston has had, though they've been removed recently in a lot of cases), reliable and ubiquitous public transit, etc.
The writer's title is oversimplifying the writer's position, then.
If you want a fast, healthy, balanced meal for $4 or less, the obvious choice in America is a frozen meal (aka TV dinner).
You can microwave it in 4-6 minutes; ingredients are often flash-frozen, locking in nutrients; and food-safety concerns are addressed at scale, rather than in a hit-or-miss way in a tiny storefront.
So perhaps, instead of advocating for more tiny restaurants that would likely need to skimp on safety considerations, we should be advocating for more microwaves available in grocery and convenience stores, so people can select a frozen meal, heat it up, and be on their way.
Not sure I can accept most of your assertions, but anyway, I left America in 2008 and IIRC there were microwaves available in every 7-11 even then?
There were't any $4 healthy bowls of anything, but there were $2 "red hot beef & bean" (& fake soy filler) burritos which hit the spot if you'd failed to find a way to eat real food...
The problem with the microwave solution, I think, is that pretty much only burritos and pasta can be packaged in a microwavable way that still tastes good? And maybe like a few kinds of vegetable side dishes.
I microwave most of my meals. Solid disagree.
I've been to the US a couple of times and most restaurants I visited did not have any parking spots at all. I have also seen plenty of food-carts operated by a single person, comparable to the Japanese mini-restaurants described here.
It's not federal. It'll come down to the state and municipality. If you were in a denser city, it's likely they didn't have that requirement. Lots of New York City doesn't have this kind of requirement, but you may see that if you were in a more suburban area
I'm guessing you stayed in a major city and didn't drive anywhere outside of it? If you flew in and didn't have a rental car, odds are your itinerary was biased towards places that didn't need a car?
Yea, the vast majority of restaurants in the US do, but the US is insanely huge and the places tourists are more apt to visit are higher density.
America is going in the opposite direction with instant food delivery. Your $11 meal is delivered to your house within 30 minutes. But, there's a service fee of $5, a delivery fee of $6, and a 20% gratuity.
There’s something very weird in the US, it’s like we intentionally set things up to accelerate convergence to obviously dumb local optima and then don’t explore any options to get over those barriers.
I think we just lack the ability for self-critique as a country. If you try, you get a bunch of loud morons yelling at you for being un-American or some other nonsense.
(And it's cold.)
I'm probably the only person here who has been in a Walmart in the last year or two, but recently I found that my local Walmart offers a warm counter with freshly prepared small bites, and you can get a respectable chicken sandwich for $2. It's a decent small meal, and the same item would probably be $6-$12 at a fast foot joint. I guess each individual Walmart is big enough to offer these bites to their shoppers.
That’s not a respectable sandwich. They have it at mine too, by the produce, which would be a better choice than eating that.
"Respectable" is not something I care about in a sandwich. Beyond your disdain for things from Walmart, how is a filling, tasty sandwich not "respectable"?
Zoning performs some important functions, but is often used to set up barriers-to-entry. I somewhat doubt that zoning is the problem here because there were plenty of cheap restaurants before the recessions, covid, and trade-war inflation. The US population is low-density, low-engagement, and low on disposable income. The food service industry has adapted by targeting the wealthiest, who have plenty of disposable income and are much more willing to spend than low-wage workers who can barely afford eggs and milk from a grocery store.
Why does the article start talking about Japan, then show some photo of Koreatown Manhattan?
Because the author quite literally does not care about accuracy. They handwave claims without any evidence at all.
Japanese fans also will stay to clean up a stadium after the game so I'm not sure how many examples from Japan can be applied to the US without taking step #1 of changing the entire culture, character, and conscientiousness of American society.
I have been living in Japan for years and I would like to know where you can find a lunch bowl for 600 yen which is not a company cantine or industrial konbini shit.
We're working on re-legalizing neighborhood businesses here in Bend, Oregon:
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/neighborhood-commerci...
The city council just had a work session and was quite supportive of the idea.
>Individual regulations, each reasonable in isolation...
