Greater Tokyo Area? Tokyo Metropolis? Previous Tokyo City limits? New York City metro area? New York City? Manhattan? These can be 2 orders of magnitude apart in scale but they've all been talked about like it was the same location A and location B.
At the small scale Tokyo's densest ward is ~22,700/km^2 and Manhattan is ~28,800/km^2 with Manhattan being ~4x-5x the land area of the former (i.e. the core is a lot more dense). At the large scale the Greater Tokyo Area is ~2,900/km^2 and the New York Metropolitan Area is ~2,053/km^2 (i.e. the urban area around Tokyo is a lot more dense).
"Tokyo" is a good example that you can get affordable housing by focusing on how to spread the population over a large urban area but it's not a good example building more housing downtown is a scalable approach.
I'm not sure why you think Tokyo works, it wasn't long ago that it was multiple times the price of NYC. It might be affordable now but only because of a economic slump and Japan's falling population.
New York City already has a significantly higher population density than Tokyo (~11,300/km2 vs ~6,300/km). It's easier to develop more housing when you have more land.
You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if you want to compare those figures.
Tokyo is 13400 sq km, NYC is 780 sq km. If I rounded Tokyo's land area to the same sig figs as I did for NYC, it would be lowered by half the total area that NYC takes up!
> You need to include Newark, Yonkers, Long Island, etc if you want to compare those figures.
That's just not an accurate comparison.
Live in NYC. Lived in Japan. The difference is transit. It is far easier to get to Saitama or Kawasaki or Yokohama or Chiba than it is to get to Long Island from NYC. You can do the former in an hour at rush hour. Try getting to downtown Manhattan from Bay Shore as a daily commute. You'll go mad.
The gray area of Tokyo on that map is pretty much all considered an exurb of Tokyo, more-or-less feasible for daily commute by rail. Most of the NYC region is inaccessible from Manhattan, except by car. Look at the Seibu Shinjuku line, or the Chuo line on the Tokyo map -- both offer express trains that will take you from the distant western exurbs, right into the middle of downtown Tokyo:
I understand, but that doesn't change my assertion that comparing Tokyo density to only-NYC density makes no sense, especially as an argument that there is no room for to build more. Hogwash! Half your NYC map is pure green, but even leaving that, most of the land area on that map that is housing is SFH.
There's plenty of room to grow up. Just because the reason we don't is shitty government organization and FPTP voting doesn't mean we can just ignore the vast swaths of low-density just outside Manhattan 's borders.
