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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of those 20,000 word articles that explain why weight loss is impossible and diets don’t work.

Coming to the Bay Area from living in NYC or traveling around Europe, you see a city full of 1-2 story single family homes, or Apple building a massive campus with literally no connection to rapid transit, and it’s like watching someone living off Mountain Dew and donuts and wondering why things aren’t going well.

Like build some fucking apartment buildings and run some trains to places where the jobs and housing are. It’s not that fucking complicated.

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>Like build some fucking apartment buildings and run some trains to places where the jobs and housing are. It’s not that fucking complicated.

Are you addressing what the author wrote because it seems like Scott Alexander says it may be more complicated than you claim. He wrote:

>suppose San Francisco dectupled its housing growth for decades, until it was packed border to border with skyscrapers, and was exactly as dense as Manhattan. In a simple supply-based model, the glut of supply should make rents crash to only a few hundred dollars a month or less. But in actual Manhattan, single-bedroom apartments cost $3800 a month – even more than in San Francisco! If your theory predicts that turning a city into Manhattan will make rents plummet, then consider that turning Manhattan into Manhattan made rents much worse, and so maybe your theory is wrong.

I didn't buy this argument in particular (though the article in general was compelling). Housing follows jobs. It's not as though there are hedge funds there because a bunch of people with finance degrees decided to move to Manhattan. And even if such a network effect kicks in, there's a limit to what that industry can sustain.

Also how many of those high rises are residential?

He ignores that Manhattan housing growth is also terrible. He also ignores that a lot of Manhattan workers live in other burroughs, cities, and even states.

> He also ignores that a lot of Manhattan workers live in other burroughs, cities, and even states.

And this phenomenon is unknown in other cities?

Manhattan's population doubles every weekday morning. Most cities do not have either a 50% or > 1 million commuter population. Is there even any other city like that?

Yes, there are other such cities. In fact, Redmond City has, percentage-wise, an even bigger fluctuation, according to this article: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/05/most-importan...

Manhattan != NYC

NYC is huge and incorporates boroughs which could just as easily be discrete municipalities (look at the Boston metro area: cities like Brookline or Cambridge serve as easy analogues to outer boroughs).

That argument is total nonsense. Manhattan isn’t a discrete urban unit with its own policies. It’s the central business district, it’s a neighborhood. New York City is vast, and the actual urban area of New York more vast still.

Single bedroom apartments within a short, reasonably efficient, rapid transit commute of midtown can and do go for drastically less money.

The world is literally full of cities that have sane housing and transit policy. If you don’t like New York, try Barcelona or Paris as examples.

The Bay Area is just an abject failure at this, and it’s getting worse. My argument stands, commenting on this topic is like watching one of those “My 600lb Life” shows or something and screaming at the TV. Sure, I get that eventually there’s subtlety to this topic, but for now maybe stop eating 15,000 calories a day.

Or, in this case, stop building massive centers of employment that are 3 stories tall and surrounded by parking lots and wondering why shit isn’t working.

It is, however, expensive. Someone has to pay for all of the real estate being condemned for the new buildings (and ideally they're paying fair market value, and not rock-bottom prices). They then have to put up the buildings themselves and improve the transit to and from the new buildings.

NYC was able to do this because they did it 50, 70, 100 years ago. Today, they're just building over the same footprints as they had already carved out. Property was less expensive, and the government/companies under fewer moral constraints then.

It is my understanding that zoning laws is SF prevent people from buying real estate in order to build apartment buildings, no matter how much money they offer.

The laws do need to change first, but that wouldn't change the need to buy the land which will, based on past experiences, involve the city having to come in and force some people out.

Better transit would go a long way, it's true. But for reasons we haven't really been able to diagnose, building new transit infrastructure -- any big infrastructure projects, really -- has become ludicrously expensive in the US. It's almost certainly still worth the investment, but the numbers are so eye-popping that it requires significant goverment subsidizing, which runs into political problems that are hard to get around in the current environment.

The VTA knew Apple of Apple's construction plans for years and yet made no effort to extend light rail to the new campus. Instead they continue to make "investments" in "communities of need" since apparently wealthy tech workers are not deserving of government spending.

If you dispute this, go look at how much unused transit capacity exists in East and South San Jose while places like Mountain View and Cupertino receive no attention. You can't even take the VTA to San Jose airport, because flying is also something rich people do. It got so bad that Palo Alto threatened to leave the VTA entirely.

This is what happens when a transit agency stops addressing transit needs to focus on "justice". If you think anything has changed, go look at the VTA's projected plans...dumping even more government spending in places where their existing investment sits idle. Indeed, the VTA is actually reducing their commitments outside of San Jose over time...its all in their plans available for public review.

Scare quotes are rarely a good look.

Wait. Apple is the most valuable company in the world, in the most economically successful region of the world. And you're saying they're doing it wrong and should be more like Europe? I think your biases are blinding your objectivity.

Being right or wrong is not a 100% thing across all subjects.

It's not Apple that's responsible for building rail, for zoning for apartments, it's the city. The city itself is not responsible for Apple's success either, and many of the residents would rather that Apple had never been sited in Cupertino so they wouldn't have to deal with all those other people.

That's the problem with Cupertino; a bunch of people moved there and changed it, and thought, "now that I'm here it's finally perfect and we shouldn't let anybody else in." That type of planning attitude, of "build it once and never let it change," is not something that's succeeded ever in the history of mankind. But we'll see how long it lasts this time.

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