Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rramadass | Hacker News Reader

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> Some years ago, Bay Area city officials visited Bangalore (on our tax dollars) to justify high density housing in Bay Area. They came up with reports and studies and stuff.

Can you please link to the concerned reports? As a person who has lived in the Bay Area and am currently residing in Bangalore, i am most interested in reading them.

Bangalore is a textbook case of "How to Ruin a Urban City and Decimate its Future". It should never be used as a model of anything.

Some articles/videos (from 2016 onwards):

1) Bengaluru will go down in history as one of the best examples of how we can ruin a city - https://archive.is/4XCAH

2) India’s supreme court thinks Bengaluru has become a template for urban ruin - https://qz.com/india-s-supreme-court-thinks-bengaluru-has-be...

3) Bengaluru: From Boom to Bust? How India's Best City Is Being Ruined - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhkAkZXOD3A

4) Political vultures, real estate sharks and criminals ganged up to ruin Bengaluru - https://www.firstpost.com/india/political-vultures-real-esta... (this is a two-part article with some suggestions for change and hence worth reading carefully).

Began in 2009:

https://sfbangalore.org/

San Francisco – Bangalore Sister City Initiative was established in 2009 to engage Individuals and Institutions in Bangalore and San Francisco in creating sustainable 21st century cities through an exchange of environmental, economic, cultural and research ideas, expertise and resources. [..]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/S-F-sustains-ti...

[..]Next month, a delegation of city officials and corporate executives, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom, will be spending three days in Bangalore, where initial agreements on projects involving sustainable building, health technology, water treatment and solid waste management are expected to be signed. All areas in which Bangalore, India's version of Silicon Valley, have said it could use some help.[..]

But..they came back with a grand plan for much higher density housing plans for Bay Area. High density housing and CEQA bashing and rezoning became policy then. Thats around when all that talk began..

They never did bring back networked public transportation that is the most crucial requirement for overpopulated high density cities.

Americans and Californians have no clue about what ‘high density’ means to resource scarcity and how it will make a city unlivable.

Lost a lot of friends when I tried to explain it.

Bay Area is a mess. PG&E is fleecing customers and it’s a monopoly. Even solar has to come through the grid. Water costs keeps on increasing. Traffic is a nightmare. Public schools are overcrowded. No new infrastructure. The cost of living in all of the state mandated high density cities in the Bay Area has only soared.

Calling Bay Area a ‘mess’ is like naming Tyrannosaurus Rex, “Little Fatty’.

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