Every single one of these rules that amounts to death by a thousand cuts preventing these sorts of businesses (as well as many others) will be rabidly defended by many/most if presented in the abstract. That sort of inability to reason about the forest based on what you're doing to the trees is the root problem. And it's a social/ideological/moral one, even if it expresses itself via governments.
It's no more "reasonable in isolation" to peddle rules than it is to justify littering in the park because they don't take effect in isolation. If everyone does it everything goes to crap and we all know it so we don't let anyone justify littering in the park using the effect in isolation.
And nobody who sells $4 lunch bowls will have enough cash left over to lobby for rule changes in their favour.
I really enjoyed Lex Fridman's interview with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on this topic, as part of their book tour for Abundance. Even if I disagree with some of their proposals, I really liked their focus and clarification of the issue. We should be mindful of the POSIWID principle and be talking a lot more about the results of our policies.
https://youtu.be/DTPSeeKokdo
> POSIWID
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
This is why the "let's slash regulations and cut the size of the government to let business prosper" pitch seems so appealing, and yet never seems to work in practice. The problem is, these kinds of deregulatory pushes always imagine that there are a bunch of price-increasing regulations set up by unaccountable bureaucrats somewhere, and that we can tear those down while making the system simultaneously cheaper and more democratic. A win-win! Supposedly.
The problem is, that's not really how it works. There are a bunch of regulations made by bureaucrats, but those tend to be the pretty arcane ones which are necessary but aren't adding a lot of cost (think "what color do the flashing lights on radio towers have to be so planes don't crash into them"). And simultaneously, there are a bunch of regulations which are actually driving costs up, but those are the ones either broadly supported by the public, or supported by one particular interest group who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it because their livelihood or home equity depends on the rent extraction.
To actually cut costs with deregulation, you need to fight ugly political battles often against sympathetic groups (homeowners, doctors, teachers, construction workers etc.), which no politician wants to do, so they instead try to pretend that "bureaucrats" (who could be less sympathetic than bureaucrats?) are to blame.
That's exactly right. I have so many frustrating stories from local politics that go exactly like you described.
There is hope. Scott Wiener is a California politician who saw that these problems can't be resolved at the local level and got himself elected to the state legislature. He is smart about how he sets up the battles so he has had very good results incrementally improving California's zoning - and other things - by gradually restricting local zoning authority when it's abused.
We are not yet at the "convenience store at the subdivision corner" stage, but give him time.
This needs more detailed data that normalizes for the amount of food (price per calorie or price per weight or something like that).
Yes, a bowl at chipotle in the US might be 2x the price (more, probably) of a Japanese bowl, but it matters if I am getting 2x the calories also.
And there are foods in the US that are technically as cost effective, although maybe not as nutritious, like pizza which they mention, that can be around $1-$3 per slice. (Not my first choice for a lunch, but I could pickup a large 3 topping dominos pizza for $10 and make 3-4 lunches out of it, for example)
> In Japan, workers rely on healthy lunch bowls for under $4
The title doesn't capture that, but the issue is not that the US can't produce $4 lunches. It's it can't enable cheap(er) healthy lunches
I'm not sure what your point is. Is it about the lunches being specifically healthy?
A rice bowl at Chipotle, for example, is not unhealthy (rice, beans, meat, vegetables). Plenty of restaurant food in the US is perfectly healthy (or, you can look at nutrition facts to know if it is). And if I can take a single US portion size and split it into two lunches that are Japanese-sized portions, then maybe we're getting the same amount food per dollar.
And on the "healthy" point: The article doesn't discuss nutrition facts at all or refer to any specific meals or dishes.
They link to an article concerning the price of Japanese bowls, that mentions "a regular-sized bowl of rice with beef from Japanese fast food chain Yoshinoya, which costs around 468 yen (S$4.25)." I don't know Japanese so it's hard for me to find nutrition information about that particular dish, but I suspect that a beef bowl is high in saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium (because most stir-fried beef is higher in these things). Is that healthy? Japan as a country has higher sodium intake than the US. Is that healthy? And so on. I suspect a big factor of the "health" of these lunches is that portion sizes are just smaller than in the US (but I have no data).
