Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

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Whenever these threads come up, the NIMBY pitch forks come out. I 100% agree that we should build more housing in the Bay Area, but some perspective is helpful. The Bay Area is already one of the most densely populated regions in America:

http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/geography/maps/...

And San Francisco is the 3rd most densely populated city in America, if you look at cities with over 100k people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

So I disagree with the narrative that Bay Area NIMBY-ism is out of control. It's probably similar to anywhere else in America.

There are two unique factors at play here:

(1) Massive growth of high paying jobs in the tech sector, with typical wages for an engineer ranging from $100-200k. This has caused housing to double/triple in cost over the last ten years.

(2) The Bay Area has very unfortunate geography: there is a giant bay in its geographic center, and mountains/oceans all around. This makes traffic and commuting more difficult, and also makes development "outwards" harder.

there is a lot you're leaving out here or misunderstand. The reason that there is a housing crises int he SFBA is that all of the cities in the SFBA have produced an order of magnitude more office space than housing in the past 10 or so years. Look at communities like Cupertino, building the apple space ship for 14k people, but adding virtually no housing to the city. Lather/rinse/repeat for Palo Alto, MPK, MTV, etc and you have a terrible region-wide housing crises.

Each city is doing that intentionally of course, because it's in their best interest.

If they allowed housing to develop they'd have to expand their school, police, fire, garbage and other departments.

NIMBYs in San Francisco scream bloody murder and call it "violence" when developers want to build on empty parking lots. I am not exaggerating. The idea that "geography" is the limiting factor here is willful ignorance.

Geography definitely impacts it.

There is substantially cheaper housing in the East Bay, compared to SF/Peninsula. However there's no good way to get from the East Bay to where the jobs are: you are limited by one of three bridges, all of which have terrible traffic.

Imagine if we filled up the entire SF Bay with concrete, and demolished all the mountains surrounding the Bay Area. I'll bet you would see improved traffic and more even prices between East/West bay.

That first map is misleading because it tops out at 530/square mile, which on an absolute scale is not very dense at all. For comparison, Tokyo metro houses 37 million people at 11,300/square mile. NY/NJ/CT has 20 million people at 4,500/square mile. The nine Bay Area counties have a mean density of 1100/square mile.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

Vancouver is more geographically restricted than San Francisco. Didn't prevent it from becoming a world renowned example of how to do city planning right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism

Perhaps they did some things better, but in terms of pure population increase I don't think it's comparable:

    Vancouver 2010: 603,000
    Vancouver 2016: 631,000 
    Vancouver increase: ~28,000

    SF 2010: 805,000
    SF 2016: 864,000
    SF increase: ~59,000

So SF added twice as many residents as Vancouver in the same time period, And this is despite SF being denser than Vancouver to begin with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver [2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-pop...

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