What Tokyo can teach American housing policy

Tokyo is the world’s largest city, with 38 million people sharing one agglomerated labor market. Despite high land prices, Tokyo’s structure rents are remarkably affordable by global megacity standards; they allow high densities and build far more new homes on a per-capita basis than peer megacities in the English-speaking world, inspiring NYC Mayor Mamdani and many other YIMBYs on the left and right. How do policy elements like land use regulation, moderate rent regulation with vacancy decontrol, and publicly subsidized construction work in Japan? The US-Japan Foundation offers Lessons from Japan: Improving US Housing Outcomes.