3 ms·

So what's stopping the Bay Area from growing out onto uninhabited land instead of trying to pack the existing areas even more densely?

cobbzilla 9y ago
The uninhabited land you speak of is: * mountains: expensive to build on, definitely not a good place for affordable housing * water: in the past 100+ years there has been substantial build-out onto the Bay. Any further encroachments are met with stiff resistance. * far: to get past the above 2 difficulties, you're looking at an hour+ to get to SF. Things are (relatively) affordable in Sacramento, if you're willing to deal with that commute. It's a beautiful but cursed geography, this SF Bay area. And then there's this, from the article: "Neighborhoods in which single-family homes make up 90 percent of the housing stock account for a little over half the land mass in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles metropolitan areas", so there is an understandable urge to increase density in some of those SFH areas.
stevenwoo 9y ago
A large percentage of the remaining open space in the peninsula at least is either state / county park land / public park land ala Midpeninsula Open Space or Santa Clara Water/San Francisco Water District land like Crystal Springs Reservoir.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Sprawl itself is a significant part of the problem. The traffic jams for Bay Area traffic extend to Sacramento, Stockton, and even Modesto. To the north and south: Santa Rosa/Windsor, and Gilroy. During the 1990s and 2000s building booms, housing was built in Solano County, Sacramento, and San Joaquin counties, as well as along the delta (Antioch, Pittsburg) and along the Livermore/580 corridor. Those are now hellish commutes, most in toward the urban core. See this Google Maps view, roughly 100km on an edge: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z And even that cuts off Sacramento, which does see a fair bit of commuting to the Bay Area. Compare a roughly similar region around London: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z Google Maps doesn't show you densities, but through much of the SF Bay Area those are low. Going from SFD simply to duplexes would be a huge progress. Multi-storey rather than single-storey dwellings. Denser localised urban cores rather than spread-out development in the various cities throughout the region. This is before considering the suitability (or lack) of undeveloped lands to development.

cobbzilla 9y ago

The uninhabited land you speak of is: * mountains: expensive to build on, definitely not a good place for affordable housing * water: in the past 100+ years there has been substantial build-out onto the Bay. Any further encroachments are met with stiff resistance. * far: to get past the above 2 difficulties, you're looking at an hour+ to get to SF. Things are (relatively) affordable in Sacramento, if you're willing to deal with that commute. It's a beautiful but cursed geography, this SF Bay area. And then there's this, from the article: "Neighborhoods in which single-family homes make up 90 percent of the housing stock account for a little over half the land mass in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles metropolitan areas", so there is an understandable urge to increase density in some of those SFH areas.

stevenwoo 9y ago

A large percentage of the remaining open space in the peninsula at least is either state / county park land / public park land ala Midpeninsula Open Space or Santa Clara Water/San Francisco Water District land like Crystal Springs Reservoir.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Sprawl itself is a significant part of the problem. The traffic jams for Bay Area traffic extend to Sacramento, Stockton, and even Modesto. To the north and south: Santa Rosa/Windsor, and Gilroy. During the 1990s and 2000s building booms, housing was built in Solano County, Sacramento, and San Joaquin counties, as well as along the delta (Antioch, Pittsburg) and along the Livermore/580 corridor. Those are now hellish commutes, most in toward the urban core. See this Google Maps view, roughly 100km on an edge: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z And even that cuts off Sacramento, which does see a fair bit of commuting to the Bay Area. Compare a roughly similar region around London: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z Google Maps doesn't show you densities, but through much of the SF Bay Area those are low. Going from SFD simply to duplexes would be a huge progress. Multi-storey rather than single-storey dwellings. Denser localised urban cores rather than spread-out development in the various cities throughout the region. This is before considering the suitability (or lack) of undeveloped lands to development.