"In Tokyo, good things [like affordable housing] have been created through private initiative.”

EMERGENT TOKYO: “This book demystifies Tokyo’s emergent urbanism for an international audience,
explaining its origins, its place in today’s Tokyo, and its role in the Tokyo of tomorrow”

"'As the Japanese government attempted to rebuild their devastated capital city [after the War], they initially drafted a comprehensive plan, but soon concluded that they lacked the budget to carry it out. And so, in areas where neither the government nor the country’s real-estate and transportation mega-corporations could properly fund reconstruction efforts, whole neighbourhoods instead rapidly rebuilt themselves. Working on a small scale, residents rebuilt homes and shops using scraped-together funds while relying on little more than their collective grit and inventiveness, and black markets full of micro-entrepreneurs sprung up around the city’s major train stations. These neighbourhoods were not initially planned, per se—they emerged, and their ramshackle, spontaneous spirit can still be felt today when walking Tokyo’s backstreets.
    "'This approach was adopted out of harsh necessity, but the resulting neighbourhoods have a striking charm: intimate townscapes with exceptional vitality and liveability, featuring a fine-grained urban fabric comprised of numerous small buildings.' ...
    "Because of Japan’s light touch, zoning it is relatively easy to build housing in Tokyo, and thus the city is not as 'unaffordable' as you might expect.*  Tokyo has also avoided the bland uniformity of the major cities in China....

    "Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area. . . .
    "Some cities, like Singapore and Vienna, have bucked the trend by using public money to build affordable housing. Almost 80 percent of Singapore residents live in public housing.*
    "In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidised housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. . . .
    “'In progressive cities we are maybe too critical of private initiative,” said Christian Dimmer, an urban studies professor at Waseda University and a longtime Tokyo resident. “I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective [sic], but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative.”

~ Jorge Almazan, from his book Emergent Tokyo, NY Times from their article on 'How Tokyo Achieves Affordable Housing 'and Scott Sumner, from his post discussing both: 'Emergent Tokyo'

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Fix spec building to make Auckland affordable again - NOT PC, 2013
"The key to making Auckland liveable is to make it affordable—a fairly complicated and heavily politicised subject, so let’s try to make it simple: we won’t have an affordable Auckland until the model for “spec” building is viable once again.
""Spec building being 'speculative' building—a builder buying land, building a house and “speculating” he can sell it to a buyer for a reasonable profit. This is how the vast majority of NZ’s cities have been built, by small builders hoping to make a modest profit.
""But in recent years this model has broken. A simple back-of-the-envelope analysis demonstrates why...."