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Comment by Hypx_ | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit of a stretch. You would to rethink how American society works for that to happen. Everything from water use and automotive dependency would have be reconsidered. And since this is earthquake country construction is relatively expensive. It doesn't take much math to realize that building enough housing for a 60M population increase would cost around $10T.

So while this is an theoretical exercise but in reality it is very very hard to see happening under any short-term circumstances.

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Why would one need to rethink how society works? This is how all cities grew until single-family-houses-only zoning swept the United States in the 1970s. And if Tokyo can build skyscrapers, I don’t see why earthquakes would keep California from replacing 40’ SFHs with 40’ multifamily buildings.

Japan has a much better mass transit system and a culture that does not embrace the automobile like the US has. Plus, Japan has far more access to fresh water that California does. And Tokyo doesn't have that many skyscrapers. In fact, for a city of its size it has surprisingly few.

Even if we could magically upgrade every SFH to a multi-family building we'll have very unlivable cities with infrastructure falling well short of comfortably supporting the resulting population. So a realistic and worthwhile path to 100M would be a long and very expensive process.

I agree that we'd have to move away from the idea of every household owning a car, but there are plenty of American cities to look to as an example. Not only did New York somehow find a way to do it, but San Francisco itself was great at it until it decided in the 1970's to make illegal the kind of growth it had been doing continuously since its inception.

In SF pre-pandemic, it was already true that a minority of people drove themselves to work.

Drivers are just much more visible. A bus can transport as many people as an entire block's worth of vehicles.

Automotive dependency should be reconsidered.

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