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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

Still too crowded.

It only feels that way because your state mandates everyone buy single-family homes with giant setbacks for lawns that aren't even ecologically compatible with the natural climate of the state. And also that NIMBYs terrorize every possible project to fix this with spurious environmental review lawsuits, and then go on to use the same laws to shut down clean energy projects they don't like.

I don't disagree. Perhaps people are voting with their feet.

>It only feels that way because your state mandates everyone buy single-family homes

I'm not sure that is the case. If everybody lived in apartments then there would be more people in your area which would lead to you seeing more people along with worse traffic.

People who live in areas with like 5 people per square mile don't complain about there being too many people around them because nobody is around them.

> If everybody lived in apartments then there would be more people in your area which would lead to you seeing more people along with worse traffic.

To an extent, though the sensation of crowding can also diverge from the actual population density depending on how the city planners organise things.

Berlin feels much more open and chill than places in the US; even the Mitte district whose population density is 9,600/km^2 and which is only a bit less than the 11,313.8/km^2 of NYC[0] and quite a bit more than the 7,193.3/km^2 of SF.

[0] whole thing not just Manhattan which is 28,154/km^2

As with most states bigger than a shoe box (looking at you Northeastern states, there's too many of you) there's loads of open space they're just not great to live in for one reason or another; those reasons range from climate to politics to lack of jobs.

The Northeast was what America was supposed to be, but something went wrong around Connecticut or Pennsylvania. I don’t know what happened but they are where things started to go all rectangle-shaped.

Once it became easier to measure longitude and latitude in land surveying it became way easier to define state borders as straight lines instead of following a river's course or other arbitrary lines. Even in the depths of the madness of the NE you have lines that are "straight from this point until you reach another state line or the border".

Also just getting past the crown colonies and states/territories with poor roads.

Yes, too crowded, except for the 30% of the state north of Sacramento, and the entire east side of the state, and a big chunk of the Central Valley. But besides that 80% of the state that is mostly empty, it is way too crowded.

In other words, the parts of the state with the worst climates.

For example, Fresno is basically the same as El Paso, Texas when it comes to climate, but has outrageously higher taxes and cost of living.

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