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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

If the population increases in an area, how else are you going to deal with it besides density, or simply telling them 'GO AWAY', which most economists agree is a terrible idea, given that adding people in highly productive areas is such a win.

Population density is generally very low in most of the US. It can go higher without too many problems.

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Modulo the load on transportation and infrastructure--which seems likely to be substantial--to the degree that you're going to add that much housing, this seems a pretty sensible way to do it. It's generally impractical to bulldoze a large tract of low-rise housing to build slightly higher housing. So just about the only solution is to put high-rise housing somewhere that it has a minimal [EDIT: the least] impact.

That said, I wonder how well it will work to build a bunch of high-rise suburban housing while making it difficult for residents to have cars and without great transportation options.

If anything, the load on transportation would actually go down. One of the big problems in Silicon Valley is that many of the cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino) are adding tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of housing units. Which means that the only option is for people to either commute ever longer distances or crowd ever more people into the existing housing. And while it's not practical to bulldoze housing for even a 100% increase in density, there are plenty of single family houses that can be replaced with 6-10 unit apartment buildings. Even in SF itself.

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