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Comment by starik36 | Hacker News Reader

The big elephant in the room that no one wants to touch is the massive immigration to San Francisco Bay Area from all over the world. The population stands at 7.68 million. Just in 2010 it was 7.1 mil. And in 2000, it was 6.7 million. So you essentially have an extra million people living in what was already pretty densely populated area.

I doubt NIMBY or anti-NIMBY is going to solve any problems.

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The San Francisco Bay Area is absolutely not by any stretch of the imagination densely-populated. At 332 people per square km (859/sq mi), it's a third as dense as Peoria. It could grow by 50% and still be on par with New Jersey, which isn't exactly Hong Kong.

Even if you're just looking at the city of San Francisco itself -- or even just the neighborhoods of the city that surround underground train stations -- the population density is a joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/3qu9uv/i_made...

This is obvious to the naked eye. The mission is all 3 story buildings, for example. For the rental revenue you would expect everything to be torn down and built into complexes.

Thank you, at last a simple fact that I can relate to other parts of the world. That's actually less than the average for the UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2967374/England-is-.... So really not dense at all for what people seem to be regarding as an urban area.

Anti-NIMBY will definitely solve a lot of problems. A lot of the South Bay and peninsula are incredibly under-developed for the amount of people working in the area, and simply allowing taller buildings to be built (among other things) would substantially decrease the average commute and rent of many residents.

>The population stands at 7.68 million ... in 2000, it was 6.7 million.

So that's about a 14% growth rate since 2000, compared to Houston's 35% growth in the same time period (3.4 to 4.6 million). And I've heard that Houston even before Harvey had one of the more affordable big-city housing markets in the country.

Houston is in exactly the opposite situation of SF regulation wise. It is famously unregulated, which did lead to massive sprawl into the flood plains. So maybe we should aim for a middle ground. Clearly letting people build housing communities in areas that are expected to flood every 10-20 years is not good, but stifling construction under a mountain of red tape is also bad. It shouldn't be hard to find examples of sensible growth with reasonable regulation.

Nobody is suggesting Houston levels of deregulation. People want to change zoning to allow for more housing, they don't want to get rid of zoning altogether.

Ha, absolutely not. Other commenters here have already made the population density comparisons pointing out that there is plenty of room, but I think it's best conveyed visually:

http://acme.com/same_scale/?48.84937,-357.65363,37.7749,-122...

What am I supposed to be seeing here? It's just a map of Paris and SF...

That they are approximately the same size. There was an assumption that you know how populous these cities are, but to to be clear, roughly the same administrative area (Geneva Ave or so North vs everything within the Périphérique) has a population of 865k for SF and 2,244k for Paris.

Next someone will say, "But Paris doesn't have to worry about earthquakes". Then you reply with a map of Tokyo.

There are an endless supply of rebuttals to the idea that a place could be more dense than it really is. They’re almost entirely provably false, but that’s not the point: they come from people who don’t like the implication, and they’ll grasp at any straw they can find.

Or more perniciously, to stoke up anti-immigrant sentiments.

Ah yea thanks, didn’t know population for either of top of my head.

As someone living here: this place is one of the least dense cities I have ever lived in.

It’s insane how low density it is for a major city.

It’s only high density in comparison to the usual CA sprawl.

How so? There are huge parts even of SF proper that have extremely low density. Just look at the vast area that's the avenues. Is there even anything at all with more than four stories? What keeps us from theoretically filling that space in with 80 floor skyscrapers if demand is that high?

The Bay Area is bigger than most people think. For example, Sonoma county is technically part of the Bay Area, even though it doesn't even touch the bay.

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