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Not the crux of the article, but: > This doesn't mean that they, or the even higher-cost, more congested coastal metros, will adopt Manhattan or Tokyo-style de

Not the crux of the article, but: > This doesn't mean that they, or the even higher-cost, more congested coastal metros, will adopt Manhattan or Tokyo-style density and transit patterns. Instead, Austin and San Antonio might be the new Houston and Dallas. My goodness, can we /please/ stop this false dichotomy that a city either has to be a Tokyo megalopolis or a suburban sprawlfest? I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan, even though that seems to be what everyone is scared of. Clearly the OP has never left the US. Average density in Paris: ~6 stories. Barcelona: ~4 stories. Most cities in Germany: 3-5 stories. Moscow: maybe 6-7 stories. Maybe those aren't perfect by a story or two, but point being, there IS a sustainable growth model, and it's a lot more than SF and LA's paltry 2 story average height, and certainly less than the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan that everyone is so scared of. You only have to look across the ocean to see it, and until the US realizes this, Boise et al. will just become another congested, sprawling, expensive suburb with an increasingly poor quality of life. If you want to live in the not-countryside, then density is the only sustainable model. EDIT: And to respond to what I think the crux of the article actually is, that we'll never invest in sustainable urban planning because there will always be another inexpensive 100k population town that we can ruin instead, well that sure is a losing attitude. There probably is some truth there, and it makes me sad. Sure, it'll take a while for the coasts to get their act together, but let's continue to promote a vision of what a viable and sustainable solution looks like for America's cities. Any comparisons with Tokyo or the next Manhattan is just furthering a destructive narrative which, for the record, is what got San Francisco in this mess in the 1980s in the first place.

