Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto

Yes! Every zoning and housing regulation commission should evaluate every proposal by the question if it enables our cities to be as quirky and wonderful as Japanese cities. If not, it's out!

I generally agree with the sentiment behind this, but like many other things, underneath the zoning issues what it actually actually goes back to is cultural issues. For a large number of other countries you could loosen zoning up and ultimately someone would start operating an abattoir next to an elementary school and it would make the 5 o'clock news and then the city council would throw a bunch of new regulations in and the whole thing would be over.

I hate to even sound like this, I hate the cynicism in my comment, and maybe the answer is to actually just do it and not declare premature defeat, but having watched how other initiatives in my own local area have gone I can't help but feel that we don't have the real secret weapon that works for places like Japan, and makes stuff like Star Trek work outside of all the fancy tech, and that's sufficiently advanced culture to not immediately race this all to the bottom.

Sadly, I think the lack of care for the other, and for social cohesion in Western nations preclude this.

Several years ago our next door neighbor applied for a zoning variance to allow their home to be used as an AirBNB. All was fine for the first month or two, then a graduation party booked it, 20 vehicles show up and parked on all the neighbors yards, loud party late into the night, etc.

All of this was reported for noise violations, parking violations, etc. to both the police and to AirBNB. Neither took any action.

Months later a college fraternity booked this AirBNB for the entire summer. All of the above plus nightly backyard ragers going until 2 AM. Neither the police nor AirBNB did a damn thing about it. We reached out to zoning to see if we could protest the variance after the fact and told no, the only way for the variance to be revoked would be for the police to make so many calls to the house that it is deemed a public nuisance. Except the police won’t show for nuisance calls and even if they did it would take years of this for a hearing to be held which may or may not decide on our favor.

So… as much as I love the idea of the Japanese civic style. I would never give up strict zoning in America for it. People suck.

Nuisance-based zoning exists as a solution to this. E.g. you can operate a flower shop but not a noisy arcade. Yet somehow this concept doesn't seem to be able to get a hold.

Mh, the obvious solution seems to be to enforce existing laws rather than invent new ones.

It doesn't get a hold, because, again, culturally it is very hard for it to take hold. Just like your other response that says "well we should just start enforcing existing laws", the problem is that by the time you get into defining a nuisance in the face of some profit-oriented rules lawyer, or getting bylaw enforcement some breathing room in their workload from the 10000x other calls they have regarding bylaw infractions, you're downstream of the underlying cause and just trying to bandaid things up as best you can. You don't need nuisance based bylaws if people are starting out from a mindset of not wanting to be a nuisance to their neighbors, and Japan probably has bylaw enforcement and its probably really great, but it doesn't just get enforced by magic it gets enforced because they likely have a much smaller workload than exists for bylaw enforcement in my area, and that smaller workload is serviced by a number of people that is probably more sustainable as people generally don't constantly try to oppose any sort of taxes collected and so the department has sufficient funding that isn't at risk of being continually cut every civic election cycle.

On and on up the chain I could go, turning this comment into a wall of text as we work our way up the cause and effect ladder until we ultimately arrive at the things a society values, aka its culture. Its ultimately all downstream of a society and culture that either is constantly looking for a loophole to grab whatever profit there is in a desperate race to the bottom, winner-takes-all struggle, or a society that prizes something different.

The home businesses in Japan are supposed to be low-impact. It sounds like the airbnb you mentioned was not.

Japan has a set of regulations for airbnb rentals [0], depending on the size of the living space, whether it is owner-occupied, or is listed for more than half a year. There are sometimes inspections. Neighbors are notified and their complaints are taken seriously. Enforcement has been much more strict since 2018. Something like you mentioned would result in the airbnb license being revoked.

Airbnb spends a lot of money lobbying politicians in the US not to do such things, millions just at the federal level [0].

[0] https://mailmate.jp/blog/japan-airbnb-law

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/airbnb-inc/summary?id=D0000...

The Japanese deal with this by zoning policies being set at a national level. Localities pretty much can decide what part of town the smelly/industrial businesses go, and the rest scales based on population.

The locality will plan where their high-rise/commercial district is, houses on side-streets are can all be triplexes with an option for a low-impact business as in the article, and secondary streets have dedicated businesses.

As an area's population grows the federal zoning allows that bigger buildings can be built - small apartment buildings instead of houses, etc. The locals can't pull-up the ladder behind them and say "no new houses", locking out young people and renters and transplants.

I assume that the problem in the US is more regulatory capture than culture. Starbucks doesn't want you to be able to sell coffee to your neighbors. And your neighbors don't want more housing to be built, because it might affect their home values. I've seen how home owners adamantly oppose these things.

And for decades we've been left with most new housing being built by developers as cheap as possible - clear cutting some space on the outskirts of town and throwing together cookie cutter houses, car dependent and without much of anywhere nearby to socialize. It's a shame that in a country of 330+ million people there's not more variance.

The sad artifact of my experience is that I learned first hand the benefit of a stereotypical mafia organization and its extralegal services and their benefits to the otherwise law abiding public.

Policing might be another issue that has become cultural in the US