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I lived in Seattle from 2000-2008. Rent (and property values!) went up by -- more than inflation -- nearly every year that I lived there. They skyrocketed by the end of that period. Wikipedia says the population grew by 8% between 2000 and 2010.

I'll give you that Seattle is more affordable than San Francisco...but it's also at least twice the land area of SF, with fewer people and geographic constraints. And the weather is...an acquired taste.

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SF is half as dense as Brooklyn. The major supply constraint is not geographic, its land use regulation.

Brooklyn is flat, and almost all of it is safely improvable, unlike SF.

1. What do you mean by safely improvable?

2. Hong Kong, one of the densest cities in the world, is built on land much steeper than SF.

Seattle is not without a strong NIMBY contingent of its own.

None of these places is really keeping up with demand. SF is simply the worst of the worst from that point of view.

I agree completely about the weather. I grew up in western Oregon and I don't know how it's possible to sustain human life further north without an IV of antidepressants!

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