pm90 8y ago
I don't see what stops cities from planning keeping some kind of growth in mind though. Rail, Bus systems are expensive but how about changing building codes to make it easier to build higher density near the downtown areas of these cities? And then maybe acquire land (at least) for a future mass transit option (monorail, subway etc.). For Gods sake don't be like Austin, which totally ignored the problem and is now scrambling to get it together with some very very expensive options (likely to be even more expensive in the future).
rayiner 8y ago
Tokyo is also not particularly congested.
- aclimatt 8y ago
  It's really not. It's actually a surprisingly livable and automobile traffic-free city for being literally the largest in the world. (Obviously the train system plays a huge role in that.)
- indemnity 8y ago
  Nor is it particularly high rise outside of the center, it’s surprisingly sprawl-like as well.
  - golemiprague 8y ago
    The good thing about Tokyo is that they let people build whatever they want and somehow it works, there are congested areas and not so congested areas and in between areas and non consistent areas, they just have it all and people can choose where they want to live.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    On the plus side, it's sprawl with train and subway stations, and plenty of buses and taxis.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    Well, the metro population is ~40 million. But even then, most of the "sprawl" is still very dense by American standards, a lot of the suburban areas have comparable population density to Boston or SF.
- anabis 8y ago
  Most people commute by train. We are improving, but the morning commute is something foreigners consider particularly wacky, and not something that they want to repeat everyday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ
ryanworl 8y ago
People who are worried about turning San Francisco into Manhattan also don't know what Manhattan is even like! The Upper West & Upper East Side as well as Harlem do not look anything like e.g. the Financial District. Even within Manhattan there is a huge variety of building heights. I used to live in Yorkville in a six story building in an area filled with other six story (and smaller) buildings. We had a nice park with a public pool, multiple schools with kids running around in the afternoons, and some people even owned cars. It was an actual community, not some caricature of what people think living in Manhattan is like.
- rcpt 8y ago
  John Jay park is so nice. I miss being able to take the kids there anytime of day and have tons of friends to play with. Here on the West Coast the playgrounds are all dry, hot, boring, and empty.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, how much is rent per square foot?
  - ryanworl 8y ago
    I shared a ~650 sq ft 2bd/1br. It was $2650. That was probably below median for the area by a little.
    - humanrebar 8y ago
      By more than a little. The Q line helped Yorkville catch up to the rest of the UES, rent-wise.
- dionidium 8y ago
  Even Hell's Kitchen, where I live, is still primarily composed of 5- and 6-story walk-ups.
neom 8y ago
It sounds like you would benefit greatly from reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - it provides a solid foundation for understanding urban economics.
closeparen 8y ago
Is Manhattan considered a mistake? I ask because, despite being one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere. Am I missing an unspoken “never again” moment? Is everyone who travels to New York doing it to revel in their hatred of the place? There’s not nearly enough Manhattan to meet the demand to live in such a place, and I fail to see why we shouldn’t make more of it. San Francisco’s economic power and landlocked geometry seem ideal for doing so.
- _delirium 8y ago
  I don't think NYC is seen as a bad model everywhere. There are plenty of medium-sized cities that are trying to conjure up a high-rise downtown with condo buildings and office towers through various kinds of development incentives. Some because they see that as key to attracting certain demographics and businesses, others because they feel it'll subjectively make them be perceived as a "real city". But in SF specifically, "Manhattanification" has been a kind of bogeyman for a while now. My amateur hypothesis is that a certain portion of SF residents have a local self-identity in part defined by being not-LA and not-NYC. So a planning proposal can be attacked by claiming it would make SF either more like LA, or more like NYC.
- nshelly 8y ago
  It's just that many of the stakeholders in these areas such as long-time property owners in the westside of San Francisco and residents with rent control fearing gentrification would not benefit directly from new development. Their incentives simply aren't aligned with younger generations who want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs. To break this quandary we simply to need intervention at the higher level. Congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy so when change comes it will come at the higher level than the city.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Oh sure, there are plenty of objections to the process of change. I'm more interested in why Manhattan is a boogeyman for the end result.
notatoad 8y ago
Or for a more american example: Union City, NJ https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/3/comparing-approaches-to-achieving-density https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/3/comparing-appro...
Redoubts 8y ago
> I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan What is that supposed to mean? I would settle for it being a less shitty Brooklyn though.
nshelly 8y ago
If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth. The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.
- lostapathy 8y ago
  Perhaps the federal government doesn't need to step in by paying for rail, but by creating efficiencies (and/or removing obstacles) that make transit so expensive now?
- otoburb 8y ago
  >>[...] Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million. Just so we're talking about the same scales, the 133 miles of the Paris Métro rapid transit system covers the entire Paris metropolitan area[1], which itself has a population of around 12.4 million residents[2]. NYC's population across the five boroughs covered by the MTA is around 8.5 million residents[3]. The last cost projection for the Paris Métro expansion[4] for 120 extra miles of tracks, stations and lines is roughly $25 billion. If anything, this clarification only further reinforces your point that, even taking into account a hypothetical 5x cost overrun, Paris would still come out ahead from a $/mile metric. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-paris-back-together/426870/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-p...
snuxoll 8y ago
As somebody who literally lives in Boise I think my city is a shining example of poor urban planning, our public transit system is ill equipped to properly service our population which is spread out far too thin making it economically challenging to do so; at the same time we live in a fish bowl of a valley and nasty inversions are becoming more frequent as more cars get on the road every year due to our growing population. I hope other municipalities learn from our mistakes before it becomes too late, I’m planning on leaving the area after living here almost my entire life because it’s unsustainable.
- Naritai 8y ago
  It's too bad, really, because as you say Boise is quite beautiful. But yeah, there was no plan for handling population growth. Too many people wanted to leave out by Eagle / Nampa, but work in downtown or at Micron. And of course there is absolutely no way to get anywhere except by car.
  - snuxoll 8y ago
    It is indeed beautiful, which makes it terribly difficult for me to even consider leaving - especially having a five year old daughter to whom Boise is all she's ever known as home. I wish I could stay, but between the increasing pollution, lack of transit options (I don't drive, so this is huge to me), lack of jobs I'd actually want should I need new employment (ClearWater, HP, T-Sheets, Kount, etc. all suck in some way) combined with the political nightmare that Idaho has become have all but pushed me away. Heck, I can't even enjoy the beauty of the area half the time because there's so much litter everywhere these days -_-
    - sudosteph 8y ago
      That really stinks. It's amazing how many otherwise modern US cities let transit infrastructure linger in limbo. That was my experience in Charlotte too, though at least they've finally rolled out another leg of light rail to help somewhat. Seattle is the only place where I've had the option of living very comfortably without driving, and man its a game changer. Though I don't know if it's my long term pick due to costs of housing. What kind of alternatives to Boise are you looking at?
hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
Even in Tokyo, much of the place is single family homes or mid rise apartment and condo complexes. There are a number of huge skyscrapers here and there, but they are not as densely packed as manhattans.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Even Manhattan is not mostly skyscrapers. Anyone can open up Google Maps' satellite 3d view and see this.
CalRobert 8y ago
The problem now, is that surburbanites vote. Suburbanites, for reasons I can't fathom, have been getting a free, bonus, car-house that comes with the big suburban house, free of charge! This car-house isn't fancy. It's just a plot of asphalt. But they get one, free of charge, * By their office * In the grocery store * Even right next to the train station in the most baffling example of all (Park and Ride) And because places that, 100 years ago, would have been houses for people, are now little car-houses, there's nobody without a car left to vote accordingly. If you try to buy the land under these car-houses and build a human-house on it, you get screamed at in planning meetings. Apparently because you're going to add more traffic (i.e. cars) I'm not sure how to fix this.
- mayniac 8y ago
  >I'm not sure how to fix this. I don't think it's possible. Maybe you can build more amenities close to where people live, and stop people using cars as much as they do. Maybe you can build public transport services more in low income areas where car ownership is lower, and people will have some way of moving around. But having lived and travelled in Europe my entire life and visiting America for the first time last year, I was honestly shocked at how car-centric every single thing was. I spent more time in my rental car than I did out of it. I couldn't find a tenth of the businesses I'm used to having within walking distance of every flat I've rented in London and every hotel I've stayed at in Europe. And the biggest problem with the car-centric focus on city planning is that the majority of every city just seems dead. Las Vegas for me just died the second you stepped off the strip. Los Angeles died the second you walk a block away from the touristy bits. European cities which aren't built around cars have people walking around in almost every suburb, taking the car out for grocery shopping or going to the bank puts you in the minority in a lot of places. I really don't think it's fixable in America within a generation, the automobile lobby has decisively won.
  - CalRobert 8y ago
    I hope otherwise, but I don't think it is either. It's why I moved to Europe (among other reasons). What's crazy to me is that it can be plainly obvious people WANT this from the fact that the few neighborhoods that exist where you can walk are fabulously expensive. A 2 bed craftsman bungalow in South Park, a walkable area of generally walking-hostile San Diego, can sell for $900 grand. So why aren't we building more of those? Do developers hate money? Answer - because it's illegal to build them. Because of the aforementioned suburbanites voting that way. Because they should get free (or dirt cheap) sleeping places for their car even if someone comes along and wants to pay half a million bucks for the very same land to build a place to sleep for their family. It's lunacy.
CalRobert 8y ago
For what it's worth, I live in a city with a serious housing shortage and zero political will to improve transit and cycling. I've been eyeing a smaller city 2 hours to the south, _solely_ because it has the finest cycling/walking greenway in the country. It also has the highest unemployment rate among cities in this country. Of course, that could make hiring cheaper. The dream is that it's a place where there's already low-traffic and an opennness to trying something new that could result in putting in proper, Dutch-style infrastructure. I do wonder if there are others out there with the same idea. Maybe there's an opportunity here.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Paris has several times the density of NYC as a whole. The latter is far more than midtown.
dionidium 8y ago
"You only have to look across the ocean to see it" You only need to look across any of the Harlem, Hudson, or East rivers to see it. Brooklyn, the Bronx, and much of New Jersey follow this development pattern, more or less. San Francisco's population would double at Brooklyn's density.

