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Comment by matthew349hall | Hacker News Reader

An American in New York...same thing

No way. America has plenty of fast growing cities, just none around the NYC area.

To be fair that's another way of saying "Europe has plenty of fast growing cities, just none around the London area"

I think we have improved transport economics so much that the size of a metro area needs adjusting in our minds - London has commuters from Birmingham, Cambridge and beyond - in the same way that NYC has commuters from Pennsylvania and even Philly.

The winning City in an area sucks in all the surrounding populations - it's just now that transport links mean that those surrounding populations are in what used to be called other cities and are now just suburbs.

We need better town planning not ways to hold back cities to certain geographic locations

Sometimes people live in the city and commute to work in the suburbs.

I propose, instead, that New York City is a suburb of Philly.

It does not invalidate the argument - they are both effectively the same "metro area"

The Bay Area, while very far from being a well planned live/work/commute environment, does have a somewhat unique structure. It is made up of 3 geographically dispersed, relatively equitable major cities, albeit with different strengths (SF - international cachet, SJ - largest city plus proximity to Silicon Valley, Oakland - future opportunity).

There are arguably more high end jobs in the suburbs surrounding these 3 major cities than in the city centers themselves. While this has removed the issue of one major city sucking in all of the surrounding resources, it has also distributed all of the problems of a major city center throughout an entire region - extremely high housing costs, horrendous traffic, etc.

Since each municipality in the Bay Area enjoys near ubiquitous power over local development and policy, it is also very difficult to implement effective regional plans to improve these issues.

I would argue it's one metro area with three authorities that plan and co-ordinate poorly and has no decent overall town / civil planning (for example like most cities, there is a focus on increasing land price being a good thing - generally not for future equitable growth)

The politics and social Dynamics in the US seem completely wrong for growth that I would consider positive in most regions. There is instead a lot of low density strip mall style growth and the resulting structures and density will largely be protected from reexamination due to risk of losing grandfathered building rights.

I would be interested to know which cities are consolidating high density areas while growing such that they will have a Manhattan.

Seattle?

But I don't think every city needs Manhattan style density. Four, five story mid-rise density is the answer. Austin's urban core is building heavily in that style. I was just in Milwaukee for work as was surprised by the huge number of mid-rise buildings all over downtown. Just to show two midsized cities with insane growth at the core.

You ever been to LA? Or San Francisco? Chicago? Miami? Boston?

New York might be a huge metropolis, but it's by no means the only one.

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