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Comment by malyk | Hacker News Reader

I agree...if you can build enough of these. I can't remember off hand, but I think that you need to build something like 40,000 more units to even start making a dent. Call me skeptical that you can build 40k of these.

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Excluding political opposition the bigger problem could be scaling up the service infrastructure to keep up. I think of some management games where, if you aren't careful while scaling, you have a collapse which triggers a domino effect until everyone dies. It isn't quite that extreme, but probably no one wants to turn the bay area in to a favela.

Another big question is what is the price curve where companies hire more locally rather than branching operations out elsewhere, and then when do other companies start flooding in?

The bay area/SF is at a point where it could become a major global city. It already is critically important, no question. If accessible, the capital would flow in. It may take a major earthquake before that happens.

You could build 40k of them, it's been done and it's called Silicon Valley. Take a look at the place with Google Earth, it's a perfect example of 50's - 60's dense Western-style suburban development. Even if you could do that, however, I think the cost of land there would be prohibitive, which I don't think was factored into the original post.

Yes, cost of land was factored in to the original post. That's what the whole section about density was about. Keeping land costs at 10k per unit defines how many units you need to put on a given plot of land, based on price paid.

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