I think just statistics about how many people are overweight and obese in both countries can already paint a picture that probably japanese food is more healthy. And optimizing for how many calories you can get for $1 is probably also not the best metric to aim for.
The parking thing caused us not to buy a building. Not enough spots, not enough handicap spots too.
The annoying part is that we lived 4 houses down from the building. We would never drive there ofc. The other thing is that the parking lot was so small, all spaces could be seen as Handicap accessible.
Instead we rented in a different area and the handicap spaces are significantly further from the building.
Maybe it ended up working out since our company grew and I know that space would not have been big enough.
Visited Japan for the first time in December. I stayed at Airbnb's in Tokyo and Kyoto.
There were no $4 lunch bowls nearby, but I didn't need that to appreciate that I could walk to six restaurants, two wine shops and three cafes in less than three minutes. It was wonderful.
Just having visited Japan, another thing that's immediately apparent though is that there are other well-intentioned laws that prevent this from happening. My favorite breakfast was like $8 (which was better than American breakfast by an order-of-magnitude) was in a tiny shop that had a tiny curved staircase that could scarcely fit tall people, definitely not obese people, and don't even pretend handicap people.
Frankly I think alternative laws should be applicable (you don't need to be able seat wheelchair people if you're willing to bring the food to them to-go) since I just think it's not worth losing that efficient density and cost-effectiveness for a tiny tiny fraction of the population.
I have heard that there are no zoning laws in Houston, Texas.
Are there $4 lunch bowls there?
https://cali-sandwich-pho.restaurants-world.net/menu
$7-9 for bun, and 3.25-5.50 for banh mi
There are still requirements for the types of use classifications (including things like parking minimums[0]), there are still food safety regulations, etc.
The lax zoning laws doesn't mean there are no rules, just that there are no rules preventing you from having an eatery right next to an active oil and gas well right next to a townhouse right next to a liquor store right next to a welding shop.
[0] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...
reducing everything to zoning laws is lazy analysis. nobody will ever sell $4 lunch bowls in SF because the rent is too high. so these market incentives will influence/force the proprietor to sell them for more!
failing to understand that the rent is too high because of zoning laws is lazy analysis.
if you are going to have a rebuttal, at least give a little bit why my take is lazy analysis. (and i'm aware your argument exists, and it's also wrong!)
why wrong? seems extremely obvious
The rent is too high because of zoning laws.
the rent is too high because of the market incentives. zoning laws are one of several dynamics that influence the market.
we've built a ton of structures with existing zoning laws when the economy is good, more than we've built during this deregulation paradigm. we stop when the economy or market is bad. very simple concept.
One less dynamic would be helpful then.
There's also the other turd in California real estate policy: Prop 13.
fair point, and my original point doesn't negate that truth: reducing every problem to zoning laws is lazy analysis.
All things being equal, SF has some of the most desirable weather on the planet, so it will always have an high cost of living due to excess demand.
There are plenty of other places with equally great weather and no needles on the streets.
it's a great place to live and there will always be high demand.
there would be more supply if not for restrictive zoning laws. and more supply = lower prices
SF has a relatively high ratio of housing units to population compared to other cities in the US and a 9.7% vacancy rate. By the numbers, it has an oversupply of housing.
By just those numbers, sure.
How many are homeless?
What does the median worker spend in money and time commuting from somewhere further?
That is not a valid interpretation of the data. The ratio you cite, which is a pointless one, is mostly influenced by household size. SF has a relatively small household size compared to the state and nation. The vacancy rate you cite is also not a useful one that people generally understand. There were 19000 units for sale or rent during the last ACS survey, out of 418000 physical dwellings, and that's only 4.5% which is very low by historical standards.
How do you square this bizarre and obviously false hypothesis with all the times that San Francisco did not have high cost of living, had declining population, etc?
What is obviously false about it? You can't just assert things as true. That's why the Democrats keep losing.
(See what I did there?)
surely if NYC can do 99c slices, it's not as simple as high rent costs?
The day of the dollar slice in NYC is dead, most places have switched to $1.50 slices.