pm90 8y ago

I don't see what stops cities from planning keeping some kind of growth in mind though. Rail, Bus systems are expensive but how about changing building codes to make it easier to build higher density near the downtown areas of these cities? And then maybe acquire land (at least) for a future mass transit option (monorail, subway etc.). For Gods sake don't be like Austin, which totally ignored the problem and is now scrambling to get it together with some very very expensive options (likely to be even more expensive in the future).

rayiner 8y ago

Tokyo is also not particularly congested.

aclimatt 8y ago
It's really not. It's actually a surprisingly livable and automobile traffic-free city for being literally the largest in the world. (Obviously the train system plays a huge role in that.)
indemnity 8y ago
Nor is it particularly high rise outside of the center, it’s surprisingly sprawl-like as well.
- golemiprague 8y ago
  The good thing about Tokyo is that they let people build whatever they want and somehow it works, there are congested areas and not so congested areas and in between areas and non consistent areas, they just have it all and people can choose where they want to live.
- twblalock 8y ago
  On the plus side, it's sprawl with train and subway stations, and plenty of buses and taxis.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Well, the metro population is ~40 million. But even then, most of the "sprawl" is still very dense by American standards, a lot of the suburban areas have comparable population density to Boston or SF.
anabis 8y ago
Most people commute by train. We are improving, but the morning commute is something foreigners consider particularly wacky, and not something that they want to repeat everyday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ

ryanworl 8y ago

People who are worried about turning San Francisco into Manhattan also don't know what Manhattan is even like! The Upper West & Upper East Side as well as Harlem do not look anything like e.g. the Financial District. Even within Manhattan there is a huge variety of building heights. I used to live in Yorkville in a six story building in an area filled with other six story (and smaller) buildings. We had a nice park with a public pool, multiple schools with kids running around in the afternoons, and some people even owned cars. It was an actual community, not some caricature of what people think living in Manhattan is like.

