1. They make a line that goes from one big Tokyo station (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro...) to outside, that used to be farming lands
2. They pretty build mini-cities around their train stations (like Futako-tamagawa for example) with shops, housing, that's all walkable or bikable for people living a bit further
The result is a small human-size neighborhood with an easy access to Tokyo (because they built the train line). One example is Futako-tamagawa.
For example, Phase 1 of Line 9 in Seoul cost around $875m or $52m per mile. This is in one of the densest urban environments on the planet.
That's 1/5th the cost of the per-mile system cost that I linked to earlier. Which was built on open and reserved right-of-way, all above ground, and didn't require massive infrastructure rerouting or other kinds of issues you might face doing the same work in a dense urban environment.
If a developer was putting up 1,500 housing units, I'd bet they could afford to split the cost of the mile of mass transit rail running by their development if it ran ~$50m per mile.
Some back of the envelope math.
Wholesale costs on new housing is around $80-90/sq ft. So a 3,000 sq ft. home costs the developer ~$250,000.
A quarter acre of property (fairly standard these days for new suburban development) in an undeveloped or rural area runs around $5-20k. So we're probably looking at a per unit cost of $300,000.
Financing construction of 1,600 units like this is $450m.
400 acres is under a square mile, but let's add in roads and green space and things and this development would easily be 1 square mile.
Let's say we want to put a subway stop right in the middle of this and run the track right on through in exchange for zoning the development.
In Korea, that'd be $50m.
In the U.S. that'd be $250m.
The developer isn't going to eat that, so they build it into their per-unit cost.
In Korea, that's a $31,250 additional per-unit cost. So my housing costs are about $330,000 per unit.
In the U.S. that's $156,250 per-unit. My housing costs are now $456,250 per unit.
The going price for single family homes in this area is $600,000. I can make a 45% ROI in Korea, while in the U.S. I'm only making 24%. My goal was to try to make 50% ROI.
24% is a pretty slim markup. Even if I boost the sale price of the houses (advertising easy access to the subway as justification), I'd have to hit $870,000 sale prices to hit 45% ROI and $900,000 sale prices to hit my target 50% in the U.S.
Are there enough buyers for that? Maybe. But it increases the developer risk substantially such that they may not bother at all.
i.e if you built a new city like this, within 15-20 mins public transit of nyc you would get much closer to the ROI your looking at.
Hell now that I think of it Toll Brothers is doing that in Hoboken. A 900sqft 2bdrm costs just under 1m.
It's too expensive here, but it's such a great town.
http://www.landwatch.com/Tioga-County-Pennsylvania-Land-for-...
Not individual .25 acre lots, but a committed developer can probably get it rezoned however they need.
It rises rapidly the closer in towards major cities.
If you're a large scale developer (of the sort that the county would hit up to help with transit development), you're probably going to buy a few hundred to a few thousand undeveloped/agricultural acres and get it rezoned.
This is a little better, $500/.25 acre and only slightly further than an hour from Pittsburgh. That's commuting distance for many people.
http://www.landwatch.com/Somerset/Cambria-County-Pennsylvani...
And here's some just an hour outside of Philly at $825/.25 acre.
http://www.landwatch.com/Montour-County-Pennsylvania-Land-fo...
I'm not aware of any evidence of this being true. If it were, I would assume that living in one of those places would be cheaper than living in other places (because it's less desirable to people), but the opposite seems to be true.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Barcelona,+Spain/@41.39479...
Look at Barcelona. It's a Roman colonial town so it's old. Can you guess which part was built first? How about which parts were built in the 18th 19th and 20th centuries?
As nice as the medieval quarter is for shopping, nobody really wanted to continue on with that kind of plan. By the 19th century (before cars) you ended up with a grid of broad roads and open boulevards. These things didn't happen to accommodate cars, they happened because medieval city plans scale poorly. It turns out cars fit really nicely within this plan.
