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Comment by malms | Hacker News Reader

If only people would move to other places when there's no space somewhere. Oh well.

No space? Yet I'm driving on 280 every morning and all I see are green fields. Yet 75% of San Francisco land has zoning rules that prevent buildings of more than 2 stories. What you really meant is: no space for you, I got mine

If you filled every damn square inch of that space with 5 story apartments, your commute would go from 3 hours to 45 days.

Right, the "oh we need better infrastructure first" chicken and egg problem. Of course infrastructure projects don't happen either. It took 20 years to rebuild half of the Bay Bridge. The shiny SF TransBay terminal was barely opened last year and got closed right away. SF has been debating for 10 years whether or not to turn a car lane into bus only on Geary Blvd... Because NIMBY also opposes transportation projects of course. Meanwhile major metro cities in the world build automated subway lines, highways without potholes etc. While Caltrain looks straight out of the 1950's.

While Cali boomers are milking the next generation instead of investing in it, the world keeps moving. If you compare it to a major chinese or european city, Bay Area looks like it hasn't changed in the last 50 years.

Too much local democracy is bad because people optimize for their own selfish interest (like not having to cut some trees in the backyard of some Atherton mansion so that millions of people can go to work more efficiently). For some things, you need a strong government to do what's good for the greater good.

The best leadership solution - in open source at least - seems to be a BDFL..

It works in open source for a decade or two. Cities need continuity over much longer time horizons.

Sounds like a reason to invest in immortality research to me!

Still not the point.. the world is big why on earth would you obsess on SV to the point of impacting your living condition ?

Because, for some strange reason, the densest and richest tech hub in the world — one which regularly promotes remote working, video calling, VR and AR, Seasteads, self-driving vehicles, and things like O'Neill cylinders — has enough employers who don’t want remote working that the local real estate market has gone mad.

Perhaps that's a sign that remote work is not as valuable as local work.

The solution is not to pave over the rightfully protected wild lands but to add a little density to the built suburban tracts. Allowing duplexes, triplexes and 4 plexes would be a good start

This.

580 Westbound is jam packed to a slow crawl, on a 7 lane highway! With people making commutes 100 miles every day! You would think there'd be sky scrapers everywhere, at least close to the highways. Nope. NOt a single building or house for miles and miles, nothing but green and yellow slopes of nothingness. It's such a waste.

With commute distances x10 more than normal and most global C02 coming from commuting, I can't even imagine how terrible this is for the environment.

Oh but don't worry, Cali boomers think about the environment: they're forcing all new constructions (not their own properties, mind you) to have solar panels on their roof - another thinly disguised NIMBY policy to make construction harder and more expensive, under the pretense of helping the environment... When increased density would be a much more efficient solution to this problem too.

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