In this reflection, you’ll hear from Urban Design Forum Executive Director on lessons learned from the Tokyo Study Trip.
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By Dan McPhee
I only spent a month in Tokyo during my sabbatical, a reminder that it takes decades to know a city. What I found was a city that was endless yet intimate, chaotic yet precise, shy but preparing to open itself back up to the world.
Upon arrival, I wrote to two contacts — Shingo Sekiya, a Pratt-trained placemaking expert with the Mitsubishi Estate; and Masami Kobayashi, the distinguished professor of urban design from Meiji University, the city’s great English-speaking academy. They unwittingly became my guides. Shingo accompanied me on minor diplomatic missions to city government and federal ministries. Masami drove me through the rain to see new waterfront tower parks. Professor Junko Tamura, Masami’s protégé, soon joined our effort helping us understand how the interior architecture of Japanese homes was evolving alongside the cityscape. Late in my trip, I met with the distinguished professor Naomichi Kurata, who presented me with the 1978 original proceedings of the Institute for Urban Design — our predecessor institution. He assured me he was the only Japanese fellow at the time. We’re still all around.
I am not sure why the two cities feel so disconnected when much of our urban design history is shared. Tokyo studied New York’s zoning codes in the post-war period. Philadelphia planner (and Forum co-founder) Jonathan Barnett’s books are required reading for urban design students. New York has long been inspired by Tokyo’s transformative transit-oriented development, not to mention graced by so many works from the city’s great architects.
The focus of my sabbatical was to design the study trip we would take in September, centered on why Tokyo had managed to grow without the affordability crisis gripping every developed city of the Western World. I journeyed around town presenting New York’s polycrisis: deepening rent burden impacting more than half the city, tens of thousands of homeless schoolchildren, immense overcrowding and substandard housing, hundreds of thousands of new arrivals without a place to settle. I suspect it is rare to be self-effacing in formal exchanges, but I wanted our counterparts to share the dirty details of what worked and what doesn’t across the Pacific.
What I discovered is that in all the ways that New York makes housing hard, Tokyo has made it easy. European and American cities have set increasingly aggressive policy to better manage existing housing through stronger tenant protections and anti-tourism regulations. Tokyo on the other hand seems to have struck a more effective balance: allowing the market to lead on new development while keeping Tokyoites in their homes.
It starts with local government, which forecasts growth and aligns public policy and subsidy to meet that challenge. Stable public subsidy unlocks a near-even number of new homes and modernizations each year, though government agencies were admittedly curious about New York’s private financing schemes. Tokyo’s tax policy meaningfully rewards multifamily housing, unlike New York’s arcane property tax rules that reward homeowners.
Zoning, set at the federal level, describes twelve core types that create predictability and flexibility for the private market to deliver new homes. Compare it to New York’s ninety, where dense housing nearly always requires time-consuming land use review.
I was also struck by anecdotes of the city’s many tenant protections. Property owners must justify proposed rent increases to tenants, citing capital improvements or rising operating costs. Tenants must agree to the change. As a result, rents rarely rise. When touring an income-restricted public housing project, city officials were puzzled by our numerous questions about evictions; their safety net so rarely required them. Even Azabudai Hills, the world-class urban redevelopment project, did not pay the going rate to buy out property owners. Instead, it offered each a new apartment in the new development, allowing them to reap the financial benefit of their own displacement.
There are useful comparisons across the cities’ social housing programs. Tokyo Metropolitan Government manages nearly the same number of income-restricted public housing units as New York, but has spent decades modernizing its midcentury housing stock. They aren’t constrained by New York’s costly recent culture of rebuilding with tenants in place. Instead, they relocate tenants, completely rebuild campuses, and integrate new social infrastructure — shared kitchens, daycare facilities, and landscapes — not to mention new market-rate housing as well.
Tokyo’s public-private municipal housing developer “UR” (Urban Renaissance Agency) continues to develop and modernize affordable — if not always deeply income-restricted — homes for the city’s middle class, and has garnered acclaim for architecturally distinct projects like Shinonome Canal Court, built by leading architectural teams within a single master plan.
In contrast to New York’s preservation culture, we were struck by Tokyo’s scrap and burn culture. Much of its housing stock was rebuilt in the post-war period after American forces firebombed more than half the city. Rebuilt quickly and cheaply, much of it was never meant to stand more than 50 years, so the city rebuilds without hesitation.
But beyond housing rules, I wondered if New York’s housing challenge could be eased by using the space we already have better. I was wowed by the shopping strips and late night eats squeezed under train tracks. Train stations — even platforms — brimmed with shops and restaurants. Unlike our uniformly ground-floor retail landscape, mid-rise “zakkyos” stacked commercial uses to create bustling commercial corridors. If we got a little more creative about highway underpasses, train stations and commercial corridors, we might have a little more space to squeeze apartments.
Though my focus was housing policy, I couldn’t resist visiting the city’s great urban design projects. I enjoyed gentle shopping districts like Daikanyama’s Hillside Terrace by Fumihiko Maki, Bonus Track and the new linear park extending Shimokitazawa’s public realm, and the careful streets of Marunouchi. Major urban redevelopment projects like Azabudai Hills, Roppongi Hills, and Shibuya rivaled our own Hudson Yards with an aim of delivering beautiful and carefree urban living—though they also often pulled life from surrounding streets. I reflected on Tokyo’s own (somewhat scrambled) Olympic plans, which delivered the massive new Harumi Flag district as well as urban punctuation like tactile paving and new public bathrooms. The craft in construction amazed me everywhere.
Early on, I was cautioned against making cultural arguments for why Japan may greet our housing challenge better than the United States — this is, after all, a large city with many stakeholders. There is no enshrined “right to housing,” only a political culture committed to delivering enough affordable homes for people to live. But I couldn’t help but wonder how much demographic uniformity had shaped better outcomes than in New York, where factors like race, immigration status, queerness and gender identity drive our homelessness epidemic.
I hope New York learns from Tokyo’s commitment to — and grace — in housing. We are grateful to our hosts for their generous time, to the guides who toured around the city and the region, and to the translators who bridged our two complex languages. Global exchange isn’t easy, and it’s going to take more than a month to get to all the answers, but we need the inspiration more than ever. Kanpai to many more years of exchange.