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Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

Haha, local residents in the Bay challenge the quantity of the agglomeration bonus. They believe they're currently at the perfect balance of dense and neighbourhood-like. Presumably this balance was attained shortly after they arrived and any further increase in density would cause congestion effects that dwarf the value of having more people around.

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The problem is more that we are far better at building housing than we are at improving transportation and other infrastructure that needs to scale with population such as schools. Additionally, adding park space in already crowded neighborhoods is virtually impossible.

Overall I think it's clear that growth can largely be a good thing, we just need to do a better job deploying resources in a rapid when when large numbers of people move in. A good example is Seattle, where the population is booming, and even with massive transportation projects planned and in the pipeline, it's certainly possible that by the time things get built it's insufficient.

I think there's something to this argument. If the Bay Area had good public transportation, and not this mess of 5+ non-coordinating, independent systems (BART, AC Transit, CalTrain, Muni, VTA, etc.), then people could live in the East Bay (or wherever) and work throughout the region. As it stands, since I do live in the East Bay, there's no practical way for me to commute to the South Bay or Peninsula in under an hour and a half driving or 2+ hours on public transportation. That locks me out of a lot of jobs, but, in my case, there are enough tech things going on in SF for it to be worthwhile.

This is the same thing everywhere. When I was living in San Antonio, I'd always joke about folks who moved from Austin because they were always saying that "Austin was better X years ago." X being equal to +- 1 year from when they moved to Austin.

Is it not only natural that people move to a city when it is good, and leave when it is not anymore?

I think there's two interpretations of the observation you describe.

I know you're being snarky, but at the same time, you're not wrong. Too much of a theoretically "good thing" is still too much.

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