To add to your point, you can rent a gosiwon[1] in Korea for as little as $230/mo. I'm sure these would not even be allowed to exist in any city in the US. The hallways are not ADA compliant. The rooms don't meet some minimum sq.ft. requirement. There are too many occupants per toilet. And so on.

Not to mention you would have NIMBYs block the development of such cheap housing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-gtbPOfyc

One of the things that I love about Seoul is the flexible zoning in residential areas that allows folks to use their space as a commercial entity. While having a coffee or barber shop next to a row of homes may seem weird for many folks in the US, I find that it adds a great deal of charm, diversity, and convenience to areas.

That said, one of the biggest criticisms of this approach to zoning in the city is that it leads to a faster pace of gentrification which can price people out of the areas, so it's not all peaches.

Seoul real estate prices are through the roof right now because of a heavily speculative market and shaky regulations though. A 100m2 in an apartment complex in the out-of-center parts of Seoul will cost you roughly 1 billion Won (1 million dollars).

Buying property is affected by speculation, renting much less so, and rents were what I was talking about.

In addition to what others have said there is no "chaos". American cities are chaos, not because of the building code but the massively failed social policies. Saying Seoul or Tokyo are chaotic compared to the likes of NYC and LA is like comparing Oslo to Mogadishu and saying the latter is less chaotic.

Seoul does not. An avg price of an apartment is 1M USD and avg salary is around 50k USD.

I said rent prices.

That is "rent" price. You pay 1m at move in but you don't own the apartment. The landlord gets the interest on it as your rent. When you move out you get the 1m back.

> The chaos of people being able to build whatever, wherever, is probably why Seoul and Tokyo both have remarkably reasonable rents relative to their size, prosperity, and national importance.

I think the premiss is not true. They cannot build whatever wherever. They have different zones, which determin, what kind of buildings are OK to be build in them. See for example this video: https://invidio.xamh.de/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

But there does seem to be some increased flexibility.

I was being a bit hyperbolic, of course there are some rules, but much more flexibility than in the US.

> reasonable rent

Surely you mean outside the city center?

I lived 10 minutes from Shinjuku 2 minutes from a station and 5 mins from another, surrounded by a popular shopping and dining street with 4-5 supermarkets and lots of greengrocers to buy food from, for $550/mo, together with my wife in a super bright and pleasant, but very compact (23 m2) 1 bedroom apartment (not a studio). Loved that place, and can't imagine rent like that near any US city.

I just got a private office in the center of Tokyo (Minato-ku) for about $400/mo. You can barely get a hot-desk in San Francisco for that price.

I meant Seoul. I think San Francisco isn't a great yardstick for rent. Average salary of software engineers in Seoul is $45k, in SF $135k (according to Glassdoor).

I can rent a studio in Seoul for a little over half the price in Seattle. The salaries trend higher if you work as a software engineer for one of the newer companies. Korea also has unique offerings opposed to the usual monthly rent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse

Tokyo doesn't really have a "city center", to my understanding. At least, not a single one; it's more multi-polar.

But going off the spirit of what you meant, even if you compare city center to roughly city center, Tokyo is still much cheaper than places like NYC or SF, I believe.

I suppose that depends on what you define as "city center". Just checking Ikejiriohashi (arguably walking distance from Shibuya) I see plenty of 2LDKs for $2k-$3k a month. If you want inside the Yamanote line there's tons in East Shinjuku and north and east of that area that are "cheap".

And of course like you mentioned, going out of the city it gets even cheaper.

Other lines can be even cheaper, if you're looking for a minimal studio you can live within 10 mins of a major central station for < $600/mo especially if you choose less popular lines like Seibu Shinjuku/Ikebukuro line. $2k-$3k is already living quite nicely for many Japanese people, my mother in law lives in a 3 bedroom apartment for ~$1,000/mo in exchange for being ~20 mins away from Ikebukuro by train in a sleeper suburb.

Definitely, A friend had a place on the Seibu Ikebukuro line, 20 mins from Ikebukuro, 3 bed, 2 bath, 3 story duplex for $1k. Similarly 20 mins from Ikebukuro on Saikyo line 3 bed, 1 bath apartment for $1k. In both cases though it was 20 mins by express.

I wouldn't consider those close to downtown though. If you're into night life downtown and you want to go home at 3am it will cost $100 to get home (though I guess with the money you saved on rent you can do that every weekend and you're still ahead! :P )

Lol yeah hard to get past the emotional sticker shock, but it's true!

> being able to build whatever, whenever

If persuading people to adopt such zoning in your area matters to you, then you probably want to describe this more accurately as "zoning that blocks nuisances but does not micromanage"

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html