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Comment by Grakel | Hacker News Reader

Everybody wants more housing in SF, but building up doesn't increase the grocery stores, the roads, the parking, the first floor retail, the room on the sidewalk.

Everything outside the home will become more crowded. You can always shove more people in. The smart question is what is the maximum pleasant capacity? Look at New York, it's unbearable.

Meanwhile there's plenty of other cities in America that would love to have your company and its employees.

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Worth noting that this isn’t mandating more housing, it’s (proposing) removing an artificial constraint.

This constraint is the land use equivalent of taxi medallions: the chosen supply cap is arbitrary and it hasn’t evolved in decades.

And as with removing the arbitrary cap on taxi supply, not everyone is going to like this change. Taxi medallions were a great system for those who owned them. The externalities were borne by passengers and other potential drivers.

The taxi medallions might not be the example your looking for because passengers, other drivers, and residents also benefited from the positive externalities generated by limiting the number of cars circling around waiting for fares.

It’s not clear that the system generated a net negative externality at all, it could very well have been positive overall. Which if applied to SF property…

I very much agree with you that there are drawbacks to increasing density, but SF isn't exactly going to look like Tokyo just because you let people in the Sunset and Richmond Districts convert some single family homes into fourplexes.

Incremental population creates the ridership needed to add transit lines and improve the frequency of existing lines. Also the foot traffic to make more businesses viable within our glut of empty retail.

Meanwhile, Tokyo is somehow more livable than SF or New York.

If you define “livable” as 50% of the Tokyo population having less than 17 sq meters of living space per person. Not just college students…everybody. Different strokes, but still…

https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-sp...

Why New York is so unbearable that 8 million people bear it and millions more visit it. Clearly no one actually likes more housing or more stuff.

"No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

The same could be argued about Dhavari in Mumbai. Nobody is fleeing a place with an estimated 1M people in less than one square mile. People visit there too…films use it as a backdrop all the time. Must be quite glamorous. One out of every 8000 people on the planet live there.

Dhavaris bear it, so it is, by some definition, bearable.

It’s kind of a nonstarter for a discussion about livability to equate livability with a lot of folks living somewhere.

would the employees want to live in those cities?

There's no way I moving to some science denying town, city, or state for any sane amount of money, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

What about an economics-denying town?

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