rcpt 8y ago
John Jay park is so nice. I miss being able to take the kids there anytime of day and have tons of friends to play with. Here on the West Coast the playgrounds are all dry, hot, boring, and empty.
mcguire 8y ago
Out of curiosity, how much is rent per square foot?
- ryanworl 8y ago
  I shared a ~650 sq ft 2bd/1br. It was $2650. That was probably below median for the area by a little.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    By more than a little. The Q line helped Yorkville catch up to the rest of the UES, rent-wise.
dionidium 8y ago
Even Hell's Kitchen, where I live, is still primarily composed of 5- and 6-story walk-ups.

neom 8y ago

It sounds like you would benefit greatly from reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - it provides a solid foundation for understanding urban economics.

closeparen 8y ago

Is Manhattan considered a mistake? I ask because, despite being one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere. Am I missing an unspoken “never again” moment? Is everyone who travels to New York doing it to revel in their hatred of the place? There’s not nearly enough Manhattan to meet the demand to live in such a place, and I fail to see why we shouldn’t make more of it. San Francisco’s economic power and landlocked geometry seem ideal for doing so.

_delirium 8y ago
I don't think NYC is seen as a bad model everywhere. There are plenty of medium-sized cities that are trying to conjure up a high-rise downtown with condo buildings and office towers through various kinds of development incentives. Some because they see that as key to attracting certain demographics and businesses, others because they feel it'll subjectively make them be perceived as a "real city". But in SF specifically, "Manhattanification" has been a kind of bogeyman for a while now. My amateur hypothesis is that a certain portion of SF residents have a local self-identity in part defined by being not-LA and not-NYC. So a planning proposal can be attacked by claiming it would make SF either more like LA, or more like NYC.
nshelly 8y ago
It's just that many of the stakeholders in these areas such as long-time property owners in the westside of San Francisco and residents with rent control fearing gentrification would not benefit directly from new development. Their incentives simply aren't aligned with younger generations who want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs. To break this quandary we simply to need intervention at the higher level. Congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy so when change comes it will come at the higher level than the city.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Oh sure, there are plenty of objections to the process of change. I'm more interested in why Manhattan is a boogeyman for the end result.

notatoad 8y ago

Or for a more american example: Union City, NJ https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/3/comparing-approaches-to-achieving-density https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/3/comparing-appro...

Redoubts 8y ago

> I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan What is that supposed to mean? I would settle for it being a less shitty Brooklyn though.

nshelly 8y ago

If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth. The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.

lostapathy 8y ago
Perhaps the federal government doesn't need to step in by paying for rail, but by creating efficiencies (and/or removing obstacles) that make transit so expensive now?
otoburb 8y ago
>>[...] Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million. Just so we're talking about the same scales, the 133 miles of the Paris Métro rapid transit system covers the entire Paris metropolitan area[1], which itself has a population of around 12.4 million residents[2]. NYC's population across the five boroughs covered by the MTA is around 8.5 million residents[3]. The last cost projection for the Paris Métro expansion[4] for 120 extra miles of tracks, stations and lines is roughly $25 billion. If anything, this clarification only further reinforces your point that, even taking into account a hypothetical 5x cost overrun, Paris would still come out ahead from a $/mile metric. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-paris-back-together/426870/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-p...

snuxoll 8y ago

As somebody who literally lives in Boise I think my city is a shining example of poor urban planning, our public transit system is ill equipped to properly service our population which is spread out far too thin making it economically challenging to do so; at the same time we live in a fish bowl of a valley and nasty inversions are becoming more frequent as more cars get on the road every year due to our growing population. I hope other municipalities learn from our mistakes before it becomes too late, I’m planning on leaving the area after living here almost my entire life because it’s unsustainable.

