The ideal would be for municipally owned mid-rise apartments in mixed-use neighborhoods to become common. Vienna does this very well, but public housing has been demonized in America (and, like the lazy dad who does a chore so badly they never get asked to do it again, our federal government starved public housing support so badly that most Americans think of it as an intrinsically horrific way to live).
I understand that in Japan there is a set of federally defined zoning types. Some beaurocrat checks your proposal against the requirements of the zone you want to build in and you get your permit or rejection within days. It's difficult to comprehend the massive impact it would have for permitting to go from an expensive, multi-year dice roll to a mostly predictable process that takes days.
