Oh, it is entirely possible to build a city larger than Munich, Berlin, Paris and whatnot. I never denied that.
The problem is all the side issues that come with density, most importantly suicide and other mental health and general wellbeing issue rates.
> Tokyo is a city that is both bigger than Munich and more affordable for low-income residents than Munich.
Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1]. No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies.
Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2]. That makes it "easier" to upzone - here in Europe this sort of policy would be completely unacceptable because we value the architectural history of our community and because of the effort and resource usage involved.
[1] https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/new-york-city-tokyo-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
Density in itself doesn't drive suicide rates. There's a lot of factors that go into this, and it's reductive to blame this simply on density.
> Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets in the world [1]
You're linking to an article about luxury rentals and using that to say Tokyo has one of the most expensive rental markets, but that's misleading at best. Yes, you can pay a lot of money for the high end apartments here, but you can also find super cheap apartments in central tokyo, near the yamanote (central) line.
> No idea about low income residents, having never been there, but I'd guess a massive amount of government subsidies.
There's government housing, which is super popular, but it's not considerably cheaper than market-rate housing. The biggest difference is the lack of fees and deposits. Government housing is a drop in the bucket of overall housing though. Low-income people live in cheap apartments, or shared houses.
> Additionally, due to earthquake resilience Japanese buildings are usually torn down after 20-30 years [2].
Though houses were historically torn down after 20-30 years, that's becoming less frequent as construction quality has increased, and as the current earthquake standards are quite high. This is also not true for highrises and lowrise multi-housing complexes.
Zoning does play a large part in this, as Tokyo's zoning laws are considerably less strict, and don't allow NIMBYs to stop construction.
Tokyo is a city that is both
* bigger than Munich and
* more affordable for low-income residents than Munich.