15 ms·

It's hard to overstate the impact this is going to have on San Francisco, long-term. As Technology becomes the most important industry in America, a well-govern

by whack 11y ago

It's hard to overstate the impact this is going to have on San Francisco, long-term. As Technology becomes the most important industry in America, a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to disperse to other mini-hubs, due to lack of capacity in San Francisco. 20 years on, San Francisco could have become what New York City is today. One of the top 5 cities in the world, and the undisputed hub where all of technology resides. Instead, it's on track to be just another major city, in the same league as countless others like Chicago/Seattle/Boston.

jjtheblunt 11y ago
That's implausible: San Francisco is overbuilt to the extent that green areas are sparse, though those which exist are decent, rather than distributed throughout the city. That contrasts in the extreme with the other cities you mentioned, and matters to many people.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  You don't need to build on any green areas to double the housing capacity of SF. Compared to actual dense cities in the world, SF is nearly empty.
- woah 11y ago
  The majority of SF is two story suburbs (and as the song goes, they are made out of ticky-tacky). Height wise, it is underbuilt, and that's why SF has such a low population density despite every piece of land being covered in these rickety little bungalows. The bungalow owners fight tooth and nail against denser multistory construction because they realize that the housing crunch is the only possible way that their shacks can have such high prices.
- thedufer 11y ago
  SF has 1/4 of the population density of Manhattan, the city it is often compared to, and about 1/6 of the densest city in the world (Manila in the Philippines). I wonder where all those extra people are being put if SF has capped out?
lettergram 11y ago
I have to say... I'm already nervous in my 3 story building when there is a earthquake. I'd be even more nervous around buildings, when I know the ground is basically sand.
- polytap 11y ago
  Taller, flexible buildings are much better at distributing shock waves.
  - scurvy 11y ago
    Right, but you can't build those everywhere. There are chunks of the city that are landfill (old ships, gravestones, etc) which are seismically unfit to hold a large building, even with pilings. As a kid, my wife grew up always wanting to live in the Marina. Now, you couldn't pay her to spend a night there because of the landfill.
- asfakeaccount 11y ago
  Modern mid rise and skyscrapers are actually safer in earthquakes than the Victoria homes of San Francisco. If our housing consisted of modern housing our city would suffer way less damages than what will happen today if the big one hits.
  - davidw 11y ago
    For evidence of this, just look at where all the damage was during the '89 earthquake: the Marina district, not the skyscrapers.
  - geebee 11y ago
    The french quarter in new orleans is also probably less safe than modern buildings, but I wouldn't want to see it torn down just because rents would be cheaper. SF does need to build, badly, but I'm wary of the term NIMBY-ism. It is descriptive, but I think it invites false equivalence. There are degrees of NIMBY. I actually think that some of the burbs, like walnut creek or mountain view (especially the latter) have engaged in genuinely shocking levels of refusal to build housing. Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business. There's NIMBYism, and then there's actually generating the problems that you push out to other neighborhoods. I'm always a little bummed to read statements by people who, probably out of frustration that I largely share, start to disparage SF's architectural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely possible to grow, dramatically, without tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.
ghaff 11y ago
Why is extreme population and industry concentration such a great thing? Yes, there are certain virtues to the concentration of talent and energy which happens in major cities generally--but I'm unconvinced that doing some Singapore-style 20-year plan to transform San Francisco into a western Manhattan is either necessary or desirable.
- adamnemecek 11y ago
  Technological mecca would translate into a technological hegemony, even larger than today.
- freyr 11y ago
  It's not necessarily great. But for a variety of reasons, the momentum has been in SF's favor as the world's dominant technology hub. We might wonder what will happen this momentum is deflected. Technical talent will disperse, and we'll end up with a more distributed workforce? Or will it simply concentrate somewhere else? Right now, the Bay Area is in an extremely enviable position: it has a high concentration of extremely profitable companies; it has a high concentration of highly skilled workers; it has a high concentration of wealth; and, except for housing, it's a desirable place to live. The Bay Area's residents and local governments oshould be able to leverage these positive factors to maintain the strong economy while making the area a better place to live for skilled workers who want to set down roots and raise families. Of course, it's more likely that nothing will happen and living conditions will become less and less sustainable.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    Or a thousand seeds will be scattered to bloom in "out of the way places," creating employment and value for towns and cities all over the world. Of course, that might not be in the Bay Area's interest but they seem to be voting firmly against it already.
  - timr 11y ago
    "But for a variety of reasons, the momentum has been in SF's favor as the world's dominant technology hub." I know this is ancient history, but I keep having to remind folks that the fetish for locating tech companies in SF didn't start until the late 1990s. Then it crashed, and didn't pick up again until the mid/late 'aughts. Viewed dispassionately, the "momentum" of SF as a technology hub looks more like a fad that happens at the peak of VC consumer investment cycles.
Apocryphon 11y ago
One of the problems is the lack of city governments and wealthy homeowners here to think beyond just SF. The Bay Area as a whole, from San Francisco to Oakland to San Jose, should work together to solve the housing and infrastructural issues we have here. It's not even just SF that needs to build. The entire Bay needs to pitch in, from San Jose to Novato. (https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/zprpe/the_actual_original_bart_planned_routes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/zprpe/the_actual_o...)
- physcab 11y ago
  This is true. My sister is a civil engineer on the SMART train - supposed to have been light rail from Fishermans Wharf all the way to Santa Rosa. The Golden Gate Bridge actually has a railway line below it that hasn't been used. But the train will only go to Larkspur ferry because Marin disallowed it.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Even then, it's not going to make it to Larkspur until later, phase 1 only makes it to downtown San Rafael (but there's supposed to be a free bus from there to take you to the ferry). As someone who lives in Santa Rosa, having something that connected directly to SF or BART from up here would be awesome (even if not really feasible). My brother lives here as well and he commutes to the Embarcadero for work. I'm not jealous, I already have no time. An extended commute would be the end of me.
    - rconti 11y ago
