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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

When I first flew in to San Francisco, I thought it looked like Mexico City.

After a while, I came to believe that lots of attached housing up and down hills is actually a pretty charming street form. On a flat plain, it would be claustrophobic, but the relief creates views that open up the dense landscape. Lots of San Francisco photography emphasizes this.

It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.

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I think your mixing the cause and effect here. Development in Flatland middle America is not constrained by coast line. It’s much easier to build out than up, and land is on average cheaper than coastal cities. This means developments include large open spaces, because it’s affordable. A lawn in a Mid West city starts at 100k instead of 10mil like in San Francisco.

In a lot of Midwest, you can buy a decent house and a lawn for $150K all-in, where the land is under $25K of the assessed value.

That’s totally reasonable. The 100k quote was for inside a city, where prices are a bit more but still reasonable. But once you get into the burbs it’s more about finding a good neighborhood than an affordable price.

Source: Grew up and lived in Indiana, now live in SF.

It's much easier to design and build on flat ground, especially at scale. Things like road grids make sense, and designs can be spatially translated without custom geotechnical work per site. It also makes it MUCH easier to stage construction equipment and materials.

There are people willing to pay the design and construction premiums for a hillside location, but they are not buying developer houses :)

Also, the lawns provide a water buffer that's essential for managing stormwater runoff. The more densely paved a city is, the more likely it is to flood catastrophically when storm sewers overload. Which isn't a problem in SF though

>>It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.

Generally speaking, it's more expensive to build on land with a significant slope. I heartily agree, however, that it results in a much more interesting built environment.

> It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.

I think you've got the causality backwards there. A lot of people still want lawns and flat land is easier to build on. There's nothing about building in a plain that prevents building dense.

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