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Comment by durgiston | Hacker News Reader

The reason that there is a housing crisis in the Bay Area is that there is a lack of housing in the Bay Area. We don't need to make it so you don't need to live in SF to work in SF, we need to make it so that there are enough homes for the people that want to live there. And this means one thing, ZONING. The reason that more housing isn't built in the Bay is that the people living there don't want developers to build it, not that it can't be built. This is much easier and cheaper to change than public transit infrastructure (or maybe, the fact that it isn't is a sign that SF is screwed?).

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I agree that we need to build in the city as well, but many major cities have good transportation inside and outside of the city too.

Currently it's almost an hour to get to downtown from Ocean Beach to Financial district with a bus, and its only 7 miles away. That is 7mph, almost a walking speed.

For example, back in Helsinki (where I'm from) you could easily get to the downtown anywhere in the 12mile radius in 10-20mins with a bus, light rail or train. I know the numbers are similar in many European cities.

Generally in Europe public transport is usually the easier and faster option than driving or at least the same time. If driving in a city is multitudes faster then you're not doing to public or other transportation systems very well.

You walk really fast! But seriously, revitalizing existing public transit and making it function properly should be a priority. No disagreements there. But we don't need to build new trains and bus lines that go further out.

Urbanists will continue to think we don't need more sprawl, and NIMBYs will continue to think we don't need more density, and nothing will change.

The only politically realistic way we're going to get large-scale high-density environments is through greenfield projects. Having a long but tolerable public transit journey between your greenfield high-density development and the existing job centers is one of very few plausible paths to getting there.

It's going to require all of those things. The densest cities on the planet still have far-flung transportation systems. That's out of necessity, even when you're building up dozens of stories at a time, there just isn't enough space for everyone.

You need sensible building policies coupled with aggressive transit expansion to get us out of the mess we're in. Not just in San Francisco, but across the whole country.

There's a separate policy statement supporting by-right housing development: http://unitedslate.samaltman.com/by-right-housing.html

Evaluating this proposal by itself, I agree that local infrastructure spending would likely be more useful, sooner, to more people than a high speed rail corridor. I don't think anyone believes or claims it will single-handedly solve the housing crisis.

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