      From Santa Rosa? That's, like, Morgan Hill to SF commute levels of craziness.
      - kbenson 11y ago
        Yeah, about the same total distance, but I think there's generally less traffic coming from the north. In any case, he just has to make it to Larkspur, as the ferry takes him directly to work. Needless to say, he's eagerly awaiting the SMART train.
timr 11y ago
"a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to disperse to other mini-hubs, due to lack of capacity in San Francisco." ...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s. It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea. I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.
- ebiester 11y ago
  I've thought about that, but as far as I can tell, it means about $10-$15k of equipment and a dedicated work room. I need a mobile-connected "smart" whiteboard for every team member, a good microphone, webcam, speakers, a separate computer + monitor devoted to video conferencing, and a team that is geographically dispersed rather than partially-colocated. ...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.
  - timr 11y ago
    I'm not suggesting that you have to have a distributed team -- though, you certainly can, and $10-$15k is trivial compared to the economic penalty of hiring good engineers in SF. I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.
aetherson 11y ago
The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy. I see people making that claim all the time, and it's madness, guys. Even if literally every density-increasing project was rubber-stamped with zero money or time cost, how many housing units do you think that this city could possibly have added in the last fifteen years? Unless you're proposing eminent-domaining people out of their houses to be handed over to for-profit developers (and man, that's a mess, and it's still super-expensive), you aren't going to be replacing too many blocks of two-storey homes with high rises, and you're also quickly going to saturate the ability of local developers to build out giant skyscraper projects -- like, how much slack do you think that there possibly was in the construction industry? And as soon as we step away from literally insane levels of accommodation to a pattern of in-fill development and recognize that, rightly or wrongly, in-fill development is not wildly popular and you can't just strong-arm an entire city into an unpopular policy, the realistic amount of new development that you could get in SF is, you know, maybe twice as much development as we actually did get. Which might've shaved 5% off the rents or so.
- hindsightbias 11y ago
  The mayors office or some development chief said it would take 100K units to make a dent. That was late 2014 I think. We all know those would be luxury units, but it would add 20K below-market, so there's that. As always, I stand ready to let them bring a bulldozer to their favorite Mission block as long as I can bring one to Palo Alto and Atherton. For some reason, people just see that as a cray-cray demand...
- grillvogel 11y ago
  >The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy. this meme has reached seattle as well.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  In a system where it's easy to build new housing, you don't need eminent domain. The developer simply buys two-storey homes for much more than they're worth as houses. You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.
nunez 11y ago
> and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. Nah. Manhattan is a really, really expensive (not as expensive as SF, though, on the average) city to live in. SF rents would have dropped, but not enough to cover the influx of people coming in. Rent prices probably would've dropped in other areas of the Bay though.
- morgante 11y ago
  Manhattan also has a lot more demand and benefits than SF. NYC also offers plenty of compelling options in other boroughs that are simultaneously cheaper and more convenient than their SF equivalents.
tryitnow 11y ago
If high-rise development solved the problem of high rents, then why is Manhatten so expensive? Thought experiment: Let's say we do massive high density development in SF. A bunch of people move in, but now that SF is denser it's more desirable, so demand has increased as well, which drives rents right back up. Now we're stuck where we were before: high rents. Having said that, I still support high density development because I think it leads to better living (and is better for the environment usually). I just am not optimistic that it will actually lower rents.
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  The trick isn't to simply build up SF. Build up Oakland. Build up San Jose- have you seen our downtown? Build up on the Peninsula- (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555). Build it up so the Bay becomes a true tri-city area, then a city of its own, from Santa Rosa to Hollister.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Manhattan has twice the people in half the space, and costs less.
- astrodust 11y ago
  Just imagine how ludicrous rents in Manhattan would be if the buildings were all 50% their current height.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Prices depend on two things: Supply and Demand. When you ask why Manhattan is expensive even with increased supply, you ignore demand. The theory that increased density in itself drives up the value of housing is popular among anti-housing activists. I've never heard an economist who believes it. If true, it would be an incredibly simple way to generate enormous amounts of money to simply building super dense neighborhoods. Since I don't see anyone getting rich off that, I have strong doubts about that model.
- vkou 11y ago
  Why would people move in just because you built a whole bunch of housing? There's an entire rust belt standing half-empty. People don't move to where they can find expensive housing - people move to where they can find good jobs. Doubling SF housing wouldn't double the number of good jobs there. Thought experiment: What do you think doubling the number of high paying jobs do to SF rent? Or, alternatively, halving the available housing?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jazzyk 11y ago
Boston is not "just another city..." It is possibly the best educated metropolitan area in the world. "Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average." http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html
- ghaff 11y ago
  Oh, but it's not the center for social/mobile/web companies so it isn't really tech that matters ;-)
astrodust 11y ago
> 20 years on, San Francisco could have become what New York City is today. Hilarious. No. Absolutely not. To even compare the cities on this level is an insult to what New York is and how it came about. San Francisco is a dinky little town compared to New York, the population is comfortably under a million people. It will take another hundred years of perfect planning and growth to catch up to where NYC is today.
BurningFrog 11y ago
Instead SF has chosen to make it's existing home owners and landlords very rich. Democracy in action!
awqrre 11y ago
luckily, software doesn't need to be all in one area...
carsongross 11y ago
Why in God's name would San Francisco want to become New York? I am a fan of neither, but they are completely different cities.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
It's not enough to build housing. You also need infrastructure (roads, pipes, electricity, etc). You can't scale an already-built city like SF, also very prone to earthquakes, at this speed. Your proposal has no realistic basis.

