It is also the entire cause of the "gentrification" problem many are so pissed off about. Nobody wants to move into a poor area, they are forced into it because you can't build skyscraper high rises in the good areas.
"Lifting the barriers" to development doesn't mean that a 50 story residential tower will be built in Central Park West. You are the barrier. Lifting them means that as a citizen, you lose control of your surroundings.
So when a big company, say Pfizer, works with the city to raze your neighborhood through an eminent domain process, you're fucked. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London)
It doesn't eliminate gentrification, it industrialized the process.
Pfizer later sold the whole thing for pennies on the dollar to a defense contractor after pulling out of that town, all that after never actually building on all of the land that was leveled.
I don't think Manhattan is a good example of a place with too restrictive laws. But SF and DC certainly are. In DC for example, you wouldn't see 80 story apartment buildings in Georgetown, but you would see them in Chinatown, NOMA, NavyYard, and other places.
Instead lower middle class black neighborhoods are converting to overpriced condos as fast as house-flippers can do it.
Another solution is to make commuting from a "long distance" (e.g. 60-120 miles) more bearable. In NYC, for instance, subways could be built to NJ.
Faster trains (low-speed maglevs) could be built like what's being done in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR).
Mountain View to San Francisco is 40 miles. Is there some reason that isn't a 40 minute commute?
That would only be your full commute, though, if you were doing deep SoMa to downtown Mountain View.
http://www.mercurynews.com/scott-herhold/ci_26809055/herhold...
We need more of this. I don't know where the low-hanging fruit is in mass transit, but a lot more could be done.
http://www.caltrain.com/Assets/__Agendas+and+Minutes/JPB/Boa...
Anyway, I was thinking more along the lines of extending the 7 to NJ.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_...
Enter the train at Secaucus, for example, then be able to go to Grand Central Station. Part of the hassle of mass transit is that if you need to make 3 transfers, and have to wait 10 minutes at each one, your commute gets long fast. Extending the NYC Subway in NJ would have several benefits, including reducing the slow crawl through the Lincoln tunnel, where almost 7000 busses cram in daily.
"ARC would have cut passenger transfers by 97 percent and taken an average 23 minutes off each trip, according to the GAO. It also would have been financed at historically low rates."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-06/christie-e...
Cities like Chicago have long distance commuter trains, but the commutes are still long. You can take a train from the near west side of Chicago to HArvard, IL (where Motorola built a huge campus and then abandoned it) in about an hour and 45 minutes. But it would be a 70 mile drive. But that skips over a bunch of farmland.
Chicago to Cary, IL would like SF to Mountain view. Train ride is 1:15 minutes. But then you need to get from the train stations to each door on both ends. Realistically its more like 1:45 door to door. People do it.
But living in a high rise is much more preferable to me.
I don't get why'd you make an low speed maglev.
http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-y...
If a bunch of billionaires want to pay property taxes while using barely any city services that sounds like a win to me. We can use that money to provide better services to the people that do live in the city year round.
In my observation the people who are most bitter about billionaires "buying up Manhattan" are the multimillionaires who want to be on the top of the heap.