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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense. I wrote a piece called "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-futu...) that focuses on Seattle, but the problems in SF are even worse.

We're seeing decades of parochial land use policies turn into affordability crises in SF and similar cities. Which is why so many people are moving to Texas: http://time.com/80005/why-texas-is-our-future, despite some of Texas's other challenges (like travel and inadequate mass transit).

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You can have good mass transit or affordable housing, but not both. This sucks.

> You can have good mass transit or affordable housing, but not both.

Why's that?

Good mass transit increases demand for housing in its coverage area, increasing prices.

But it doesn't have to increase prices to the point of unaffordability, does it?

Every piece of real estate that sells/rents is affordable to someone.

But wealthier people are less likely to want mass transit, since they can afford private transportation. That's basically the fundamental issue to providing good mass transit in the US: anybody who can afford to, avoids it.

The density needed for effective mass transit means that what many people seem to see as affordable housing ("a house with a white picket fence") isn't going to work especially well.

A house with a fence may or may not be affordable, but it's not dense for sure.

Or, as the Bay Area demonstrates, neither.

Well there's definitely an inverse correlation between housing costs and convenience of travel. Apartments near Caltrain stations or in SF being more expensive than those that are farther away, etc.

>> "...but not both."

What about Chicago. Way cheaper than New York, and has the second best train system in the country.

You can have affordable housing, good mass transit, and jobs. Pick two.

Chicago has all three. It just has a really shitty climate and is surrounded by...corn fields

Don't forget the soy!

And Lake Michigan.

Ah Lake Michigan. How I hated you in the winter when your freezing winds suck the life out of me, but how I loved your cold cold waters come summer

Finance seems to be a strong employer there, no?

It's a scale issue. There are plenty of small metro areas (600K-1.2MM pop) with affordable housing, plenty of jobs, and absolutely zero useful mass transit. Traffic is bad for about one hour in the morning and two hours in the evening, at most, and usually just in one direction with plenty of side streets.

You double that and the infrastructure collapses. The tax base doesn't support large investments in transit to get a system built from nothing, and the roads and bridges aren't equipped to handle 2x the volume.

Chicago is adding knowledge jobs at a pretty impressive clip. If you want to work in a factory though, this isn't the city for you.

Brutal climate, though

It is worth noting that Chicago Public Schools is functionally insolvent and the City of Chicago has a $20B pension liability (relative to a $7.8B annual budget). Pension payments have been routinely deferred ("pension holidays") to balance the budget. Bankruptcy is inevitable at this point.

With self-driving cars on the horizon [hopefully!?], this will hopefully become false. [ie everywhere that currently has shitty mass transit will get a system with no single point of failure which is hopefully cheap]

Who knows, though?

This is a very insightful comment.

It's also important to understand the reason you can't have both, in the US, is political. Infrastructure spending in the US is currently below depreciation (http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/10/spending-on-our-cru...) so we aren't building mass transit at a rate that meets growing demand. Rich, mobile people buy up property in cities and along transit lines. If we invested in transit we could make a lot of underused housing useful.

Where I lived in Italy had pretty good mass transit (although not up to northern European levels, most likely) and reasonable house prices.

Because it's dense.

Italy has double the unemployment rate and double the poverty rate of the US. It would be pretty shocking if they didn't have reasonable housing prices relative to the US.

For comparison, Seattle is denser than Rome. I'm pretty sure housing is still cheaper in Rome than Seattle.

Housing in Italy is not actually cheap. It's just not batshit crazy expensive like the California bay area.

Rome is pretty spread out in terms of a city.

Most of Europe has good public transportation and reasonable housing prices, although of course there are tons of local variations (London is super expensive).

I just don't see any reason why you can't have both decent transportation and reasonable housing prices.

I walked across most of Rome with my second-trimester wife many times on our vacation there a couple of years ago. It's really not that spread out. What cities in Italy are less spread out? Naples, I guess. Any others?

I agree that Rome is not really cheap. But I don't think it's fair to point to Italy as an example of affordable housing driven by higher density when it's not more dense. Especially since density actually seems to correlate well with price. San Francisco is way denser than Rome or Seattle.

I don't really agree that most of Europe has reasonable housing prices. For the most part, in urban areas homes seem to be quite expensive and quite small. I wouldn't call that reasonable in comparison to, say, Austin or even Seattle. Just about anywhere is reasonable compare to San Francisco of course.

I'm not decided on whether it's possible to have good transportation and reasonable housing prices. You have to have a pretty dense population to make public transit cost effective, and to pay for the up-front costs. And density does tend to imply very expensive housing.

I'm guessing you walked across the city center, not 'Rome', which is fairly large:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rome,+Italy/@41.9036094,12...

Looking at the map, we probably didn't cover as much as I thought.

Regardless, if Rome is "spread out", it's not dense. If Rome, being among the densest of Italian cities, not dense, then neither is Italy.

Rome is not very dense compared to places like Milan or Naples.

Italy has a lot of cities that are fairly dense, but not Hong Kong or Singapore dense.

That's why, despite being somewhat smaller than California, it has about 20 million more people.

I've completely lost sight of your point. You said Italy has good transit and affordable housing because it's dense. Now Italy only has "fairly dense" cities. Of those, the densest are on par with Seattle.

I'm going to re-assert that Italy has affordable housing because they are in an economic slump. I was frankly not that impressed with their public transit, either, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it.

If Italy had the same kind of NIMBY laws that the US does in many places, half the country would have to get up and leave, or they would have to pave over everything between towns, leaving no agriculture, parks, forests or much of anything.

The public transportation in Italy varies a lot, from North (pretty good) to South (awful in many places). The thing they tend to do well is that it's fairly frequent, so you usually don't have to stress about missing one particular bus or tram.

"Fairly dense" is all you need to vastly improve things in many places. Look at vast swaths of the bay area that are single story detached houses. Mix in some 2/3 story buildings in there, and you'd add a lot of supply without going 'full Hong Kong'.

Also, Milan is about twice as dense as Seattle.

> "Fairly dense" is all you need to vastly improve things in many places. Look at vast swaths of the bay area that are single story detached houses. Mix in some 2/3 story buildings in there, and you'd add a lot of supply without going 'full Hong Kong'.

Ok, but I still don't buy your argument. Seattle has a density similar to Rome. San Francisco has a density similar to Milan. Why is Italy cheaper with good public transit? It's clearly not the density, and I don't buy that it's just NIMBY-ism either (though even if so, it's still not density.).

> Also, Milan is about twice as dense as Seattle.

I was looking at the broader urban area. You're right that it is considerably denser if you only look at the 70 square mile administrative area (roughly San Francisco density).

Sure, in part Italy is cheaper due to the economy, but it's also because you can build outside of the historic areas to meet demand.

And there's decent public transportation.

I just don't see any relationship between decent public transportation and things being affordable or not. It's much more closely tied to density: without density, public transportation doesn't work as well.

I think I've just been misunderstanding your point. From your original comment, I thought you were saying that density was responsible for both good transit and affordable housing in Italy. I totally agree that you need density for decent public transit.

Philadelphia has both

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