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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Animats·

It's been tried. Huge failures. See Robert Taylor Homes (Chicago)[1], Pruett-Igoe (St. Louis) [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe

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Both you and the user notfromhere seem to be interpreting the GP post as suggesting the solution is large public housing projects, it's possible my reading comprehension is really off today but I see no such suggestion. To me the GP seems to be saying that so much as high housing costs are responsible for at least part of the homeless crisis, perhaps less restrictive zoning might help considering that large portions of SF and very large portions of the Bay Area as a whole are pretty low density, at least compared to other global urban centers.

Neither you nor the sibling comment I'm not going to bother responding to expended one iota of brainpower parsing my post. This is what an ordinary 45-foot-tall apartment building looks like in San Francisco. This type of building houses the overwhelming majority of San Franciscans, while occupying relatively little land:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7759476,-122.4242439,3a,75y,...

Most of the land in San Francisco is limited by law to short, detached, single-family dwellings. Erasing that regulation will make housing dramatically cheaper.

Those are public housing projects. Lifting zoning requirements is a different solution.

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