This article makes an interesting comparison between San Francisco and Seattle. "San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Com

This article makes an interesting comparison between San Francisco and Seattle. "San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else." Interesting point, but are we comparing apples-to-apples? Here's the wikipedia page for Seattle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle land area is 142 sq miles, current population density is 7,402/sq mi . For San Francisco, we get: https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco land area is 46.87 sq mi, population density is 17,620/sq mi. Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? I don't really know how that works up there. San Francisco is a very rare case where the city and county are the same. The article doesn't seem clear about this - how are we defining "Seattle" for the purposes of this article? If we cherry picked a 142 square mile area around SF, I think we could probably substantial construction and growth. In some ways, the article even goes on to mention this by talking about how SF and Oakland aren't part of the same city, but that this is where the growth is starting to happen. SF is at the point where there isn't much left to be infilled. There certainly is some, but by and large, you'd have to tear something down to build something up - at least to a much larger extent than cities that get to be defined as a 150 square mile area or more. I don't think there's much to be done here... but I think people are coming down pretty hard on SF. My guess is that you could easily circle 48 square miles of most major cities with comparable population density that haven't allowed much construction in the last 50 years or so, and you could easily circle 150 square miles around SF that make it look like it has pursued rapid growth policies. The difference is that because of the way borders work in the bay area, SF appears to be hostile to development because the new growth happens elsewhere.