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Is Manhattan considered a mistake? I ask because, despite being one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere. Am I missing an unspoken “never again” moment? Is everyone who travels to New York doing it to revel in their hatred of the place?

There’s not nearly enough Manhattan to meet the demand to live in such a place, and I fail to see why we shouldn’t make more of it. San Francisco’s economic power and landlocked geometry seem ideal for doing so.

I don't think NYC is seen as a bad model everywhere. There are plenty of medium-sized cities that are trying to conjure up a high-rise downtown with condo buildings and office towers through various kinds of development incentives. Some because they see that as key to attracting certain demographics and businesses, others because they feel it'll subjectively make them be perceived as a "real city". But in SF specifically, "Manhattanification" has been a kind of bogeyman for a while now.

My amateur hypothesis is that a certain portion of SF residents have a local self-identity in part defined by being not-LA and not-NYC. So a planning proposal can be attacked by claiming it would make SF either more like LA, or more like NYC.

It's just that many of the stakeholders in these areas such as long-time property owners in the westside of San Francisco and residents with rent control fearing gentrification would not benefit directly from new development. Their incentives simply aren't aligned with younger generations who want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs. To break this quandary we simply to need intervention at the higher level. Congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy so when change comes it will come at the higher level than the city.

Oh sure, there are plenty of objections to the process of change. I'm more interested in why Manhattan is a boogeyman for the end result.

Manhattan is a byword for the unhappy worst-of-both-worlds situation where you have premium luxury housing no one can afford or run-down walk-ups where you're paying thousands a month for a hole-in-the-wall; pedestrians overrun the sidewalks and gridlock continues late into the night; there's technically trains but sometimes it's faster to walk; people are on top of each other and you can't find anywhere quiet.

Parts of Manhattan aren't like that, but that's not the image people have in their minds.

Manhattan is a byword for the unhappy worst-of-both-worlds situation where you have premium luxury housing no one can afford or run-down walk-ups where you're paying thousands a month for a hole-in-the-wall

As opposed to SF? At least in the NYC area you have the option of cheaper housing in Queens or New Jersey and a not-too-horrible commute.

What about east bay?

The bay bridge and transbay tube are pretty much at capacity at rush hour (8-10a, 3-7p).

You can drive over the Bay Bridge in 15-20 minutes if there's no traffic. If there's an accident and a ball game and rush hour, you could easily be stuck on it for 90-120.

For those who don't know, the Bay Bridge has a relatively thoughtful design where rate-limiting is done at the approaches so that traffic on the bridge itself moves just fine. Then there are dedicated lanes so that buses can jump the queue.

Right now the bottleneck for bus throughput is loading bays at Temporary Transbay Terminal. When the new Transbay Terminal comes online, AC Transit will be able to substantially increase bus throughput over the Bay Bridge.

The Transbay bus system has many distinct routes that go express all the way to SF after making a few local stops in a couple of adjacent neighborhoods. Consequently, it's often faster than BART, especially if you don't live particularly close to your BART stop. Transbay Terminal moving the SF terminus closer to the Market St subway will also make the transfer more pleasant if Embarcadero isn't your stop.

there's technically trains but sometimes it's faster to walk;

I like to complain about train delays as much as any New Yorker but this perception is pretty much incorrect; once you're going more than 15 minutes away it'll always be faster to take the subway. Commuting from midtown to where I live takes 25 minutes by train during peak times and up to ~40 minutes late night; walking takes an hour and a half.

I guess I can see how someone who visits NYC and only visits Times Square / Canal Street gets that impression though.

Having extensively used the public transportation system in a number of US cities, NYC has been by far the best place to try to get around by subway. Is there another US city where you think the subway works much better?

Chicago's threatens to be borderline usable, but unfortunately as you tend away from the Loop to the vast expanses of suburbia, its utility diminishes exponentially. Still, by comparison to 95% of Middle America, Chicago definitely deserves a top spot.

The irony in all this is that NYC is actually more affordable than SF now.

I live in midtown Manhattan in a renovated studio on the 30th floor. I pay less than my coworker who is renting a 1bed apartment in Mountain View on a job rotation there.

Bay Area cities may have avoided turning into Manhattan but they have Manhattan-level rent prices. Congratulations people.

