Manhattan has twice the people with half the land area, on an island. ...that is tightly connected to 10 times that land area as the boroughs of New York City.

Manhattan has twice the people with half the land area, on an island. ...that is tightly connected to 10 times that land area as the boroughs of New York City. Everybody leaves that part out. It's more convenient to live in Queens and commute to Manhattan than it is to live in the Outer Richmond and commute to SOMA. This matters, because the part of San Francisco that people conventionally see as "San Francisco" in has little overlap with the parts of the city that are actually low density. The city north of Market and east of Divisadero is fairly high-density development, by any standard: most buildings are at least six stories, and often taller than that. But to make the other 2/3rds of San Francisco viable as high-density development, you'd need to build a ton of new mass transit. It's car country over there. There's immense hypocrisy on both sides of this discussion. I think height limits in SOMA and the Financial district and Mission Bay should be higher. But it's hard to stomach density criticisms from people who want to live in cute, victorian, single-family housing in Noe valley themselves, and re-develop the places where poor brown people live. And that's happening a lot around here.