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San Francisco is a bonsai kitten. It wants to grow into a major world city like NYC, LA, or Tokyo, but its older residents are steadfastly opposed and want to keep it in a jar so it stays cute. The result is a painful deformed mess.

I don't really think city planning boards can control how cities grow. A city is a living thing. If it "wants" to grow, let it grow. If it doesn't, I don't think it can be forced.

Detroit learned the opposite lesson and is recovering in part by realizing that the Detroit of today is destined to be a much smaller city population wise than it once was and they are adjusting and "right-sizing" the city accordingly. They are concentrating on the living areas and demolishing and transforming the dead ones into parks, public gardens, urban farming, or natural land. The result will be a smaller city with a ton of really cool history and a cool "post-industrial" vernacular.

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I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? Is NYC cheap, clean, free of homeless people? No, it is crowded, smelly, expensive, and only livable for the extremely wealthy.

The mistake here is assuming that if SF grows it must become NYC. What if it could be better? There are many other even higher density cities than NYC in the world with much better policies and quality of life. Look to those.

Right? This keeps coming up on the neighborhood FB groups whenever anyone discusses SB50 or any changes.

"We don't want to become like NYC, where are all these people going to go??"

San Francisco could double its population and still be ~30% less dense than Paris is. Let's aim for that. Paris is generally considered to be an okay place.

> Paris is generally considered to be an okay place.

Lol do you know anyone who lives there? It has one of the highest property prices and rents in the world.

> Lol do you know anyone who lives there.

Yes I do..

> It has one of the highest property prices and rents in the world.

It's still cheaper than San Francisco.

But you can get a great croissant for 1 euro.

Union City, New Jersey?

Here's a quick test for you. Next time you go to SF, count how many dogs you see vs children. Then compare the ratio to NYC. Then tell me again about which city is not 'livable'.

Yes, people who keep dogs in NYC apartments are plain nuts.

To a very close approximation, the only place I’ve ever seen a nuclear family with kids in New York is Trump Tower.

In Park Slope in Brooklyn you are in constant danger of being run over by a baby buggy.

> and only livable for the extremely wealthy.

Do you mean just Manhattan? There are five boroughs.

I lived in Brooklyn, during an enormous construction boom, and ended up getting driven out by gentrification as the neighborhood got overrun with high-end condo buildings.

Yea, that sucks. The edges of Queens and Brooklyn are hardly less expensive than most of Manhattan. They're really big boroughs though, and living in Flushing or Forest Hills for example is still quite affordable as is deeper Brooklyn.

But now that I think about it, it really is a matter of "when", not "if" the neighborhoods further from Manhattan get too expensive. I'll agree with you in like 5-10 years :[

No, not that much in the future. I have a friend who has lived in Flushing for many years. Not long ago they were thinking about getting a bigger apartment, but even with the equity they have, they couldn't do it. It was cheaper for them to buy a weekend place outside of the city.

And Flushing is already way the fuck out there.

I think we are thinking of different standards of "livable".

So what do you think is the best city for startup employee/founder?

I fantasize about winning Green card someday and moving to USA

I've lived in New York.

So have I.

Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that?

It would be a significant improvement. NYC is far from perfect, but it has semi-affordable rents (outside of Manhattan), semi-functional transit, and much less excrement.

Nearly all of the subway lines were built many decades ago when construction costs were much cheaper. It’s basically impossible for San Francisco to ever build such a comprehensive system at this point. Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station that doesn’t have any train tracks serving it and was only open for six weeks before it was closed because it was found to be structurally unsound. If they do ever build the train tracks (estimated to take ten years and cost $6 billion), they didn’t build enough platforms for the number of trains they want to run.

> Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station

This can't be anything other than corruption or incompetence. There is absolutely no way it can possibly cost that much. The new One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) cost about $3.8 billion, so almost twice that, but that should give you a scale... and this was done in a city not known for cheap construction costs.

SF's development and planning culture is just epically bad.

> I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that?

Yeah, I'd hate for SF to be a world class city.

It's not now?

>> It's not now?

You are kidding right? The only city in US that even compares to world class cities (London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney even Shanghai, Paris) is NYC.

SF is beautiful and amazing in its own right but world class is different. Start with public transportation to be world class.

No.

NYC however has excellent connectivity to Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. I used to live in LI and my commute was pretty decent and my rent in LI was very affordable.

Have you heard of Boston subway's daily breakdowns?

Sorry I ninja edited with a better thesis. :P

Yes I used to live there. The subway system in Boston and NYC is very badly run, but the city as a whole at least for Boston isn't bad. They do a better job with urban planning at least.

It is a conundrum that most American cities do not really support their public transit systems very well, and yet they seem to desire the kind of urban organization that basically requires a well-run transit system.

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