{"id":611,"date":"2007-10-20T00:40:13","date_gmt":"2007-10-19T15:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-10-20\/611"},"modified":"2007-10-20T00:40:13","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T15:40:13","slug":"boxed-in-new-house-and-parking-lot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-10-20\/611","title":{"rendered":"Boxed In: New House and Parking Lot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f\/2.8 @ 28mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>320 sec, f\/8, ISO 500 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\n(Insert Your Caption Here<\/span>)<\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n

This is a new house a short distance from my place that I marvel<\/span> at\nevery time I go<\/span> by, for any number of reasons.<\/p>\n\n

You can see the shape of the previous building that was on the site by\nthe roofline-marks left on the walls of the adjacent buildings. It's not uncommon<\/span> for buildings to attach that way, which I can't<\/span> understand because\nif I<\/i> had a building,<\/span> I couldn't<\/span> imagine liking someone attaching to\nit.<\/p>\n\n

In looking at the parking lot in front of the house, I can make<\/span> a guess<\/span>\nas to what's going on (but it's only a guess<\/span>): the land owner might have\nbeen limited by zoning in how much of the land could be covered by a\nbuilding,<\/span> and so rather than waste the uncovered space with a useless<\/span>\ngarden or an ugly tree, he turned it into a pay<\/span>-by-the-hour parking lot\n(that can hold three whole cars!) to try to offset his fantastically huge\nmortgage.<\/p>\n\n

That's my guess, but I'm not wholly confident in it because it's a major<\/span>\nbusiness area, so I'd expect zoning to allow 100% building coverage (as the\nbuildings on either side are doing). So, it may well be that the limitation\nthe land-owner faced was in the finances to build a bigger<\/span> house, and so\nfaced with a smaller<\/span> house, he decided to put the rest of the land to\nfinancially-productive use.<\/p>\n\n

Or, it could have been.... well, this is Japan, so probably anything.<\/p>\n\n

When I took this photo, the parking lot stuff had just been installed\nand wasn't yet working, which is why the spots are coned off.<\/p>\n\n

These kind of short-term parking lots are extremely common. I've seen\nthem as small as two spots, and as large as 20 or 30. They're generally\ncalled “100-yen parking” because prices are usually quoted in how many\nminutes 100 yen will get you. The spots<\/span> in this picture will go for 100 yen\nper 20 minutes (a rate<\/span> of US$2.60\/hour) during the day, and 100 yen\/hour\nduring the night.<\/p>\n\n

(More commonly these days, rather than 100 yen for 15 minutes, they'll\ndo 200 yen for half an hour, which means they get double the money for a\nquick<\/span> five-minute stop.)<\/p>\n\n

The spots have sensors, and a minute or two after a car<\/span> pulls in, a big<\/span>\nplate moves up to block the tires from leaving until the spot is paid for. The ones here<\/span> are orange.<\/p>\n\n

Another interesting tidbit is that because the path from the road to the\nfront door of the house takes away a tiny<\/span> corner of the parking lot, the\nrightmost space had to be shortened, and is marked “compact.” The price is\nthe same, though.<\/p>\n\n

So, how would you caption this photo? Certainly, anything you come up\nwith will be more witty than what I could<\/span> scrounge up....<\/p>\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a new house a short distance from my place that I marvel at every time I go by, for any number of reasons.<\/p>

You can see the shape of the previous building that was on the site by the roofline-marks left on the walls of the adjacent buildings. It's not uncommon for buildings to attach that way, which I can't understand because if I had a building, I couldn't imagine liking someone attaching to it.<\/p>

In looking at the parking lot in front of the house, I can make a guess as to what's going on (but it's [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}