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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

"That sounds bigger than it is?"

Per Wikipedia, New York city's land area is 790km^2. Tokyo's is 2187km^2. Tokyo Metro's population density is 6,224/km^2 (I picked the higher of the possible numbers for this). New York City's density is 10,431/km^2.

There's really no argument you can make that New York should be cheaper than Tokyo based on density alone. Tokyo's big secret is sprawl.

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NYC is limited by arbritraty state lines, if you look at the physical reality there is just as much sprawl it's just across state lines past Newark which is the same metro area with slightly different taxes and still has 11,654 people per square mile.

Further people commute to the city's center which is why they tend to have lower population density than parts of their surrounding area. Which is why https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg,_New_Jersey has twice NYC's population density even with shorter buildings.

It's really hard in general to compare metropolitan areas in an apple-to-apples way for reasons like this. As a result, people tend to draw misleading conclusions based on often meaningless administrative boundaries. (e.g. Paris often cited as having extraordinary high density based on the small area that is technically the city.)

Right, Tokyo is very wide-spread. I believe it's the incredible infrastructure that allows people to commute to work easily. There is surprisingly little traffic for a city of that size.

Leaving Tokyo for Kyoto by train I kept seeing apartment buildings and houses for the first 50km or so.

This sort of super sprawl is enabled by Japanese employers' promises of lifetime employment. You buy near where you work, and your job lasts as long as a mortgage. No need to buy in Mountain View because 20 employers are nearby.

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