Look at London. With 1/3rd the population density of Barcelona, it's cramped, and tight everywhere. Basic logistics costs are high because getting goods into and out of the city is difficult and time consuming. It's one of those weird cities that developed right along the traditional medieval plan like what's being advocated here and it's an expensive cramped and often unpleasant place to live. Even if London suddenly started building up and increasing density, the city road system couldn't handle it. It has to spread out because this kind of city plan scales poorly.
In some very old towns, ones that never really continued to develop, so they're left with the medieval "bones". Getting things like groceries to the shops is a circus of people physically moving hand trucks throughout the city. What's more expensive? 50 trips back and forth throughout the city with handtrucks? Or backing a truck up to a loading dock and spending 15 minutes unloading a few palettes of goods?
Other than tourists, this is why nobody likes to live in Venice, despite it being one of the specific examples given here as a model city. In the slow seasons, Venice is one of the most beautiful, walkable cities in the world. It's perfectly human scale. But it's a terrible, expensive place to live because every item in your local grocer had to be hand carried there.
> If it were, I would assume that living in one of those places would be cheaper than living in other places
Expense isn't just because of popularity. There are fixed costs to existing in places. Just like it's very expensive to live on an island, despite there being relatively few people there. These kinds of city plans are inherently expensive, they create almost an island in a way.
However, cities have other benefits, mostly in terms of job availability, and that attracts people to them. Because earning money can outweigh almost any other downside.
Hence all the hand-wringing over "gentrification".
Really, this is just a return to the long-term normal of cities. Cities are centers of power and wealth. It was a weird American aberration that, for a time, "inner city" was associated with poverty and decay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram-train
Or do what actually happens in cities, namely hub'n'spoke: tram lines to each city's central station, high-speed/capacity lines between cities.
In a dense city like London, which doesn't have the wide roads and car-focus of US Cities, transit is important and the value of residential property here is very highly correlated with distance to transit hubs. For a developer, it can make a lot of economic sense to develop transit to new developments.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station#2012_re...
Getting the developers to foot the bill has significantly increased the financial hurdle for developing that part of London.
The Battersea project is a poster child for why developers can't shoulder this kind of expense.
This kind of development is constrained to really make car ownership a reasonable thing (I know I know, he has photos of 3 or 4 cars in some of his examples). So getting into and out of this kind small scale development requires something like rail for interconnections -- I agree buses or trams would be better for intraconnections.
But the residential picture in these areas are a mess. That's why lots of cities have turned their medieval quarters into glorified shopping malls with hotels attached. None of the locals particularly want to live there.
I understand the aim of what's being advocated here, and I really enjoy visiting cities like this (it saves on car rentals). But there's significant reasons people have spent a century or so trying like hell to escape these kinds of cities. Sprawl is a problem, but modeling cities after 15th century Italian towns is a mistake as well. I'd love to live in a place like this I suppose if we're all boutique shop owners and grocers this might work. But most people aren't these days. We actually have to get places that aren't necessarily right in our town.
One of the significant reasons we started moving away from this kind of development, even before cars became common, is that it traps people inside of them and prevents people from getting into and out of them. He uses Barcelona as an example, but he uses the Medieval part of Barcelona, not the 19th century bits.
So now we have to build extensive mass-transit. I'm thrilled as peaches to do that, but it's unbelievably expensive to finance. One of the reasons so many roads get built and expanded is that local governments can finance road development by forcing developers to build the roads or they won't get the zoning for their new mall or suburb (and the increased tax revenue is intended to cover long-term maintenance).
Brand new, above ground, subway/metro runs around $250 million per mile [1] in the United States (built on existing right-of-way). No developer can finance that. A brand new rural/suburban road runs $4-6 million per mile, and $8-10 million in urban areas [2].
I wish that humans had managed to develop a way of life and an advanced economy that made this possible. But we didn't. It sucks, but even if the car had never been invented, cities would no longer look like this.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metro)
2 - http://www.artba.org/about/transportation-faqs/#20