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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

> Historical preservation is stealing from the future.

No, it is not. SF problem can be fixed with a few blocks. A 35 stories building with 1 bed-room condos can host up to 700-1000 persons. I'd bet lots of SF tech developers will opt for a very small high tech condo with amenities (pool, gym, library...) than the crap that is right now.

Say you build a hundred of these. That's 100K person and more than 10% of the population of San Fransisco. You plot the land 10 miles south of the downtown. You make a fast, efficient and new subway that connect from the plot to the downtown.

It is easy considering that the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are doing it everyday. SF has the money, land and tech to do it.

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Rather than building housing way outside the city center and building expensive transit to it, upzoning around current transit would be a better use of the resources we already have.

A 35 story building's residents will make much greater use of existing mass transit when located within 3 blocks of said transit than existing low rise development will.

Remember that it costs the US $2.5 billion per mile to build subway now in a city like SF. That’s $250,000 per person in capital costs alone to build that subway, not including the money-losing operation of it. SF has the land, money, and tech, but not the political and moral discipline to do it like the Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans.

$2.5bn/mile? Euh, sorry, I don't think it costs this much. "Get your shit together", the world will not wait. There is a reason why I go vacationing in SEA and not in Europe despite proximity.

The crazy part is partly we don't know for sure why it costs this much in the every US project [1]. A deep dive into details shows a thicket of intertwingled challenges [2] that are solvable by goring an army of oxen.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/11/economy/subways-US-ex...

[2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...

What's the reason?

Are blocks of 35 story buildings the best that can be done? Perhaps some of the arcology designs from historical urban design and scifi could be tried instead.

As an aside, the building with the largest floor space is also found in China, the "New Century Global Center". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwc4fL_rpo

Sure. But you don't need that. You can do what people around the world have already done and there is ready tech for that.

Yes, I guess we should prefer to go with tried and tested solutions and never try anything new. Now where did I leave my abacus?

It will be interesting to see which cities do the best in future: the ones that try to house large numbers of people at low cost? The ones that are quickest to adopt new ideas? The ones where billionaires prefer to live? Who knows.

That's not what I'm saying. The best is to try new innovative ideas. But if you are in a hurry and your house is a mess, at least start with the traditional house cleaning and then move from there.

> A 35 stories building with 1 bed-room condos can host up to 700-1000 persons. I'd bet lots of SF tech developers will opt for a very small high tech condo with amenities (pool, gym, library...) than the crap that is right now.

Sure, but you'll induce demand. As SF prices drop, think of all the people who will move in from (mostly) the East Bay. Prices will drop, but not nearly as much as you think without 100,000 units.

That drops rent in the East Bay too so I don’t see the problem. And there’s no way prices in SF don’t drop at all with that’s much construction.

Well, if prices don't drop, those 100k people will be paying something like a billion a year in rent (and/or condo mortgages,) making it probably one of the most high-return investments possible. There's not really a downside.

35 stories is not even that tall for buildings in Guangzhou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_G...

Those buildings are tall and skinny, they aren’t hosting 700-1000 people on 35 floors, I’d guess the number is more likely to be around 3 or 4 hundred, serviced by two elevators.

Tall and skinny buildings are creatures created by zoning. We can build wider and taller, but in the US most cities have zoned higher square footage buildings away with setbacks & allowances based on height and depth, forcing developers to build skinny or shrink the width of the building as it rises.

I’m talking China, not the USA. A big slab of a tall building is something that was done in the 60s but is hardly done anymore. Tall and skinny works much better in balancing residential space with a couple of elevators and a staircase.

Wide buildings lead to rooms without windows which most people don't like.

there is much more pent up demand than that, even 100k units wouldn't budge prices much.

As a rough estimate, Wikipedia says the SF area's population is roughly 8-9 million, depending on how you count. If you assume that each new unit would house 2 people, that's enough to house about 2% of the current population. (I have no idea how to estimate the effect of that on prices.)

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