4 ms·

Maybe we could keep the protections for labor and drop the many additional protections for landowners.

• jfengel 5y ago
  I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc. I don't know how much the issue is with the rest of Silicon Valley. There used to be a lot of undeveloped area not too far from Palo Alto. Texas may want to avoid the wrong kind of over-dense housing, since they've got plenty of land, though there are also reasons to encourage people not to commute multiple dozens of miles per day.
  • filmgirlcw 5y ago
    >I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc. I'm going to push back on this. Manhattan is less than half the size of San Francisco and has nearly four times the population density. The Bronx is roughly the same size and has double the population density. It isn't that San Francisco can't expand, it is that it doesn't want to.
    • Gibbon1 5y ago
      You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't. Subways[1]. Sure developers would love to build more chicken coops for tech bros. But they absolutely don't want to kick down coin to pay for the subway system needed to support that density. [1] Oh yea SF has BART which was built 50 years ago and not expanded since. And the central subway which is 1.7 miles long, not open yet after ten years of construction and 20 years after it got the green light.
      • filmgirlcw 5y ago
        I agree, which is my underlying point: they don’t want to expand! The lack of public transit is a problem plenty of people have been yelling about for decades, as you mentioned. Developers, citizens, and the city council have all proven over the years they are unwilling to do what needs to be done to make expansion possible.
      • wolverine876 5y ago
        The famous legend of NYC is that they had the vision to build infrastructure beyond current needs. Now, it's trendy to view any investment by democratic government as wasteful, and to reduce the taxes by which the community makes that investment to nothing. What will happen to future generations, who have us as their forbears rather than the visionary New Yorkers.
        • sib 5y ago
          2 of the 3 subway systems in NYC were built by private companies. It was only later that all were merged into one publicly-managed one.
          • barry-cotter 5y ago
            That was also when expansion basically stopped.
        • kiba 5y ago
          There's plenty of investments. It's called suburban sprawl, and some people even think it's a tax ponzi scheme.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        > You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't. Subways. Well, yes. And deep bedrock and fairly stable geology that makes them possible.
        • barry-cotter 5y ago