The Financial District of Manhattan (and Midtown) is the only place like that in the U.S., and most people have been to Times Square, so it does a good job conjuring up an emotional reaction in voters.

> most people have been to Times Square

A lot of people have been to Times Square, but I doubt most United States voters have.

50 million Americans visit NYC each year. Times Square is a marquee draw for tourists.

There are ~150 million (134m in the last Presidential election) active American voters. They tilt older and financially better off, which is also the combination that is most likely to have a substantial travel history.

I'd bet on the majority of active US voters - 75m+ - having visited Times Square at least once in their lifetimes.

50m visitors != 50m uniques.

There are people who never leave their home state, occasionally city/metro are, though I'm not finding a good source on that.

Where did you get that 50M number? That sounds more like the total number of tourists altogether, only a fraction of whom are Americans.

50M looks an awful like the total tourist numbers reported in this article[0]. I still hold the view that less than half of registered voters have been to time square.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/nyregion/record-number-of...

As a European I was surprised how many buildings in Manhattan are not sky scrapers.

Pardon me for appearing to be the spokes-person for market economics, but if "congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy", wouldn't they be self-healing problems?

Do "younger generations ... want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs" or do they want to accumulate as much of the easily-available money there a fast as possible? (The former is available almost anywhere.)

It probably is self-solving, but probably not over useful timescales.

Further - it seems like the people truly making the decisions (i.e., the people deciding to keep company headquarters in SF rather than moving) are in a better economic position than the entry-level people who pay for those decisions in quality of life.

The "market self-healing" here is the development of multifamily residential near jobs and transit, which is already close to legal limits.

What's not available "almost anywhere" is your industry's center of gravity.

A lot of Americans are old enough to remember the significant rise in urban crime rates from the 60s to the 90s. Manhattan was a poster child for crime, drug abuse, urban decay, and corrupt government/police.

Obviously it's much better today, but the image has stuck. And to be fair, the image was mostly accurate at the time. Liberals were so fed up with it they were actually willing to vote for Rudy Giuliani.

I grew up in NYC in that era. Many people forget that the reason for the city’s problems was that it almost went bankrupt due to an exodus to the suburbs in the 60s.

> Is Manhattan considered a mistake

It's not so much a 'mistake' as it is an instant feeling of "no living thing could ever afford Manhattan". It's like a physical manifestation of the saying, "no one ever goes there anymore, it's too crowded".

> (Manhattan is) one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere.

Sure, absolutely. And Lamborghinis are some of the most desirable cars in the world. But if you told everyone in Milwaukee that all other cars were being destroyed ('upzoned' into Lambos) and all Milwaukee citizens would be forced to buy a Lambo or never drive in Milwaukee again -- residents would be freaking out in a similar way.

Personally, I actually like high-rises. I like the look, I like the use of space, and I like the lifestyle. But even as a person with a decent tech income, I could never afford to live in one (in any city, anywhere in the US). And I would be terrified if my city became even 10% more similar to Manhattan, because people already struggle to afford living here as it is.

Try telling families that can't afford $200k-$300k houses that their city should "be like Manhattan" and they hear "you should be paying 1 million to 4 million dollars for a 3 bed apartment, just like Manhattan".

I think we can all agree that there's a relationship between expensive real-estate markets and high-density structures. But are the buildings a cause, or an effect?

And if the reason to restrict density is cost, 1) how do we explain the participation of homeowners, and 2) how do we square this with the other ways people invest in their neighborhoods?

They don't have to be very expensive. High rises that subdivide to 1000-2000 sq. ft. have reasonably priced homes in Atlanta and Chicago, depending on location. 4000 sq. ft. is on the expensive side, but cheaper than a similarly sized townhome.

> no living thing could ever afford Manhattan

I stayed for a week at a hotel in Midtown, in February for about $80/night. Not a great hotel, but there were no bed bugs, rodents, or roaches. That's well below what most folks consider the median rent to be in San Francisco. Plus someone cleaned the place every day.

Hotel Penn is damn near the only place you'll find a rate like that, and if that's where you stayed, it sounds like you got one of the nicer rooms.

It was the Watson near Columbus Circle. The room probably hadn't been redecorated in the better part of thirty years, but I'd happily stay there again.

Whereas the truth is that the only way to bring rent and home prices down where demand outstrips supply and space is limited is to build higher.

