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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

"The housing element is important. The Builder’s Remedy is nice, but we want compliant housing elements to house population growth, combat segregation, reduce home prices and combat sprawl."

I was surprised to see "sprawl" called out in the op because that is directly opposed to the flattening of building restrictions and the deregulation that is being pursued by both the state and housing activists.

I thought that sprawl and homogenization of built environments and the flattening of transitions between built spaces was a necessary evil that has been conceded in order to pursue housing deregulation.

So ... I'm surprised to see it mentioned - especially as a pejorative - and it seems incoherent in this context.

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> I was surprised to see "sprawl" called out in the op because that is directly opposed to the flattening of building restrictions and the deregulation that is being pursued by both the state and housing activists

Strange. I understand sprawl (especially suburban sprawl) to be the direct result of housing regulations. The "natural" ("unregulated") trend seems for cities to become denser and for buildings to become higher (e.g. single family homes getting replaced by multi apartment buildings). Density being the opposite of sprawl.

More housing in an already populated area leads to denser populations leads to less sprawl.

"The "natural" ("unregulated") trend seems for cities to become denser and for buildings to become higher (e.g. single family homes getting replaced by multi apartment buildings)."

I agree with that.

Further, I would like to see cities like San Francisco and Oakland and San Jose become denser/taller in just the ways you are describing.

However, the article speaks of the entire Bay Area which runs the gamut from Point Reyes Station to Atherton to Strawberry to Dublin - and everything in between.

I don't live in a residential area and I have no financial exposure to residential housing in the Bay Area - so this is purely academic for me - but I really don't see why our inability to make San Francisco denser means people in Atherton (for instance) can't decline apartment high rises.

That outcome is, in fact, sprawl.

Further, the impacts of that sprawl go beyond the aesthetic: it starves infrastructure advances that depend on a critical mass of density.

Every unit of housing that gets distributed outside of the city center is a missing unit of density that would have gotten us closer to another subway, another terminal connection, another tunnel, another rebuilt blighted area, etc.

Sprawl can be the result of deregulation in a ex-urban, suburban context, but not in an urban context, as the urban areas are already fully built out, so further sprawl in an urban centre is not possible. Deregulation in an urban context enables redevelopment and denser housing.

Additionally more housing options that result from a deregulation in urban spaces is thought to weaken the profit motive for further development in deregulated suburban environments, and thus limit sprawl. Whether this is true I'm less sure, though laying it out as an explanation because it's at least part of the typical environmentalist and urbanist argument for deregulation in urban areas.

Sprawl is somewhat the result of over-zoning for SFH. That severely limits the height and density of the city while sprawl is concerned with the total area of the city (compare an area like Manhattan with Atlanta).

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