Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjensen | Hacker News Reader

No. The Valley is geographically constrained. The mountains enclosing it are too rugged to safely build on. The best you could do would be to permit high-rise housing which would provide some expensive housing to the high-end.

A better idea would be to stop permitting any non-housing construction until the housing to job balance is restored.

View on HN

This is just empirically false. High rise construction is massively cheaper than the current property values. Per square foot, suburban Palo Alto is $1409 per square foot at the median [1]. Heck, even the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and hardly a bastion of affordable housing, cost only 1.5B / 3,595,146 = $417 per square foot. [2]

More reasonable construction of 10 - 20 stories could easily be put up for that cost, even once you factor in the high cost of labor in CA.

1 - http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/ 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa

Most of the value in the "per square foot suburban Palo Alto" number comes from the land, not the structure.

If all those single-family houses were torn down and rebuilt as high-density, then surely the price per square foot would be cheaper. Property rights are pesky though.

> Property rights are pesky though.

Let developers buy them out. Or theoretically, they could just eminent-domain a bunch of houses.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

The Valley is geographically constrained.

Which makes the 40-foot height limit insane. http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-density-thought... You could trivially build more housing by removing that limit. Some background: http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Height_Limit_Revolt_Saves...

San Francisco is not "The Valley"

And now I just feel silly. But anyway... building high-rise housing is probably a good idea.

Don't feel silly -- many Valley cities have strict rules on building height too. Ideally, we'd like high-rise living next to mass transit, but I outside of downtown San Jose, I doubt any city would approve.

This is untrue. High-rise housing can be quite affordable, if built in sufficient density. Everything in the Bay Area is laughably low density compared to the east coast (let alone NYC or even Tokyo or Hong Kong)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com