"Sure, absolutely. And Lamborghinis are some of the most desirable cars in the world."

Isn't this a false parable? I thought houses themselves are not expensive, but the land on which they are built, is.

I.e. high rises are expensive in US because they are built in areas with high market demand - not that 'a highrise' would necessarily need to be expensive.

I might be totally wrong here, please educate me.

The high price is because there isn't enough of it now. If you make more of it (or something even sort of close to it), the price will fall.

>Is Manhattan considered a mistake? I ask because, despite being one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere. Am I missing an unspoken “never again” moment? Is everyone who travels to New York doing it to revel in their hatred of the place?

No

Manhattan is somewhat good, but has deficiencies:

1. Public sanitation there should at least be better than that in China...

2. Spacing in between buildings can be larger. Or it, better to say, the ratio of public space in between buildings and the building area should be larger. I like the idea "a lot of tall buildings with a lot of space in between" - Vancouver Coal Harbour and Yaletown are good examples.

3. Too much old buildings. Rules for mandatory "renovate or bulldoze" for old buildings.

4. Streets and sidewalks can be wider.

5. Elevated walkways will be a good idea.

6. District steam system can be changed to district heating, as a more safe alternative.

7. Public transport licensing should be liberalized.

8. Restrictions on building height, and land plot to height ratio should be struck down.

9. Brooklyn bridge can be replaced with something newer and fancier.

10. Architectural norms should be less strict, allow for more avantgarde designs

People who are worried about turning San Francisco into Manhattan also don't know what Manhattan is even like! The Upper West & Upper East Side as well as Harlem do not look anything like e.g. the Financial District. Even within Manhattan there is a huge variety of building heights.

I used to live in Yorkville in a six story building in an area filled with other six story (and smaller) buildings. We had a nice park with a public pool, multiple schools with kids running around in the afternoons, and some people even owned cars. It was an actual community, not some caricature of what people think living in Manhattan is like.

John Jay park is so nice. I miss being able to take the kids there anytime of day and have tons of friends to play with. Here on the West Coast the playgrounds are all dry, hot, boring, and empty.

Out of curiosity, how much is rent per square foot?

I shared a ~650 sq ft 2bd/1br. It was $2650. That was probably below median for the area by a little.

By more than a little. The Q line helped Yorkville catch up to the rest of the UES, rent-wise.

Even Hell's Kitchen, where I live, is still primarily composed of 5- and 6-story walk-ups.

The problem now, is that surburbanites vote.

Suburbanites, for reasons I can't fathom, have been getting a free, bonus, car-house that comes with the big suburban house, free of charge!

This car-house isn't fancy. It's just a plot of asphalt. But they get one, free of charge, * By their office * In the grocery store * Even right next to the train station in the most baffling example of all (Park and Ride)

And because places that, 100 years ago, would have been houses for people, are now little car-houses, there's nobody without a car left to vote accordingly. If you try to buy the land under these car-houses and build a human-house on it, you get screamed at in planning meetings. Apparently because you're going to add more traffic (i.e. cars)

I'm not sure how to fix this.

>I'm not sure how to fix this.

I don't think it's possible.

Maybe you can build more amenities close to where people live, and stop people using cars as much as they do. Maybe you can build public transport services more in low income areas where car ownership is lower, and people will have some way of moving around. But having lived and travelled in Europe my entire life and visiting America for the first time last year, I was honestly shocked at how car-centric every single thing was. I spent more time in my rental car than I did out of it. I couldn't find a tenth of the businesses I'm used to having within walking distance of every flat I've rented in London and every hotel I've stayed at in Europe.

And the biggest problem with the car-centric focus on city planning is that the majority of every city just seems dead. Las Vegas for me just died the second you stepped off the strip. Los Angeles died the second you walk a block away from the touristy bits. European cities which aren't built around cars have people walking around in almost every suburb, taking the car out for grocery shopping or going to the bank puts you in the minority in a lot of places.

I really don't think it's fixable in America within a generation, the automobile lobby has decisively won.

I hope otherwise, but I don't think it is either. It's why I moved to Europe (among other reasons).

What's crazy to me is that it can be plainly obvious people WANT this from the fact that the few neighborhoods that exist where you can walk are fabulously expensive. A 2 bed craftsman bungalow in South Park, a walkable area of generally walking-hostile San Diego, can sell for $900 grand. So why aren't we building more of those? Do developers hate money?

