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Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

If you drive 30 minutes any direction from San Francisco, you will see plenty of vast empty fields covered with wild grasses.

I don't argue that we should cover all the land available with houses, I like wild grass, but I just point out that if we really hadn't enough space -- we would have settled it already.

I've never heard the now popular "Earth is overpopulated" rant from anyone who lives outside major metro. Going by train in Russia or Japan (yes, Japan) and watching empty fertile lands for hours is a really useful educational experience.

Also, 1. Americans love to live in private houses. And that takes up way more space, and energy to maintain than condos/flats. Yes, some people in other countries just cannot afford private house, but I've noticed often they just feel anything bad about living in a condo.

2. Americans like their cars. And parking/highways take a lot of space, obviously.

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Yes, I fly into Santa Clara every week and live in the Portland, OR area (actually across the river in Vancouver). When I fly in it seems far from dense ... there is room for a lot more housing w/o becoming super dense.

I think people in the Bay Area got their's and don't want others moving in... they love the high prices... it suits them just fine.

> I like wild grass

And that is the problem. You're not the only one. Yes, if we turned the San Francisco Bay area into a clone of Manhattan or Hong Kong or Tokyo we could accommodate a lot more people. But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome. People who like that kind of lifestyle can have it in any of the dozens of dense cities on the planet.

The SFBay area is desirable precisely because it is not (yet) dense. People move here because they like yards and redwood trees and vineyards and hiking trails. Manifestly there are more people who want these things than there is space to accommodate all of them. That is the problem.

> People move here because they like yards and redwood trees and vineyards and hiking trail

no, they want jobs. you can get outdoors anywhere in the US, but only a few places in the US actually have a super vibrant economy.

and NOTHING precludes turning SF into a stack of 120-story high-density towers apartments for all family types and leaving the redwoods and grassy fields alone.

nothing but the unwillingness to go density, thus ensuring the grassy fields will slowly be turned into cookie cutter suburbs

Going to be fun getting around those 120 story towers given the rest of San Francisco’s infrastructure including mass transit. There’s always the cable car I guess. But it shouldn’t take more than a few decades to expand that further as well.

> rest of San Francisco’s infrastructure including mass transit

The moment Proposition 13 gets repealed that will no longer be a problem.

>The SFBay area is desirable precisely because it is not (yet) dense.

False. San Francisco has an entire quadrant of non-walkable non-mixed use areas that need to be rezoned and connected to its light rail transit network (Richmond). Density does not preclude green spaces. All residents have a park within a 10 minute walk[0].

http://hoodline.com/2017/05/san-francisco-is-nation-s-first-...

Exactly my point -- if we were really overpopulated, then those desires would have stepped aside for the dire need of housing.

Concerns about global overpopulation are not usually about housing, but how much of the total energy in the system can be safely diverted to our uses. I think it is reasonable to be concerned when one species controls a large fraction of the energy in an ecosystem.

On average, moving one person from a small town in the midwest to SF reduces resource consumption, so from that point of view construction in SF should be encouraged. Tearing down abandoned houses in small midwestern towns and converting them to wildland should also be encouraged.

> But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome.

If they didn't consider that a good outcome, they would stop paying money to move there, or move out, and cause housing prices to drop, thus solving the problem.

personal incentives don't "solve" social problems. People compete themselves into subsistence -- not motivated to improve a situation until it's too miserable to bear, and then back off just to the edge. This is the "tragedy of the commons" coordinate problem

Except what the SF Bay Area is facing isn't the Tragedy of the Commons--it's the Tragedy of the Anticommons, where the owners of resources underutilize them.

Parking lots for the nearby hiking trails are already overflowing on weekends and holidays. Squeezing in more people has a very direct negative impact on quality of life.

This is a red herring argument. There is no need to raze the redwoods or pave Golden Gate Park.

Changing the single-family zoning to just allow 2 or 3 story housing on 1 out of 10 blocks would be enough to alleviate the shortage, provided developers had few enough regulatory obstacles.

It boggles my mind that the Palo Alto Caltrain abuts single family homes with 5000 sq ft yards. Their quality of life is low due to the noise and traffic. That area really should be apartments.

Going to Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, or any other similar city will show you that a little density in the right places can accommodate many people.

Paris isn’t a sci-fi dystopia. It’s still pleasant, and has more than 2x density as SF.

Vineyards and redwood trees are not found in suburban neighborhoods, and an apartment building next door does not threaten your yard. Nobody want to expand into nature areas, we want to build taller and denser where there are already buildings and transit stations.

> Vineyards and redwood trees are not found in suburban neighborhoods

They are around here. I have three redwood trees in my own yard, and I'm a half hour bike ride from multiple redwood groves. There are even a couple of vineyards around here.

> an apartment building next door does not threaten your yard

You haven't seen my yard.

A big reason for that is those communities are ultra nimby. If you want to buy land, it needs to be a large plot. This makes it inaccessible cost wise to most people even if they want to be pioneering.

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