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I might be hopelessly naive, but why not do the new growth somewhere else? The BA is pretty obviously "full" already, and adding more housing of any kind isn't going to make it better.

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The BA isn't "full" by any reasonable measure. See this list of US cities by population density for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d.... San Francisco is 21st on the list, at 17,246 people per sq mi; the next densest city in the Bay Area is Daly City, which is 49th at 13,703 people per sq mi.

By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has 18,297.

There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if denser housing is allowed.

It's subjective, of course, but when I worked in NYC, I was able to commute from an area with a density more like 2,000 per sq mi. Maybe an hour each way. That's what I think of as "not full".

I believe I looked for something like that in the BA and it doesn't really exist.

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