Hacker News Reader

Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

Is it beneficial for the rest of US to save SF? Won't its demise actually improve the lives in the rest of the country/world as businesses spread out after workers or allow remote work?

View on HN

It's beneficial for the rest of the US to find solutions that make high density cities successful. Such locations tend to be both your cultural and economic centers, in particular due to the network effects of putting so many people in close proximity to each other. (The Internet helps but hasn't proven to be a substitute quite yet.)

Additionally, dense urban areas tend to have the smallest environmental impact per capita (lower carbon footprint in particular), and help prevent the problem of urban sprawl invading rural areas. Nobody wants to live in a suburb that covers the whole country.

These solutions have already been found and implemented in developed countries around the world. The problems in the US are ideological limits that circumscribe the forms of collectivist action that are required to implement strategies that work. Singapore, Western Europe, Japan etc don’t have these limits and thus don’t have the problems that result from them. Heck in Singapore, upwards of 80% of people live in some form of public housing. It’s not means tested and there’s no stigma about it.

How we’re currently trying to address these problem is a bit like trying to address climate change while refusing to believe it exists.

Totally agree. However, that doesn't absolve us of trying to find solutions that are feasible within our cultural and political landscape. At least in SF, for the moment, that primarily seems to mean getting more units built within the city, since we're not going to improve transit to other towns soon, nor are neighboring communities willing to build more units to help SF.

That assumes people can be equally productive no matter their location. Concentration of industry and specialization of regions increases productivity.

Side effects of this productivity increase (which is hard to measure anyway), can completely negate the benefits when looking at the big picture. You create concentration in one area and create a bubble instead of betting on a more organic approach.

Isn't that true of any city? Let's permanently shut down the subway in NYC. The rest of the country will benefit from the flood of educated people looking for jobs elsewhere.

I suppose it depends whether a city is a hub that serves other cities too, on the shape of wealth distribution and how the rents are shaped. As far as I know NYC has rent control laws and it serves as financial hub for many other cities. If you dismantle it, another city will take it's place, but one not multiple - that's pretty much how finance works.

I had the same thought when reading the article. NYC became NYC partly because of the need for physical proximity of businesses. For example, there was a time when you HAD to be physically present on Wall Street to exchange stocks.

In the 21st century, how great the need for physical proximity in the tech industry? Sure, it's convenient to have a ton of skilled devs in one place, but does that convenience outweigh the (rather extreme) cost? Is this sort of flocking behavior a cultural hand-me-down from a bygone area?

That said, this isn't an either/or situation. We can fix SF's mass transit situation AND we can find ways of spreading out businesses across the US.

Hi, I read your comment here -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152917.

Are you still developing your software, and is it downloadable?

Currently working on v2, it's nowhere close to a usable state. In the meantime, I'm an daily Anki user.

Great point.

Also worth asking, can a city not just find a comfortable homeostasis? Is it every city's goal to become increasingly dense? Do we measure the "success" of a city on GDP?

I don't. I think the best cities in the world would include Paris, St. Petersburg, Valpariaso, not the manufacturing centers of China or America.

So, define "save."

Paris is twice as dense as SF, and denser than any other US city except New York. Increasing density isn't necessarily a goal, but it's a sign of a healthy city - it means people want to live there so much that they're willing to pack together closer in order to be there, and it helps drive the cultural wealth (food, culture, social) that marks the most prominent cities such as NY, Paris, London, Hong Kong, etc.

Manila, Mumbai, Dhaka? Nothing against any of them but they're usually not what people are thinking about when they're extolling the benefits of density. You also need to be careful with city density numbers in general. For example, the 55K/sq. mi. Paris number that gets thrown around is specifically for the core of the core.

I think you're presuming a lot there - for example, while Manila has its problems, there's a reason people want to be there rather than the provinces. I certainly don't think it would be a better city if you took its ~13M people and spread them out further, especially considering they mostly can't afford cars.

Interesting you mention this - did you see Richard Florida's recent article that says the same thing? https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/the-flip-side-of-nimb...

My opinion, however, is that we should do everything we can to encourage prosperity in all our cities, including our superstar cities. If that means more concentrated urbanization in a few places, that's simply a continuation of a trend since 1870 that has resulted in tremendous growth and prosperity for this country and many others.

>If that means more concentrated urbanization in a few places, that's simply a continuation of a trend since 1870 that has resulted in tremendous growth

That's not universally true. Even leaving aside cities with fairly big problems like Detroit, many of the current destination cities saw significant outflow over the course of a number of decades. The current trend for a fair number of (mostly) college-educated millennials to desperately desire living in certain dense urban cores is a relatively recent phenomenon. (Which is part of the reason it's way outpaced things like mass transit infrastructure.)

If the only way you feel that you can attract talented workers is for some other place to go under, you're not trying hard enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com