Geographically speaking most of SF already suffers from poor quality of life. Except for the northeast quadrant of the city, SF is dominated by flat, boring, ugly zones of car-centered banality.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7398485,-122.5023375,3a,75y,...
There's nothing in this photo worth preserving.
With high rise buildings, all you need to do is convince ONE place to build a bunch of them. Perhaps in a place such as south SOMA, which is packed with industrial warehouses that could be replaced with apartment sky scrapers.
Nobody is going to be gentrified when the old dirty warehouses in south SOMA get replaced.
FWIW, the city thinks that warehouses and auto body shops are an important part of its jobs plan for non-techies. Apparently it pays better than working in the service industry.
Well, there was a decent uproar when a large wholesale flower market was slated to be shut down.
Now, Eric Mar, the Supervisor from the Richmond. This is a man I detest.
In the Midwest, if someone built that photo (exactly) it would get called a strong downtown urban design, and the builder would be praised for creating "missing middle" housing.
https://hoodwork-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/story/i...
http://www.janetdelaney.com/south-of-market/
http://oaklandplanninghistory.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/1/1/181...
"In the Richmond District neighborhood in San Francisco, CA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Asian (50.0%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (10.9%), and residents who report Irish roots (6.9%), and some of the residents are also of Italian ancestry (4.5%), along with some Russian ancestry residents (4.1%), among others. In addition, 35.2% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country."
http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/richmond-d...
Holy crap. Every inch of ground is covered in concrete yet it looks like less actual housing than say a rowhouse neighborhood like: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d2a119e4b03323486a5e...
+street five times too wide
+snout houses with huge garages and driveways but few yards and porches
+low rise housing with one floor devoted to parking in a high demand area
+not nearly enough trees
+no street corner retail
But if you think that's bad, you should see 98% of the United States where it's much worse than the worst of San Francisco.
You also have to consider that decreasing cost in SF will lead to increased demand.
Including land costs, is that really true? I sort of doubt it, since those sorts of high rises are built in cities where land prices aren't that high.
> You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.
Don't you want the opposite of that? If it is spread, you spend more time traveling. Public transit that is spread out is very hard to accomplish. Cities with that stuff all spread out are car cities.
I always trot out Paris, but that's only because it's such a good example.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/bakery/@48.8858374,2.3347...
I think adding high rise is the right choice, as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links. It's all very well to add in a couple of thousand people, but they all have to get in and out and buy groceries etc. you don't want each of those people owning a car and making the traffic worse.
I think there should be mor emphasis on making other parts of the Bay Area more like the things people want from the city / peninsular proper. Whether that is transport, cultural or liveability, it should all be possible.
That point so often seems ignored in these discussions (with respect to many growing/popular cities).
So an example of the reality in the Boston area is that the Green Line extension is on hold last I read because costs have doubled to $2 billion or so. (And the Green Line is basically the oldest and crappiest line in the overall not-bad Boston metro system. It's essentially a trolley with underground sections dating to the turn of the last century.)
So 20 years and $20 billion or so in transportation infrastructure would certainly set San Francisco up to do more building in areas where there are good opportunities to expand housing stock beyond what's already being built.