Naritai 8y ago
It's too bad, really, because as you say Boise is quite beautiful. But yeah, there was no plan for handling population growth. Too many people wanted to leave out by Eagle / Nampa, but work in downtown or at Micron. And of course there is absolutely no way to get anywhere except by car.
- snuxoll 8y ago
  It is indeed beautiful, which makes it terribly difficult for me to even consider leaving - especially having a five year old daughter to whom Boise is all she's ever known as home. I wish I could stay, but between the increasing pollution, lack of transit options (I don't drive, so this is huge to me), lack of jobs I'd actually want should I need new employment (ClearWater, HP, T-Sheets, Kount, etc. all suck in some way) combined with the political nightmare that Idaho has become have all but pushed me away. Heck, I can't even enjoy the beauty of the area half the time because there's so much litter everywhere these days -_-
  - sudosteph 8y ago
    That really stinks. It's amazing how many otherwise modern US cities let transit infrastructure linger in limbo. That was my experience in Charlotte too, though at least they've finally rolled out another leg of light rail to help somewhat. Seattle is the only place where I've had the option of living very comfortably without driving, and man its a game changer. Though I don't know if it's my long term pick due to costs of housing. What kind of alternatives to Boise are you looking at?

hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago

Even in Tokyo, much of the place is single family homes or mid rise apartment and condo complexes. There are a number of huge skyscrapers here and there, but they are not as densely packed as manhattans.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
Even Manhattan is not mostly skyscrapers. Anyone can open up Google Maps' satellite 3d view and see this.

CalRobert 8y ago

The problem now, is that surburbanites vote. Suburbanites, for reasons I can't fathom, have been getting a free, bonus, car-house that comes with the big suburban house, free of charge! This car-house isn't fancy. It's just a plot of asphalt. But they get one, free of charge, * By their office * In the grocery store * Even right next to the train station in the most baffling example of all (Park and Ride) And because places that, 100 years ago, would have been houses for people, are now little car-houses, there's nobody without a car left to vote accordingly. If you try to buy the land under these car-houses and build a human-house on it, you get screamed at in planning meetings. Apparently because you're going to add more traffic (i.e. cars) I'm not sure how to fix this.

mayniac 8y ago
>I'm not sure how to fix this. I don't think it's possible. Maybe you can build more amenities close to where people live, and stop people using cars as much as they do. Maybe you can build public transport services more in low income areas where car ownership is lower, and people will have some way of moving around. But having lived and travelled in Europe my entire life and visiting America for the first time last year, I was honestly shocked at how car-centric every single thing was. I spent more time in my rental car than I did out of it. I couldn't find a tenth of the businesses I'm used to having within walking distance of every flat I've rented in London and every hotel I've stayed at in Europe. And the biggest problem with the car-centric focus on city planning is that the majority of every city just seems dead. Las Vegas for me just died the second you stepped off the strip. Los Angeles died the second you walk a block away from the touristy bits. European cities which aren't built around cars have people walking around in almost every suburb, taking the car out for grocery shopping or going to the bank puts you in the minority in a lot of places. I really don't think it's fixable in America within a generation, the automobile lobby has decisively won.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  I hope otherwise, but I don't think it is either. It's why I moved to Europe (among other reasons). What's crazy to me is that it can be plainly obvious people WANT this from the fact that the few neighborhoods that exist where you can walk are fabulously expensive. A 2 bed craftsman bungalow in South Park, a walkable area of generally walking-hostile San Diego, can sell for $900 grand. So why aren't we building more of those? Do developers hate money? Answer - because it's illegal to build them. Because of the aforementioned suburbanites voting that way. Because they should get free (or dirt cheap) sleeping places for their car even if someone comes along and wants to pay half a million bucks for the very same land to build a place to sleep for their family. It's lunacy.

CalRobert 8y ago

For what it's worth, I live in a city with a serious housing shortage and zero political will to improve transit and cycling. I've been eyeing a smaller city 2 hours to the south, _solely_ because it has the finest cycling/walking greenway in the country. It also has the highest unemployment rate among cities in this country. Of course, that could make hiring cheaper. The dream is that it's a place where there's already low-traffic and an opennness to trying something new that could result in putting in proper, Dutch-style infrastructure. I do wonder if there are others out there with the same idea. Maybe there's an opportunity here.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Paris has several times the density of NYC as a whole. The latter is far more than midtown.

dionidium 8y ago

"You only have to look across the ocean to see it" You only need to look across any of the Harlem, Hudson, or East rivers to see it. Brooklyn, the Bronx, and much of New Jersey follow this development pattern, more or less. San Francisco's population would double at Brooklyn's density.