by whack 11y ago

jjtheblunt 11y ago

That's implausible: San Francisco is overbuilt to the extent that green areas are sparse, though those which exist are decent, rather than distributed throughout the city. That contrasts in the extreme with the other cities you mentioned, and matters to many people.

BurningFrog 11y ago
You don't need to build on any green areas to double the housing capacity of SF. Compared to actual dense cities in the world, SF is nearly empty.
woah 11y ago
The majority of SF is two story suburbs (and as the song goes, they are made out of ticky-tacky). Height wise, it is underbuilt, and that's why SF has such a low population density despite every piece of land being covered in these rickety little bungalows. The bungalow owners fight tooth and nail against denser multistory construction because they realize that the housing crunch is the only possible way that their shacks can have such high prices.
thedufer 11y ago
SF has 1/4 of the population density of Manhattan, the city it is often compared to, and about 1/6 of the densest city in the world (Manila in the Philippines). I wonder where all those extra people are being put if SF has capped out?

lettergram 11y ago

I have to say... I'm already nervous in my 3 story building when there is a earthquake. I'd be even more nervous around buildings, when I know the ground is basically sand.

polytap 11y ago
Taller, flexible buildings are much better at distributing shock waves.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Right, but you can't build those everywhere. There are chunks of the city that are landfill (old ships, gravestones, etc) which are seismically unfit to hold a large building, even with pilings. As a kid, my wife grew up always wanting to live in the Marina. Now, you couldn't pay her to spend a night there because of the landfill.
asfakeaccount 11y ago
Modern mid rise and skyscrapers are actually safer in earthquakes than the Victoria homes of San Francisco. If our housing consisted of modern housing our city would suffer way less damages than what will happen today if the big one hits.
- davidw 11y ago
  For evidence of this, just look at where all the damage was during the '89 earthquake: the Marina district, not the skyscrapers.
- geebee 11y ago
  The french quarter in new orleans is also probably less safe than modern buildings, but I wouldn't want to see it torn down just because rents would be cheaper. SF does need to build, badly, but I'm wary of the term NIMBY-ism. It is descriptive, but I think it invites false equivalence. There are degrees of NIMBY. I actually think that some of the burbs, like walnut creek or mountain view (especially the latter) have engaged in genuinely shocking levels of refusal to build housing. Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business. There's NIMBYism, and then there's actually generating the problems that you push out to other neighborhoods. I'm always a little bummed to read statements by people who, probably out of frustration that I largely share, start to disparage SF's architectural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely possible to grow, dramatically, without tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.

