I love Tokyo and HK. They are wonderful cities to live in and have terrific public services. Have you been to the cities you named?

Tokyo has one of the best land-use regimes in the world, the way they have kept housing prices down is a miracle compared to other cities.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/th...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/la...

> Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

> Tokyo’s steady construction is linked to a still more startling fact. In contrast to the enormous house price booms that have distorted western cities — setting young against old, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and denying others the chance to move to where the good jobs are — the cost of property in Japan’s capital has hardly budged.

> This is not the result of a falling population. Japan has experienced the same “return to the city” wave as other nations.

No they are not, look at the varience in population density of us cities [0] and it's pretty obvious lots of them can expand. The real problem is that jobs are highly local and people want to live in an area where their are lots of job opportunities. Thus, cities with lots of good job opportunities beget more job opportunities like how Amazon chose New York instead of a smaller city.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

The lack of societal and governmental support for mass transit makes it doubly difficult for cities to scale.

Gotta support our struggling petroleum industry!

When you build more appartments, more people come to the city. It’s a positive feedback loop. The result is a city with terrible quality of life. The city no one wants to live in. Only then it will stop growing.

Yeah, like Tokyo. It's still one of the most amazing places on the planet, with great culture, ready to get around and even beautiful green spaces. But soon it will continue to grow and become awful...<\s>

Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded...

By what measure of fullness?

That sounds amazing!

That’s how it will look like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AoPpFfXwx_o

That is not a problem of population density, that problem is inadequate peak capacity in transportation infrastructure. For example if you stack subway lines one under the other simalar to those described by Elon Musk, or increase the capacity of the existing public transport system through through faster & more frequent trains, you can resolve such issues. You just need to commit to spending on the infrastructure to support the population density.

Interestingly, it is policies like prop 13 in California that restrict the revenue needed to invest in the infrastructure to support higher population densities.

I've been to Tokyo several times and always use public transit, even during rush hour and it honestly has never been worse than the light rail in SF. It gets crowded at times sure and I'm sure there are specific times on some lines when it's this bad that you get staff posing passengers in, however it's far away from being the norm. It's usually pleasant and if take it over my commute on a car any day.

Check out Houston.

Isn't Houston left leaning?

> Isn't Houston left leaning?

No. Houston is centrist, which for a city is right-leaning.

They have deed restrictions.

And aren’t most of those deed restrictions for perpetuity so, unlike zoning, the property can never be used for something else?