I wonder if you could partially get around this by using the "ghost kitchen" model. Offer food only for delivery, but then "hire" customers to deliver their own meals if they want it cheap.
Delivery apps eat into revenue way too much. Also most ghost "restaurants" aren't small businesses, they're a second (or nth) brand for an existing restaurant.
This is an interesting point...many of the ghost kitchens technically allow pickup.
Pay Japanese salaries, get Japanese prices [0]. That $4 kombini bento feels like a $13 burrito or Cava bowl when on a Japanese salary.
Japan only appears cheap if you earn in USD, GBP, and Euros. For most Japanese households, costs have risen higher than salaries [1][2] and they are now facing inflation due to tourist spending [7][8][9].
It also doesn't help that the median household income in Japan is around $25,000 [3] compared to $83,000 [4] in the US. Even Koreans (who used to be Japan's "Mexicans") now earn more in Korea than in Japan, which is a massive psychological shock in JP.
This is why you've starting seeing the rise of populist far right parties like 参政党 in Japan campaigning on an anti-tourist and anti-foreigner plank - it's overwhelmingly young Japanese (18-34) who are facing the brunt of tourism-induced inflation and a bad job market, and have as such shifted right [5][6]. And mainstream Japanese parties like the LDP have had to shift further right as a result.
[0] - https://www.nippon.com/ja/japan-topics/c14023/
[1] - https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/apac/en/insights/markets-an...
[2] - https://www.iima.or.jp/docs/newsletter/2025/nl2025.48.pdf
[3] - https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/mro/2029703?display=1
[4] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
[5] - https://asia.nikkei.com/opinion/sanseito-brings-far-right-po...
[6] - https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/japan-election/nostalgia-an...
[7] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/travel-leisure/japan-s-tour...
[8] - https://therobinreport.com/japans-backlash-on-luxury-tourism...
[9] - https://www.princetonpoliticalreview.org/international-news/...
> Japan’s minimum wage ($6.68 an hour) is similar to America’s ($7.25).
>to America’s ($7.25).
That's the federal minimum wage. The actual minimum wage, factoring in state and local rates is actually around $12, 65% higher.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251122_FNC...
Minimum wage doesn’t tell you as much as you’d think. McDonald’s in my lowish cost of living area starts at $14 an hour.
The US federal minimum wage hasn’t increased in nearly 20 years. Japan raises it regularly.
But does anyone actually make minimum wage in the US? Statistics i can find suggest it is around 1% with Japan closer to 20%.
Most (30) states have their own minimum wage, higher than the federal. 20 have no minimum wage or a minimum lower than or equal to the federal.
Besides what all these other commenters are saying, probably many of the people running these small lunch shops in Japan are the owners, not waged employees. On top of that, that business probably isn’t viable for 8 hours per day.
Now try actually hiring anyone at $7.25 an hour.
Not to mention most states have their own minimum wage at over $10.
$13-15/hour is the minimum even in Mississippi, which are the rates McDonald’s advertises for crew there.
1. American state minimum wage supersedes the national minimum wage [0]
2. The median household income in Japan is significantly below the US ($25,000 [1] versus $83k [2]), let alone other OECD members.
[0] - https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wage...
[1] - https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/mro/2029703?display=1
[2] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
america is not japan. in america, density and commercial development always = more crime
Ok… if this is the case, then why are food trucks charging $18 for a burger and fries now?
It isn’t all zoning laws.
from the article:
> But the restaurant industry fights to limit food trucks. On average, food trucks must handle 45 separate regulatory procedures and spend $28,276 on associated fees.
Lets napkin-math this. If we assume a food truck has margins at the upper end of the fast-casual industry of 9%, then each $18 burger-and-fries nets 1.62 in profit.
$28,276 / 1.62 = 17,454 burgers-and-fries.
If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
And that doesn't cover any of the other fees and expenses a food truck might have.
Those are brutal economics. I'm impressed it's only $18!
> If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.
This looks crazy because it is incorrect. In your premise, that 9% profit margin includes the regulatory costs for a brick and mortar restaurant already. The only way your logic works out is if truck regulations are on average $30k more expensive than a regular building, which they almost certainly are not.
