Towards an Aesthetic of a High Density Society, Part 2
Recently I took a trip to the Tokyo region in Japan to see a childhood friend and visit the old neighborhood that I grew up in — it’s been over 15 years since I’ve been there so there was a lot to catch up on. (It’s a long story but I’m a 4th Gen Japanese-American who grew up in a English speaking household but I became fluent by living in Japan during my formative years.) Like a good YIMBY member, though, I decided to check out what was happening on the housing front as well since Tokyo is often used as model for what good city planning looks like.
By pure coincidence the old neighborhood I grew up in has since turned into a technology research hub, which seemed like an odd parallel with the type of work I do today. It was interesting doing some comparisons between San Francisco (where I work now) and the YRP since the differences between the two couldn’t have been more stark.
Near the YRP there were Studio/1BR apartments available for 450–600 (USD) a month. Considering the average salary near Tokyo tends to be around the 50–60k USD range, this seemed very reasonable to me. Even more so when there’s no need to own a car in Japan due to their impeccable public transit system (trains and buses were always on time, and very, very fast) while companies often provide travel subsidies for employees in need.
In San Francisco, the average salary tends to be around 80–90k, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere (reasonably safe) that costs less than 2000 a month. Even adjusted for higher pay, rent still eats up a much bigger portion of your income. What’s more crazy is that the “affordable” below market rate units (BMR) can easily go into the 2–3k ranges in today’s crazy housing market.
In Tokyo, you can get a decent, healthy meal for 5 bucks if you know where to look. Even cheaper if you’re willing to cook. In San Francisco, you would generally expect to pay 10–20 dollars if you want to eat anything that won’t make you feel immediately awful afterwards.
Tokyo (and its outskirts) are super safe compared to US standards. You can safely walk alone at night in most areas, and the police don’t usually carry firearms. While I was there I saw houses selling veggies on the side of the street, based purely on the honor system. I watched a news report where the city of Tokyo was actually having trouble getting rid of abandoned bikes because people were just leaving them everywhere. Free bikes! Oh no! (They typically don’t even bother locking them up.)
During the whole trip (and I went all over, if you want to take a look), I probably saw maybe 3–4 homeless people on the streets while there. Back when I was working for the city of SF, I was literally stepping in human waste on the way to work everyday while some businesses were literally using robots to chase homeless people off the streets. (Can’t make this stuff up even if you wanted to.) Tokyo has literally 1/60th of the homeless population rate per-capita than San Francisco does so it may not be all that surprising, though.
I could go on and on but it’s quite obvious that you’re getting a much better bang for your buck in Tokyo than in San Francisco. Americans often make fun of Japan’s “weak” economy, but it seems obvious to me that on average, the quality of life is much higher in Japan in ways that won’t necessarily show up in pure GDP or productivity measurements. Even if you’re single, uneducated and making below market rate salaries, you could still easily afford your own space without too much fear of being priced out.
Seems almost too good to be true, in a lot of ways. What’s the catch?
Well, the catch is that yes, Tokyo is a much denser city than San Francisco, full of high-rises and tall apartment complexes. Critics of the Tokyo-SF comparison often cite “culture” as the reason why Tokyo is so “different” than cities in the US, but the only real difference here is that Japanese people are more open to the idea that living in a high-rise is a perfectly acceptable, healthy way to live. (As someone who has no intention of living in Japan because of cultural incompatibility, I’d like to think that I have some objectivity, here.) People living in apartments are featured in advertisements, TV shows, movies, games and books as part of the everyday experience and even celebrities are often shown to be living in modest-sized condos as well.
American ideas of high density living, however, are colored by images and narratives that depict apartment complexes as crime-and-poverty ridden dystopian hellholes. You can find examples of these types of depictions in Judge Dredd, or Blade Runner, or Futurama, or The Fifth Element, or…well, let’s just say it’s all over the place, even in so-called “progressive” visions of the future. Surely, if you live in such a place, you must be either poor, sad, dark-skinned, and/or lonely. Implicitly, American culture hammers the idea into our head everyday that if you don’t make enough money to own a single family home (where 90% of advertisements are targeted towards) you are losing in life, therefore, a loser.
Anyone who has had the experience of debating the merits of housing development knows the frustrations of dealing with NIMBYs since the vast majority of their arguments appear to be completely irrational. While bad-faith arguments made in lieu of keeping their property values artificially high definitely is a factor, that’s not the only thing that keeps them going — it’s the genuine fear that higher density living automatically leads to a loss of quality in their life, and of others. Even if the current approach is making things worse for everyone — even if working examples all around the world show that there’s nothing to worry about — the fear itself is very real. You can hear it in their voice — you can see it in their eyes.
This is the cultural challenge that YIMBYs will have to overcome in order to make the changes that are badly needed for future generations to come. Americans are, generally speaking, land-space entitled due to its long history of expansionism that is held especially strong in places like California. (It’s the gold rush that built the West Coast, after all.) Changing the way people think will not be easy nor quick because it is rooted in a very strong outlook that has been reinforced by history for over a 100 years. But focusing on the positive, rather than negative, may be the path towards bridging the divide.
Earlier I wrote about the possibility of establishing an aesthetic of an high density society as part of the YIMBY movement as means of garnering broader support. I do feel a little naive now after seeing what Japan has done since this aesthetic seems to be already in place there. (Perhaps it’s easier for Japan to accept the concept of high density since it’s an island nation and you can’t just tell people to “leave the city if you can’t afford it” like they do here.) In practice, “high density aesthetics” isn’t anything too outlandish or out of the ordinary —on TV, instead of sitcoms and ads featuring people living in single family homes, it features people and families living in condos and apartments.
Why are kids of today drawn to platforms like Twitch and YouTube where people broadcast directly out of their tiny bedrooms? Because it’s something they recognize and can identify with. Advertisements and shows found in the mainstream media, on the other hand, tends to feel distant and out-of-touch due to its overwhelming focus on rich, suburban single-family homes. People have come up with many theories as to why institutional trust in America is now at an all-time low, but the reality isn’t so complex: liberal or conservative, people just don’t feel like society recognizes or listens to them in any meaningful way. And if we were to be honest about the whole thing, they would be right.
Housing politics should not be about who has the biggest house, the nicest of yards, or the quietest of neighborhoods — exclusivity and isolation should not be considered a virtue, but a vice. It should be about giving everyone the dignity and autonomy to have their own place — no matter how small — to call their own. If you allow people to have a stake in the process, they will be more productive, more happy, less likely to commit crimes and more likely to be a good neighbor. Other cities have proven that this can be made to work, and if we still want to continue to consider ourselves to be a civilized nation, we need to follow suit as well.
In Japan, high-density aesthetics is already in place, but in the United States this form of sentimentality will have to be built from scratch. I have plans on incorporating these ideas into my music, but I can only write what I know and because I don’t know everything, I will have to ask for your help. This will have to be done from all fronts — from the visual to the aural, from the high-brow to the low, from the popular to the obscure — people from all walks of life working towards a common cause. If it can be done, we’ll have a real artistic movement making a very real impact on the way the world works. This is the stuff that you read in the history books and there is a very real possibility here in the YIMBY movement to make it actually happen.
If you’re interested in collaborating as an artist or supporter please email me at ryan@ryangtanaka.com, or DM me on Twitter/Facebook. Will be travelling between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the near future so either city would work. (Make sure you mention the article here since I’ve been getting a lot of spam lately, thanks!)