Answer - because it's illegal to build them. Because of the aforementioned suburbanites voting that way. Because they should get free (or dirt cheap) sleeping places for their car even if someone comes along and wants to pay half a million bucks for the very same land to build a place to sleep for their family. It's lunacy.

As somebody who literally lives in Boise I think my city is a shining example of poor urban planning, our public transit system is ill equipped to properly service our population which is spread out far too thin making it economically challenging to do so; at the same time we live in a fish bowl of a valley and nasty inversions are becoming more frequent as more cars get on the road every year due to our growing population.

I hope other municipalities learn from our mistakes before it becomes too late, I’m planning on leaving the area after living here almost my entire life because it’s unsustainable.

It's too bad, really, because as you say Boise is quite beautiful. But yeah, there was no plan for handling population growth. Too many people wanted to leave out by Eagle / Nampa, but work in downtown or at Micron. And of course there is absolutely no way to get anywhere except by car.

It is indeed beautiful, which makes it terribly difficult for me to even consider leaving - especially having a five year old daughter to whom Boise is all she's ever known as home. I wish I could stay, but between the increasing pollution, lack of transit options (I don't drive, so this is huge to me), lack of jobs I'd actually want should I need new employment (ClearWater, HP, T-Sheets, Kount, etc. all suck in some way) combined with the political nightmare that Idaho has become have all but pushed me away. Heck, I can't even enjoy the beauty of the area half the time because there's so much litter everywhere these days -_-

That really stinks. It's amazing how many otherwise modern US cities let transit infrastructure linger in limbo. That was my experience in Charlotte too, though at least they've finally rolled out another leg of light rail to help somewhat. Seattle is the only place where I've had the option of living very comfortably without driving, and man its a game changer. Though I don't know if it's my long term pick due to costs of housing. What kind of alternatives to Boise are you looking at?

Portland is my top option, keeps me in the PNW close to family, nature is still close by, housing is within my means and TriMet is fantastic (I used it every day when I was visiting for PuppetConf 2015, by far my favorite out of the major cities I have visited). Seattle is a another option, but I'm really not a fan of WA's regressive tax structure and it's not very close to outdoor activities.

If it didn't put me so far away from my family I'd consider Boston since my brother-in-law + niece/nephew live there, but my daughter is much less attached to them than my mother and grandparents so it makes sense to stay close (at least PDX and SEA both have nonstop flights available to BOS, makes it much less painful to visit than the BOI-DEN-BOS legs with Southwest).

I can hardly imagine trying to live in Boise without driving. Not because I love my car (now that I live in Silicon Valley I'm one of the few people who commutes by train), but because Boise is notably unfriendly to non-drivers. I agree that (every says) Portland should be much better for that.

Thankfully my wife drives, we made it work with bikes after we got married living by Capital High but after we had a child the car was a necessity. It’s hard for me because even if I wanted to drive my lack of peripheral vision on the left makes it unsafe (severe amblyopia as a child, my eye is aligned now but the vision center in my brain didn’t develop properly as a result).

Boise drivers are terrible as of late too, my wife hates getting in the car - just glad she is a stay-at-home mom so she doesn’t need to deal with I84 or the east-west arterials at rush hour :/

VRT is finally looking at expanding their hours and service area but it’s going to take a decade or more to even get to a point where they can invest in a rail line from Caldwell to Boise - I can’t wait that long, traffic is bad enough and the lane increases ACHD has been working on aren’t going to cut it. Pine Ave from Meridian Rd to Locust Grove is going to four lanes and it’s going to get clogged right back up.

If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth.

The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.

Perhaps the federal government doesn't need to step in by paying for rail, but by creating efficiencies (and/or removing obstacles) that make transit so expensive now?

>>[...] Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.

Just so we're talking about the same scales, the 133 miles of the Paris Métro rapid transit system covers the entire Paris metropolitan area[1], which itself has a population of around 12.4 million residents[2]. NYC's population across the five boroughs covered by the MTA is around 8.5 million residents[3].

The last cost projection for the Paris Métro expansion[4] for 120 extra miles of tracks, stations and lines is roughly $25 billion.

If anything, this clarification only further reinforces your point that, even taking into account a hypothetical 5x cost overrun, Paris would still come out ahead from a $/mile metric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-p...

