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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

It seems ironic that the land of self-aggrandizing free market disruption (Uber, AirBnb) seems so against the obvious free-market solution to their problems: increase supply.

You have too little of something, and it's causing prices to skyrocket because demand is increasing. So make more of it, reducing the price.

I just got back from a visit to the Bay Area. Outside of SF itself, not a single building over 4 stories tall. All that air space that could be condos, homes for people, anything at all, wasted so that "people can see the mountains better". Meanwhile, my friend and his girlfriend are paying $4000/month for 1000 sqft. Their rent is more than the median total pre-tax income in large swaths of America.

This is a self-inflicted wound. I have little pity.

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So I generally agree, even within SF itself, basically nothing outside a tiny area of downtown is the height it could be. Tons of the bay area is under built. The regulatory environment is a nightmare. There is intense fear that any new building will bring newcomers that will destroy the community.

That said...

San Jose and Oakland both definitely have downtown portions with 20 story + buildings. RWC has been building bigger too.

To me, Mountain View is the most egregiously under built city in the bay. Huge corporate campus for Google and others, but the housing stock of a suburb.

> All that air space that could be condos, homes for people, anything at all, wasted so that "people can see the mountains better". Meanwhile, my friend and his girlfriend are paying $4000/month for 1000 sqft.

My guess is that, if significant amounts of extra housing were added in the Bay Area, software devs salaries would fall. Right now, software companies need to pay insane money in order to offset the insane cost of living (as otherwise, they'd lost their workforce). So, filling BA with high-risers would not help members of this forum that much (it would likely be very helpful for people in low-wage jobs though).

This assumes that the cost of living would stay the same. Salaries might fall, but so would cost of living.

Home prices will fall too.

So all these people who have already paid millions for their homes will suddenly find their homes devalued by a huge margin.

Needless to say that won't go down well.

When driving through south bay I noticed several buildings with red rope in place of where they would have another story or two on the building. Turns out the bay area has very strick rules around building too tall and disrupting flight patterns of birds. Probably one of many reasons they haven't built massively upward.

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