[gdne]

The problem isn't housing. The problem is transportation and infrastructure. People need to work for a living. They also don't want to spend a significant amount of time commuting to said work. California's transportation, road, and highway infrastructure is completely and utterly inadequate for the population in the SF and LA areas. This forces people into living situations that are far from ideal and creates a fight over housing.

Create multiple ways for people to commute from 30 miles away in 30 minutes and housing will be much less of a problem with people having many more options.

Proof: If people could instantly teleport between work and home no matter how far apart they are, do you really think they would still cram into SF Bay Area or LA housing? Hell no. Housing is the symptom of poor transportation infrastructure.

[YokoZar]

The next best thing to teleportation is living across the street from work and having an instant commute. No public transit can compete with that.

If you legalize housing next to work, then you reduce the amount of stress on the transit systems we already have. It's just plain more efficient.

[tannhaeuser]

Well how about, at least in IT and S/W development, we encourage remote working, rather than promoting childish "agile" work practices where people come in at 9 am for a "daily standup" and mess around by writing tasks on sheets of paper like in the last century?

[pascalxus]

And if that's not a strong enough argument, just think of the climate! All those hours stuck in traffic, each one a car running for 2 to 4 hours a day, that's got to be causing a lot of pollution.

[flexie]

This is true. But the easiest way to fix the inadequate transportation is to build more densely. Build more highrises. A 30 floor highrise with 8 apartments per floor can easily house 500 people but only takes up the land that 4 single family houses with less than 15 persons would occupy.

But the effect is multiplied if this highrise is in an city with many highrises. Now, instead of commuting 30 miles to pass another 1,500 single homes to reach work, the inhabitants of our highrise may only have to walk 1 mile to pass the homes of a similar amount of people and reach work.

[codedokode]

it is very uncomfortable to stand near a 30-floor building looking up. Also, people in the building will have troubles with parking all of their cars. By the way this [1] is what those buldings look like.

[1] https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/09.jpg

[closeparen]

Well we should certainly not make them with concrete faces. This isn’t Soviet Russia, so there’s not much danger in that.

Take a look down any street in the Financial District. What we want is that, just more of it over a larger surface area.

[mvid]

It’s not optimizing for “comfort in looking up”. Also, cars are only a necessity when you can’t walk everywhere. San Francisco is already a city where the majority don’t own a car. Making it more dense won’t undo that.

[SomewhatLikely]

While this is true, you get better return on investment on transportation and infrastructure when people live in more densely built up areas.

[imtringued]

The question is why are there more jobs than homes? Homeowners don't oppose commercial development because it raises their home value but they oppose residential development because it lowers their home value.

The only compromise for existing home owners could be to balance out job and home zoning so that there is no massive excess or deficit on either side.