ghaff 11y ago

Why is extreme population and industry concentration such a great thing? Yes, there are certain virtues to the concentration of talent and energy which happens in major cities generally--but I'm unconvinced that doing some Singapore-style 20-year plan to transform San Francisco into a western Manhattan is either necessary or desirable.

adamnemecek 11y ago
Technological mecca would translate into a technological hegemony, even larger than today.
freyr 11y ago
It's not necessarily great. But for a variety of reasons, the momentum has been in SF's favor as the world's dominant technology hub. We might wonder what will happen this momentum is deflected. Technical talent will disperse, and we'll end up with a more distributed workforce? Or will it simply concentrate somewhere else? Right now, the Bay Area is in an extremely enviable position: it has a high concentration of extremely profitable companies; it has a high concentration of highly skilled workers; it has a high concentration of wealth; and, except for housing, it's a desirable place to live. The Bay Area's residents and local governments oshould be able to leverage these positive factors to maintain the strong economy while making the area a better place to live for skilled workers who want to set down roots and raise families. Of course, it's more likely that nothing will happen and living conditions will become less and less sustainable.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  Or a thousand seeds will be scattered to bloom in "out of the way places," creating employment and value for towns and cities all over the world. Of course, that might not be in the Bay Area's interest but they seem to be voting firmly against it already.
- timr 11y ago
  "But for a variety of reasons, the momentum has been in SF's favor as the world's dominant technology hub." I know this is ancient history, but I keep having to remind folks that the fetish for locating tech companies in SF didn't start until the late 1990s. Then it crashed, and didn't pick up again until the mid/late 'aughts. Viewed dispassionately, the "momentum" of SF as a technology hub looks more like a fad that happens at the peak of VC consumer investment cycles.

Apocryphon 11y ago

One of the problems is the lack of city governments and wealthy homeowners here to think beyond just SF. The Bay Area as a whole, from San Francisco to Oakland to San Jose, should work together to solve the housing and infrastructural issues we have here. It's not even just SF that needs to build. The entire Bay needs to pitch in, from San Jose to Novato. (https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/zprpe/the_actual_original_bart_planned_routes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/zprpe/the_actual_o...)

physcab 11y ago
This is true. My sister is a civil engineer on the SMART train - supposed to have been light rail from Fishermans Wharf all the way to Santa Rosa. The Golden Gate Bridge actually has a railway line below it that hasn't been used. But the train will only go to Larkspur ferry because Marin disallowed it.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Even then, it's not going to make it to Larkspur until later, phase 1 only makes it to downtown San Rafael (but there's supposed to be a free bus from there to take you to the ferry). As someone who lives in Santa Rosa, having something that connected directly to SF or BART from up here would be awesome (even if not really feasible). My brother lives here as well and he commutes to the Embarcadero for work. I'm not jealous, I already have no time. An extended commute would be the end of me.
  - rconti 11y ago
    From Santa Rosa? That's, like, Morgan Hill to SF commute levels of craziness.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      Yeah, about the same total distance, but I think there's generally less traffic coming from the north. In any case, he just has to make it to Larkspur, as the ferry takes him directly to work. Needless to say, he's eagerly awaiting the SMART train.

timr 11y ago

"a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to disperse to other mini-hubs, due to lack of capacity in San Francisco." ...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s. It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea. I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.

ebiester 11y ago
I've thought about that, but as far as I can tell, it means about $10-$15k of equipment and a dedicated work room. I need a mobile-connected "smart" whiteboard for every team member, a good microphone, webcam, speakers, a separate computer + monitor devoted to video conferencing, and a team that is geographically dispersed rather than partially-colocated. ...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.
- timr 11y ago
  I'm not suggesting that you have to have a distributed team -- though, you certainly can, and $10-$15k is trivial compared to the economic penalty of hiring good engineers in SF. I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.