You can’t even begin to do the calculation without knowing the breakdown underlying the profit margin you cite.
I feel like this math is double dipping a bit. The 9% net profit figure would have already accounted for associated fees.
Yea, if people are thinking you can just grab a truck and park it wherever you like, they are in for a big wake up call. The last city I lived in had the brick restaurant owners lobby and fight like hell to stack up every regulation they could on food trucks.
Dude when industry wide margins are considered it's net margin. Gross margin on food is typically 70%. Of course, that margin does still get eaten up by a million things and the business is still brutal but they're definitely making gross margin of way more han $1.62 on burgers.
1. food trucks are subject to lots of regulation and fees too
2. burrito trucks sell their burritos at the market clearing price for a burrito, which is $18 because most of that burrito truck's competition is brick-and-mortar restaurants with expensive rent because of zoning laws.
A lot of the interesting food trucks around me are routinely more expensive than the brick and mortar stores around, often due to the novelty of the cuisine.
Dude, there's a million regulations for food trucks. Not only do zoning laws typically still apply to them (of course it varies a lot by municipality) there's usually extra regulations on top of that (can't park within X metres of a restaurant for example) and cities often have extortionate fees for permits. It's often tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in permits...
Honestly, at this point, may be someone can collect a bunch of like minded individuals and build a city from scratch that ticks all the boxes instead of fighting existing vested interests. Then, hopefully it can be a model for others to review and check.
The problem with US or any other country is that too many things that should not be ideological become ideological. So many people would be happy to live in a 1400 sq ft 3 bedroom house over 2500 sq ft single family homes if a lot of other things were provided.
Building a city from scratch has been attempted a few times. Disney tried to make a city once and now Musk is trying to do the same. They don't work out.
Musk's city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbase,_Texas
Disney's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)
Also, see the Simpsons's episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain" which, btw, has a very funny guest appearance by Stephen Hawking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Saved_Lisa%27s_Brain
you don't have to build new city from scratch just do city planning and dedicate one outside part of city to high density, high tower residential buildings then let me people decide where they want to live.
just wait until Americans find out you can make a $2 lunch bowl every day yourself.
The article's diagnosis just doesn't seem connected to the facts. It has nothing to do with "restaurant tiers"; as the first link describes, the "healthy lunch bowls" are provided by the fast food chain Yoshinoya, which sells the same bowls in their US locations for $9.
> don’t want to spend $11 at Chipotle
Nice strawman. How about a $4.59 salad at Carls Jr or Wendy's, or an In-n-out cheeseburger for $4?
This is missing the forest for the trees a bit. Our zoning laws do prevent lower footprint businesses, but in reality the problem is less zoning laws and more landlords and rent. If you compare city to city (ignoring other societal issues), cities in Japan have a far lower vacancy rate compared to cities across America.
In Seattle I've seen a ton of smaller spaces become vacant and stay vacant for years because landlords aren't interested in lowering rent prices; they're holding onto the building/land itself because it'll appreciate over time and there's little to no cost to them to hold onto empty space. Roosevelt Square here is a great example of what I'm referring to, because you've got prime restaurant and retail space located right next to public transit that's increasingly going empty.
That's not how commercial real estate works.
It sort of is. When a property owner has loan against a commercial property, the lender uses the monthly rent to calculate how much they will loan you. The rent number they use is the last paid rent.
So you, the property owner, end up in a situation where if you lower rent to attract a new tenant, the bank will recalculate your loan, potentially ending in a margin call.
Because you are a heavily leveraged house of cards, a rug pull on a few of these loans could cause a cascade liquidating your commercial inventory. Your business is buy a property, take a loan against it, use that loan to buy a property, etc etc.
Therefore it becomes worth it to carry vacant properties, because they are acting as the stilts holding up your money making properties. The vacancy becomes a cost of doing business, and gets factored into the rent of places that are getting leased.
The current location my office is in, was vacant for 12 years before we signed a lease, owned by a big name commercial real estate firm.
Given what seems like a high rate of vacancies in a lot of markets maybe its time for those landlords to be wiped out, the loans defaulted, and the buildings sell to get back to their real valuations.
