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Comment by Tempest1981 | Hacker News Reader

Tempest1981

To be livable, a city needs a balance between 3 things:

  - Business (commercial real estate)
  - Housing
  - Transportation (streets, busses, trains, flying cars)

The first 2 are easy, since they're very profitable to the city and developers. But taxpayers don't want to pay for transportation, and commuters are willing to tolerate horrible traffic and the resulting poor quality of life.

Does San Francisco have a good balance now? What if we doubled business and housing?

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But in SF, there's a transit-impact fee commercial and residential real estate developers have to pay. Between that, the market-rate property tax they'll be paying, all the taxes the people inside the building will pay, and their transit fares, new construction is great for transit. Unless there are too many new parking spaces, of course.

SF has plenty of money for transportation. It's just used very ineffectively.

Citation needed. :-) Is the money used on the wrong things? Or on the right things, but not efficiently? Many public works projects end up over budget and behind schedule, so I guess that should be factored in.

Where is the money going, and/or where should it be going?

What % of people who work in San Francisco also live there?

San Francisco's budget is vastly less efficient than other comparable US cities:

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-worst-run-big-city-...

As for people living vs. working in SF, this comment does an excellent job explaining it, with sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875936

tl;dr: The increase in population due to daily workers commuting in from outside is vastly smaller than in NYC.

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