aetherson 11y ago

The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy. I see people making that claim all the time, and it's madness, guys. Even if literally every density-increasing project was rubber-stamped with zero money or time cost, how many housing units do you think that this city could possibly have added in the last fifteen years? Unless you're proposing eminent-domaining people out of their houses to be handed over to for-profit developers (and man, that's a mess, and it's still super-expensive), you aren't going to be replacing too many blocks of two-storey homes with high rises, and you're also quickly going to saturate the ability of local developers to build out giant skyscraper projects -- like, how much slack do you think that there possibly was in the construction industry? And as soon as we step away from literally insane levels of accommodation to a pattern of in-fill development and recognize that, rightly or wrongly, in-fill development is not wildly popular and you can't just strong-arm an entire city into an unpopular policy, the realistic amount of new development that you could get in SF is, you know, maybe twice as much development as we actually did get. Which might've shaved 5% off the rents or so.

hindsightbias 11y ago
The mayors office or some development chief said it would take 100K units to make a dent. That was late 2014 I think. We all know those would be luxury units, but it would add 20K below-market, so there's that. As always, I stand ready to let them bring a bulldozer to their favorite Mission block as long as I can bring one to Palo Alto and Atherton. For some reason, people just see that as a cray-cray demand...
grillvogel 11y ago
>The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy. this meme has reached seattle as well.
BurningFrog 11y ago
In a system where it's easy to build new housing, you don't need eminent domain. The developer simply buys two-storey homes for much more than they're worth as houses. You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.

nunez 11y ago

> and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. Nah. Manhattan is a really, really expensive (not as expensive as SF, though, on the average) city to live in. SF rents would have dropped, but not enough to cover the influx of people coming in. Rent prices probably would've dropped in other areas of the Bay though.

morgante 11y ago
Manhattan also has a lot more demand and benefits than SF. NYC also offers plenty of compelling options in other boroughs that are simultaneously cheaper and more convenient than their SF equivalents.

tryitnow 11y ago

If high-rise development solved the problem of high rents, then why is Manhatten so expensive? Thought experiment: Let's say we do massive high density development in SF. A bunch of people move in, but now that SF is denser it's more desirable, so demand has increased as well, which drives rents right back up. Now we're stuck where we were before: high rents. Having said that, I still support high density development because I think it leads to better living (and is better for the environment usually). I just am not optimistic that it will actually lower rents.

Apocryphon 11y ago
The trick isn't to simply build up SF. Build up Oakland. Build up San Jose- have you seen our downtown? Build up on the Peninsula- (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555). Build it up so the Bay becomes a true tri-city area, then a city of its own, from Santa Rosa to Hollister.
rayiner 11y ago
Manhattan has twice the people in half the space, and costs less.
astrodust 11y ago
Just imagine how ludicrous rents in Manhattan would be if the buildings were all 50% their current height.
BurningFrog 11y ago
Prices depend on two things: Supply and Demand. When you ask why Manhattan is expensive even with increased supply, you ignore demand. The theory that increased density in itself drives up the value of housing is popular among anti-housing activists. I've never heard an economist who believes it. If true, it would be an incredibly simple way to generate enormous amounts of money to simply building super dense neighborhoods. Since I don't see anyone getting rich off that, I have strong doubts about that model.
vkou 11y ago
Why would people move in just because you built a whole bunch of housing? There's an entire rust belt standing half-empty. People don't move to where they can find expensive housing - people move to where they can find good jobs. Doubling SF housing wouldn't double the number of good jobs there. Thought experiment: What do you think doubling the number of high paying jobs do to SF rent? Or, alternatively, halving the available housing?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jazzyk 11y ago

Boston is not "just another city..." It is possibly the best educated metropolitan area in the world. "Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average." http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html

ghaff 11y ago
Oh, but it's not the center for social/mobile/web companies so it isn't really tech that matters ;-)

astrodust 11y ago

> 20 years on, San Francisco could have become what New York City is today. Hilarious. No. Absolutely not. To even compare the cities on this level is an insult to what New York is and how it came about. San Francisco is a dinky little town compared to New York, the population is comfortably under a million people. It will take another hundred years of perfect planning and growth to catch up to where NYC is today.

BurningFrog 11y ago

Instead SF has chosen to make it's existing home owners and landlords very rich. Democracy in action!

awqrre 11y ago

luckily, software doesn't need to be all in one area...

carsongross 11y ago

Why in God's name would San Francisco want to become New York? I am a fan of neither, but they are completely different cities.

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

It's not enough to build housing. You also need infrastructure (roads, pipes, electricity, etc). You can't scale an already-built city like SF, also very prone to earthquakes, at this speed. Your proposal has no realistic basis.