[ic0n0cl4st]

San Francisco is a small city, only 49 square miles, 1/2 of which is parkland and a significant portion is landfill which liquifies in a serious earthquake. It’s also surrounded by water on 3 sides

I don’t understand why so many HN commenters seem to think it could magically become a dense metropolis like Manhattan or Chicago.

Even in the Gold Rush in the 1800s SF was unscalable the rent was unaffordable. It was always a high crime city. Just read about the history of the barbary coast.

Everybody who comes here purely for money wants this city to be something it just isn’t.

[shuckles]

It could be three times as populous by developing its existing residential land to Paris or Barcelona proportions, neither of which have Manhattan’s physical form. The vast majority of residential land (nearly 80%) is unremarkable single family housing.

[ic0n0cl4st]

Sure, but we don’t want that. There is an incredible amount of space in the bay area which could be turned into droid housing and office buildings. ALL of those places have cheaper real estate, fewer homeless people (the #2 complaint of everybody here) and warmer weather.

It’s 2021 and Covid-19 has shown that remote work is viable.

Back in the day large tech companies like Sun, Peoplesoft and Cisco built offices all over the bay so that people had the option to work at facilities close to their home.

SF wasn’t even a significant tech destination before 2007.

My wife and I are actually moving to Barcelona when Covid is over, under the Non-Lucrative residency permit. If you think San Franciscans have a Nimby attitude and hate outsiders then you should go visit Barcelona.

“Unremarkabe single family housing”. So what, you want to take peoples’ housing via eminent domain and build more of the hideously dugly condo boxes they’ve stuffed all over SOMA and the Missiom?

I happen to love my unremarkable home in the Sunset in which my family has lived for 55 years.

[shuckles]

Great that you love your home. That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be able to redevelop their own homes, but that’s currently illegal. It also doesn’t make your house or its architecture remarkable or worth preserving if you wanted to do something else with the land.

It’s quite rude to refer to housing for people as “droid housing.” What makes you any better than them?

[ic0n0cl4st]

It’s quite rude for you to say my home is not remarkable or worth preserving. You’ve never even seen it. You know nothing of my tightknit, diverse community which cares about things of more importance than ipos and user engagement.

“Droid housing” is san francisco slang for the soulless eyesore boxes containing cramped, slapshodnfaux “lofts”, usually painted a bluish slate grey or salmon pink on the outside, entirely devoid of character or quality.

Thankfully San Francisco’s direct democracy works well to keep this city small. There are many soulless sprawling cities which are seismically stable, devoid of character, flat and inhabited by people who don’t care enough to resist.

[ic0n0cl4st]

3x as dense??????? We are already 17,000 per square mile. New York is 28,000 per m^2.

You seriously think San Francisco would be livable at 51,000 pe m^2? It would literally cost $500bn in infrastructure investment to make that possible just inside the city.

101 and 280 would need to be 15 lames wide each, bulldozing 1/8 of the peninsula. We would need a half a dozen new transbay bridges and tunnels.

SFO would probably need another couple of runways and terminals.

You’re talking trillions of dollars in investment because tech companies prefer open office spaces to Zoom.

[asdff]

Koreatown in los angeles is a bit more than 1/3 the size of SF and achieves 42,000 per mile and is basically a mix of single family homes and 3-5 story apartments over parking. There is a subway that comes every 10 minutes. The 101 through here is not 15 lanes wide each, it's 4. The city still functions at this density, and could probably stand a lot more and function just as well.

[shuckles]

Tripling the density of residentially zoned land is not the same as tripling the density per square mile. There’s lots of non-residential land between roads, parks, commercial areas, etc.

Why would we need more freeways if amenities are local? In fact, we could probably demolish freeways if more people who worked in San Francisco could afford to live here.

People don’t disappear if you don’t have housing for them. Why is building infrastructure in Phoenix preferable to growing it here? There are returns to scale with all of this. OAK is underutilized as an airport as well.

Have you considered that San Francisco is a pleasant place to live, and people want to live here independently of their employment situation? Prices were high before technology employment.