Yes, I unironically want 4 million new homes in San Francisco.
The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.
The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.
Obviously HN skews towards tech but let’s not fall into the trap that SV is either representative or the center of “American prosperity” for the average citizen
BUT you couldn’t move the people through the city and bay area with current infrastructure.
Money (in big amounts) needs to be taken away from roadwork and poured into public transport.
Why would any SF resident care even a little bit what non-residents think of their housing situation?
"The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity."
Have you considered that someone's home, their life is not a function of 'industrial prosperity'? And that they're not interested in having their neighbourhood turned into a bunch of skyscrapers hosting Facebook Engineers?
It's possible they do - but it's entirely up to the residents to decide.
In particular, tech people, or even the intelligentsia in general, tend to have an odd disregard for cultural issues and tend to see 'housing' as entirely an economic or civic function (i.e. numbers, pricing, density, affordability) while disregarding the nature of the fact that these are communities and homes. (Witness the fact that everyone on this thread, and in most reference articles tend to talk about issues such as 'price')
I watched in my lifetime the city of Vancouver get bulldozed over and replace with a zillion apartment buildings. The money is nice, but otherwise, it's a brutally garish city, the architecture is thoughtless, it's just another 'pop up' city of the theme of the New Millenium / Pacific Rim. It will not age well. What's more - even as Van has evolved towards this super-high density Hong Kong / New York physicality, costs have skyrocketed and affordability has plummeted. This should be of no surprise of course, as almost everyone in the Western world, more density generally implies less affordability and certainly 'less space'. Have a look [1]. Texan cities like Dallas are considerably more affordable and considerably less dense.
Bulldozing most of a beautiful city possibly against the wishes of its citizens to drive some kind of risky civic/industrial experiment is ... an extreme view.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Bay area housing is a ponzi scheme, and younger families have to choose between their careers and buying in at nonsensical pricing.
Local governments suppress housing starts and intentionally snarl the roads to keep the house of cards standing.
Sooner or later the older residents will be outnumbered by people that moved here, and the reckoning will probably be swift and severe. As you said, it’ll be up to the residents to decide.
A few years back, there were signs in Cupertino saying “no four story apartments”. I agree. If you’re within 0.25 miles of transit, it should be illegal to build (or improve) anything that short. I’m guessing this isn’t what the NIMBYs had in mind though.