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The Bay Area is not the same as Silicon Valley. The East Bay (bay side of the hills) and SF have been building upwards. The South Bay and the past-the-hills East Bay are ruining things with sprawl. San Jose/SC/MV/etc are horrendous in terms of upward building and it comes down to an extremist form of NIMBYism passing laws preventing proper upward development.

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The San Jose urbanized area is the third most densely populated in the country, at 5820 people per square mile. That's only slightly behind the San Francisco-Oakland urbanized area, which is #2 at 6266 people per square mile. (#1 is Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim at almost 7000 per square mile).

Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_censu...

These are looking at the densities of entire metropolitan areas, which doesn't mean much.

In the NY-NJ metro area there are lots of high-density cities, like Manhattan at 70,000/sq. mi.; Brooklyn, Union City, Hoboken, at 40,000/sq. mi.; Queens at 20,000/sq. mi. There is empty space between these cities, which lowers the density of the metro area, but that doesn't really matter.

On the other hand, SV cities (Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose), actually are at densities of 5,000-6,000/sq. mi.

The figure we should actually be looking at is weighted population density, not population density.

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