Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?
You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill.
Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certain areas they don’t currently live in.
Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like they are the focus because it’s good for politics, but the reality is the diversity is already gone.
The problem of course is the best time to build affordable housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years. You can start today though on a 20 year plan.
You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people, and private transportation will become impossible. The experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live in. There's a reason people push back against growth with respect to housing.
The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one negative feedback loop for population growth, you will ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails) will be divvied up into smaller portions
A nuclear missile fired into the San Andreas fault, perhaps (this is a movie reference, folks, and not a serious suggestion).
It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress, which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-vulnerability.
Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way. And even movies based on DC characters have advanced slightly.