Japanese zoning
It's worth nothing that bigger cities in most first world countries generally have more expensive housing, rent or buy. Wages rise in bigger cities, too, but not as fast as housing prices.<p>Sometimes we're told that it's a natural result of city living, sometimes we're told that without high rise apartment density, it's inevitable. Tokyo has 35 MM people, almost double the second largest first world city (Seoul, 21 MM), and has housing prices to income ratios far lower than London, New York, or Los Angeles. [0]<p>Tokyo has very few high rises, medium density (150/hectare or 40k/mi^2)[1], low traffic, quiet streets, and mostly single family residential homes. What it doesn't have is low density suburbs (everyplace is medium density), mandatory free parking, or a street grid that serves much car traffic.<p>There are eight first world cities over 10MM people and their housing to income ratios roughly run like this:<p>(Middle class people can easily buy homes)
Osaka/Kyoto
Seoul 
Mexico City 
Tokyo
(Things start to get really expensive)
Paris
Los Angeles
London
New York
(Insanely expensive)<p>Japanese zoning has a lot to be proud of. If Nagoya were a smidgen larger, Japan would dominate the liveable and affordable part of the list even more.<p>[0]<a href="http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/japan-shows-the-way-to-affordable-megacities" rel="nofollow">http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/japan-shows-the-way-to-affor...</a><p>[1] SF is about 70/ha incl. parks, Manhattan 260/ha, Paris (20 arrondissements) 210/ha