Thanks for clarifying! That’s a lot of new track for one metro area. “Buying in bulk” seems to ring true with many of these expansions.

Or for a more american example: Union City, NJ https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/3/comparing-appro...

Tokyo is also not particularly congested.

It's really not. It's actually a surprisingly livable and automobile traffic-free city for being literally the largest in the world. (Obviously the train system plays a huge role in that.)

Nor is it particularly high rise outside of the center, it’s surprisingly sprawl-like as well.

The good thing about Tokyo is that they let people build whatever they want and somehow it works, there are congested areas and not so congested areas and in between areas and non consistent areas, they just have it all and people can choose where they want to live.

On the plus side, it's sprawl with train and subway stations, and plenty of buses and taxis.

Well, the metro population is ~40 million.

But even then, most of the "sprawl" is still very dense by American standards, a lot of the suburban areas have comparable population density to Boston or SF.

Most people commute by train. We are improving, but the morning commute is something foreigners consider particularly wacky, and not something that they want to repeat everyday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ

I've seen these clips before and always wonder where these examples are on the scale of "average experience".

Is this the worst of the worst? ie- only the few most congested stations experience this during peak hours on a particularly bad day?

Or is it relatively expected? ie- most major stations will experience this during peak hours on an average day?

Station attendants pushing people in isn't that common, most lines in Tokyo have a train coming every minute or two during the morning and that would just make everyone late. However can't move your arms crowded is the morning commute everyday unless you live far from work at the end of the line and can snake a seat. Even then it's not guaranteed (another compounding addition to your stress) and often times you'll be just as miserable as everyone else but with the added misery of the longest commute.

It's interesting to experience once on vacation because you planned to go to the airport during the morning. It's something else entirely to do it everyday in a stuffy suit until you retire.

However that level of travel only happens in the morning. Overtime culture spreads out the number of people leaving after work, even though technically everyone should get off around the same time.

I usually spring for a hotel in Narita for the last night in Japan. While probably not the most charming place, it's a town in its own right and good food can be had so you're not dependent on the hotel restaurant.

Going to Tokyo for the evening is mostly out, since the train connections at night are terrible and a taxi will hit you with 200 - 250$.

Nevertheless it definitely beats the Shinjuku early morning rush hour with heavy luggage experience, which really is pretty fucking dreadful.

I was in a central part of Tokyo while working out of Google's Tokyo office for a few days, and didn't experience any crush passenger loads in the morning. In fact, the trains had plenty of space.

But I did experience a very, very packed train once while I was there, taking a commuter express line out of the city...at 9pm.

I don't see what stops cities from planning keeping some kind of growth in mind though. Rail, Bus systems are expensive but how about changing building codes to make it easier to build higher density near the downtown areas of these cities? And then maybe acquire land (at least) for a future mass transit option (monorail, subway etc.).

For Gods sake don't be like Austin, which totally ignored the problem and is now scrambling to get it together with some very very expensive options (likely to be even more expensive in the future).

For what it's worth, I live in a city with a serious housing shortage and zero political will to improve transit and cycling.

I've been eyeing a smaller city 2 hours to the south, _solely_ because it has the finest cycling/walking greenway in the country. It also has the highest unemployment rate among cities in this country. Of course, that could make hiring cheaper. The dream is that it's a place where there's already low-traffic and an opennness to trying something new that could result in putting in proper, Dutch-style infrastructure.

I do wonder if there are others out there with the same idea. Maybe there's an opportunity here.

It sounds like you would benefit greatly from reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - it provides a solid foundation for understanding urban economics.

"You only have to look across the ocean to see it"

You only need to look across any of the Harlem, Hudson, or East rivers to see it. Brooklyn, the Bronx, and much of New Jersey follow this development pattern, more or less. San Francisco's population would double at Brooklyn's density.

Even in Tokyo, much of the place is single family homes or mid rise apartment and condo complexes. There are a number of huge skyscrapers here and there, but they are not as densely packed as manhattans.

Even Manhattan is not mostly skyscrapers. Anyone can open up Google Maps' satellite 3d view and see this.

> I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan

What is that supposed to mean? I would settle for it being a less shitty Brooklyn though.

Paris has several times the density of NYC as a whole. The latter is far more than midtown.