[Onavo]

The issue with trying to study US YIMBY through the lens of Asian urban planning is that most of these Asian countries have very different approaches to civil rights and private property than America. Japan has the added complication of routine natural disasters forcing rebuilds of housing. Singapore is a tiny city-state with a strong single party unicameral government (no separate parliaments, no municipal/state/federal divide) and a willingness to use eminent domain powers (and you don't "own" property there, most land is not freehold, you are merely temporarily leasing it from the state). South Korea is more similar to the US with a high percentage of rental owners but they also have a negative population growth (same as Japan). The less said about North Korea the better. People in these countries are also used to public transport, which is completely unacceptable to most Americans used to car ownership.

In short, some of these models are nice to be admired from afar and I definitely recommend going in person to to experience them, but I doubt there's truly any interesting takeaways that truly useful for the US.

[decimalenough]

None of this has anything at all to do with the contents of the article.

[robocat]

> and you don't "own" property there, most land is not freehold, you are merely temporarily leasing it from the state

Nobody really owns land: the government disallows many many activities, maybe charges you a yearly rental, and just has different hurdles to take it from you (eminent domain, market replacement cost). Even freehold is more like a franchise right to sell your freehold. Perpetual is somewhat irrelevant given zoning restrictions.

[binaryturtle]

I'm from the EU, not the US.

[bluGill]

You can substitute EU for US and large parts of the point remains. The context of the EU and Asia is also very different. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. We should still look at what others do, but we need to be careful extrapolating as sometimes things are the way they are because of some factor nobody is even aware of.

[Zardoz84]

USA isn't the centre of the world.