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This is how SF-style housing crises are made. When you force everyone to be very geographically close to their place of employment, it has the dual effects of

This is how SF-style housing crises are made. When you force everyone to be very geographically close to their place of employment, it has the dual effects of reducing the effective supply of available housing options, while simultaneously increasing demand for housing in a very specific geographic area. If you look at the cities that have done this, both in the US and abroad, you will notice that their rents are typically astronomical.

vertex-four 9y ago
SF has the issue that certain popular types of work are only available in SF, and if someone wants to be in that type of work, they have very few options for where to live. More, smaller cities - or even large cities with multiple “city centres” - and an approach which attempts to ensure that the SF centralisation of the consumer tech industry couldn’t be a thing, would be the solution, surely, if you decided to design from top-down?
- chroem- 9y ago
  No, the point is that the Bay Area is too congested (and to some extent intentionally congested) to allow for an appreciable amount of commuting. One person's sprawl is another person's affordable housing.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    The point is that the Bay Area is essentially the unique place where you have to work if you want to work in the consumer tech industry on things that make newspaper headlines. The point is that if people could work on that in more places, the problem of wanting to commute to a specific area wouldn't exist.
    - chroem- 9y ago
      While that may be true, it's also passing the buck since there are a lot of economically productive cities where commuting is practical and rents are cheap.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        Honestly speaking - the concept of nearly every person in America commuting by car into work, home, and then having to get back in the car to go to any sort of entertainment, is something to solve on its own. "Let's have people commuting more into SF so we can keep building suburbs empty of anything to do" seems a bizarre solution to the problem of SF being a hotspot for work. American commutes are getting longer every year as it is, and hour-long commutes by car are becoming more and more of a thing for more and more people. And this might be on top of a school run before work! In the affordable housing I've lived in, we had malls, parks, cinemas, skate parks, all within walking distance. Pedestrian bridges over any busy roads so you could take your young children everywhere they'd need to go without hopping in a car. The result of the social housing boom of the last century in the UK. Work might be somewhere else, but you'd take a bus or a train there, depending on what city you live in. It's unlikely that there'd be staff parking where you work, anyway, unless you worked at an office on the edge of town, even if you had space for a car at home.
CPLX 9y ago
The problem with San Francisco is that it's pathologically unable to build apartment buildings.
- chroem- 9y ago
  But that wouldn't be an issue if you could just commute from somewhere else.
X6S1x6Okd1st 9y ago
That's also how NYC-style housing crises are made, they have 27k people per square mile.

vertex-four 9y ago

SF has the issue that certain popular types of work are only available in SF, and if someone wants to be in that type of work, they have very few options for where to live. More, smaller cities - or even large cities with multiple “city centres” - and an approach which attempts to ensure that the SF centralisation of the consumer tech industry couldn’t be a thing, would be the solution, surely, if you decided to design from top-down?

chroem- 9y ago
No, the point is that the Bay Area is too congested (and to some extent intentionally congested) to allow for an appreciable amount of commuting. One person's sprawl is another person's affordable housing.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  The point is that the Bay Area is essentially the unique place where you have to work if you want to work in the consumer tech industry on things that make newspaper headlines. The point is that if people could work on that in more places, the problem of wanting to commute to a specific area wouldn't exist.
  - chroem- 9y ago
    While that may be true, it's also passing the buck since there are a lot of economically productive cities where commuting is practical and rents are cheap.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Honestly speaking - the concept of nearly every person in America commuting by car into work, home, and then having to get back in the car to go to any sort of entertainment, is something to solve on its own. "Let's have people commuting more into SF so we can keep building suburbs empty of anything to do" seems a bizarre solution to the problem of SF being a hotspot for work. American commutes are getting longer every year as it is, and hour-long commutes by car are becoming more and more of a thing for more and more people. And this might be on top of a school run before work! In the affordable housing I've lived in, we had malls, parks, cinemas, skate parks, all within walking distance. Pedestrian bridges over any busy roads so you could take your young children everywhere they'd need to go without hopping in a car. The result of the social housing boom of the last century in the UK. Work might be somewhere else, but you'd take a bus or a train there, depending on what city you live in. It's unlikely that there'd be staff parking where you work, anyway, unless you worked at an office on the edge of town, even if you had space for a car at home.

CPLX 9y ago

The problem with San Francisco is that it's pathologically unable to build apartment buildings.

chroem- 9y ago
But that wouldn't be an issue if you could just commute from somewhere else.

X6S1x6Okd1st 9y ago

That's also how NYC-style housing crises are made, they have 27k people per square mile.