4 ms·
The greater Huston area is approximately 10,000 square miles. The city of Huston itself is 670 square miles. The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square
by shagie 4y ago
The greater Huston area is approximately 10,000 square miles. The city of Huston itself is 670 square miles.
The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square miles... and that includes a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on.
If you take the land area of the cities in the Bay Area ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th... ) and sum them all up, you've got something on the order of 1,600 square miles.
The land constraints within the Bay Area contribute significantly to the price of a house.
- dan_quixote 4y agoAnd general desirability - diverse and well-paying economy, weather, water, mountains.
- shagie 4y agoAbsolutely... though that's harder to point a number to. The "this is how much land is there" is a metric that can't be argued. If you then try to look at the population densities of those areas, it becomes even more clear about why a single family detached house would be that much more expensive.
- kortilla 4y agoHouston is more racially diverse than the Bay Area.
- ch4s3 4y agoIt’s also functionality illegal to build anything but single family homes in most of the Bay Area and it’s now out of places to do that. Houston does have more space, but also doesn’t prevent you from building a duplex on your own land.
- exhilaration 4y agoPretty much all of the HOAs that are de facto zoning boards of the Houston area would most definitely prevent you from doing anything like that. HOA by-laws are where you'll find the real zoning regulations over there.
- ch4s3 4y agoI wonder how well those hold up in court if you really wanted to build. I could imagine a Texas court being friendlier to development.
- gfaster 4y agoYou mean trying to violate the deed restriction with compliance mandated by Section 26-475 (and other applicable places) of the Houston Code of Ordinances? I don't think a lawsuit would hold up very well, unless you could could convince the judge that the city can't regulate land use.
- BurningFrog 4y agoA huge part (half? 1/3?) of the Bay Area is nature reserves of various kinds, but most of that land would be perfectly suitable for housing construction, if it was legalized.
- shagie 4y agoOk... double the space allocated to the cities and you're still at about 1/3 of the greater Huston area. Pave every single square foot of the nine counties that make up the Bay Area including Marin, Sonoma, and Napa... and you're still 3,000 square miles short of the greater Huston area.
- BurningFrog 4y agoMy disagreement was about "a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on". I don't doubt your numbers. That said, Tokyo, which is a wonderful city to live in, and on more earthquake prone land, has 14 million people on 5,194 square miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo.
- pixl97 4y agoAh yes, bulldoze nature to make it more desirable...
- BurningFrog 4y agoPretty much all human homes are on on what used to be wild nature. To me, human homes is one of the most worthy uses of land.