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Comment by QuixoticQuibit | Hacker News Reader

People who have vested interests in keeping it that way: NIMBYers. People who currently own homes and want to see their habitable “retirement plans” grow indefinitely. And god forbid we build apartment complexes greater than 5 stories all over the Bay Area. We wouldn’t want anyone’s glorious viewshed of the surrounding yellow hills to be blocked.

Of course, increasing housing density highlights other problems: terrible traffic and poor public transportation. We’d need to make large investments in both housing and transportation infrastructure if we’re ever going to make headway in the CoL problem.

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Yes. People can be generally pro-development and also oppose development that just consists of sticking tall apartment buildings here and there while leaving public transit, auto infrastructure, and other public works as an exercise for the indefinite future.

This doesn't make much sense. Transit follows population. You wouldn't build transit before there was a need for it.

In fact, population has historically often grown up around rail and transit lines. It's one argument for light rail vs. buses; people buying and developing along along a line are far less exposed to the transit moving than in the case of a bus.

So, no. It's normally not a great idea to build a bunch of random housing and hope a total transportation mess--which already describes much of the Bay Area--will hopefully be solved someday.

Yes, population centers have historically grown up around trade routes. Population grows around transit that is already in use, in order to provide services along the route.

But a route that nobody uses doesn't have any surplus around which a population would grow.

A robust city development plan should incorporate infrastructure buildout as part of the planning sign-off process. For urban areas in particular, it's important to make sure that things like road and transit access, schools, medical facilities etc. are able to cope with increased demand. This can include requiring developers to make financial contributions towards infrastructure as part of that process.

You can't realistically expect to create substantial residential developments without appropriate infrastructure, and just kind of "fill in the gaps" later – transit infrastructure in particular has long lead times that make that impractical. In reality, planning of residential development and infrastructure changes need to be part of an integrated planning strategy ad the government level.

What you describe is ideal, but we also have to recognize that the city has limited ability to stop things from getting unbalanced. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle are adding more jobs than they are housing. Banning an increase in housing doesn't create a balanced system, it just shifts the deficit to the suburbs and the road system.

Why not? There's already a need for more of it, and doesnt the cost of living indicates that any new housing would be filled instantly?

That's exactly when you build it if you want to do it cheaply and control where the growth happens. Growth follows infrastructure.

No, growth following infrastructure is the "bridge to nowhere" model. Growth does not follow infrastructure, infrastructure follows growth.

Paying for infrastructure you can't use just means you're poorer and less able to grow.

>Of course, increasing housing density highlights other problems: terrible traffic and poor public transportation

But that in itself is a zoning problem. Mixed development that allows the places people want to go to be integrated where people live drastically reduce transportation trips.

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