But no, we can't have wealthy people lose some money or the banks take a loss, that'd be terrible. We'll just continue crushing the middle class and poor with high rent costs and empty properties.
In an ideal situation, cities should be placing pressure on property owners and businesses to lease out vacant space because otherwise they are effectively offloading the negative externalities of empty space to the city and its tax base. If the city isn't going to outright buy vacant property for the sake of development, then it should heavily tax property owners for leaving said property empty or undeveloped.
I disagree, and it's one of the things our new mayor is working towards (imposing a vacancy tax).
> imposing a vacancy tax
That might help a little, but you won't notice. Beating such taxes is done with low value businesses. A mattress store is a typical case, good for holding larger spaces with almost no capital cost: a low overhead business used to hold a retail property until values appreciate. Smaller spaces are held with little clothing stores nobody shops at, or wire transfer shops and such. There is a plethora of such operations holding real estate everywhere, barely breaking even or losing modest amounts of money.
It's compelling to imagine there is some brilliant tax fix for every ill, but investors are a lot more agile than tax authorities; they make their living solving these impediments. Handling food is one the costliest ways to hold a commercial property, so that's rarely how its done.
I don't disagree, but even a low overhead business is still going to be better than an empty storefront (since it means creating some business and employment than none) and a reasonable % of said vacant businesses will be turned into decent value for the community. It's something especially apparent because even the local mattress stores have closed and left said space vacant.
Ok, but you're not going to get a nifty $4 lunch bowl shop. The properties are held until Starbucks or H&R Block or whatever wants to expand. Maybe said tax makes the mattress store reopen with its one minimum wage cashier poking at their phone all day, but you won't get more than that. The investors are holding out for the big money.
The business model works because when a buyer appears looking for numerous sites for expansion, they can deal with a professional investor group that can close deals in a cinch. This greatly lowers costs, because otherwise said buyer has to employ a small army of expensive people and take years to acquire or develop properties themselves. The buyer pays a premium for the value of foregoing all that. The price covers all the years of expenses; minimum wage labor, taxes, upkeep, and a good deal of profit, after years or even decades of squatting.
Nowhere in any of this is there someone with dreams of $4 lunch bowl shops.
Restaurants will charge what people are able to pay. My office is on the third floor of a century-old parisian building, in the heart of the city. The street is filled with tiny restaurants, some of which serve these "healthy lunch bowls" that the US apparently lacks. Except they're 14€ here (without drinks or desserts), because people have the money to pay for it, and do so. You can relax zoning laws, but no one will price their bowls at $4 in the richest country on Earth, obviously.
I used to be able to get $3 breakfast and $5 lunch (ok, tipping rounds those up, but the base price is there) at nearly any Coney Island in the Detroit metro. It's not about richness or zoning, it's all about population density and disposable income. People in the US are poorer than we used to be, so restaurants only target the rich. US cities are remarkably fluffy and often less dense than suburbs in other countries. It's that simple.
No one sells $4 lunch bowls in the US because no one wants to work for minimum wage for 12 hours a day. The article makes it seem like a great idea, but people in Japan who run these stores work like dogs and live in poverty for their whole lives.
Does the US really lack cheap easily exploitable labor? What about Uber taxi drivers?
Uber isn't exactly cheap, just cheaper than taxis, which are super-expensive. Kitchen work generally requires some kind of training, often some kind of licensing or certification, and is rarely the cheapest type of labor.
Anyway, the main issue here is population density, not labor availability. If there tens or hundreds of thousands of people working and living in a quarter mile radius and average foot traffic was in hundreds or thousands per hour rather than dozens or less it would likely be easy to sell $4 bowls and make a profit - most of the US is vastly less dense and walkable than that though, even in cities.
You’re not getting $4 lunch bowls in Seattle when minimum wage is more than $20/hr. You aren’t getting affordable anything when labor is so expensive. (You also aren’t getting your 16 year old their first job either when labor costs more than your kid is worth but that is another topic entirely)
Zoning is only one tiny piece of the puzzle.
The labor is expensive because the rent is expensive.
Guess why the rent is expensive?