[xmprt]

What were the reasons your friend gave for not wanting to live in SF? The common reasons I see are often that it's too expensive, there's too much crime and homeless people, and it's noisy and full of traffic. All of these are solvable problems.

Cost is fixed by building more housing and traffic is solved by making the Bay Area less car centric (public transportation in the Bay Area isn't terrible but it can still be a lot better). I don't have great solutions for crime and homelessness but building more housing all over will definitely help reduce it and better social safety nets can help eliminate it entirely.

Additionally, you don't need to build a second SF to solve the problem. In fact, most dense housing can be built for relatively cheap. You don't need to build 20 story buildings everywhere.

[zip1234]

Yes, the funny thing is that because cities allow so many cars in the city center, congestion, pollution, and noise are everywhere, which makes people want to move to the suburbs, which means they have to drive to get anywhere, which makes congestion, pollution, and noise everywhere in the suburbs, which makes them want to move further out...

[acdha]

It makes a lot more sense when you look at the history. American suburbs exploded in popularity after the successes of the civil rights movement started cutting into the ability of white people to live in a city without having to share public spaces with black people. Public pools were closed around the country, tons of people moved into suburbs which had barriers of various levels of subtlety where they could create a de facto segregated school system, etc.

Since that was the class of people with the most money and significant political power, city planning departments were heavily dominated by the idea that the people who mattered the most weren't actually residents for many decades, especially since it's always easier to continue a direction than radically reconsider the approach.

I saw a good example of that here in DC a couple of years ago when our pedestrian safety project was being led by an older traffic engineer who could not stop talking about cars per hour as his primary metric. It was very clear that this was a deeply engrained way of thinking, and that it had never been subject to much critical analysis. When he retired and a much younger replacement got the job, they treated neighborhood safety as their top priority — and since they actually ran simulations rather than relying on their gut, it turned out to have almost no impact on overall commute speeds because all the reckless drivers were doing was getting to the next backup slightly faster.

[refurb]

Their reason often came down to “raising a family of four in 700 sq ft 2 bed kinda sucks”.

For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.

You cant “build more housing” if the desirable housing is a single family home with a yard. SF is out of space.

Like I said in my other reply, countries where raising a family in a 2 bed apartment is mostly due to cost - they can’t afford more space. American has plenty of space.

[acdha]

> Their reason often came down to “raising a family of four in 700 sq ft 2 bed kinda sucks”.

> For the same amount of money they could get a 1,100 at ft home, with a yard, lots of families close by and good schools.

You can't build tons of detached single family homes but you certainly can build higher-density housing with public parks and playgrounds. Similarly, I'd say the lack of families and schools is more of a symptom than a cause of not having the infrastructure to support families. In the United States there's a lot of marketing, culture, and laws which mean the detached single-family suburban home model is heavily subsidized but if you look at the better U.S. cities or many examples internationally, there's no shortage of families living in smaller places using shared public space — even a small playground is going to be more fun than the average back yard.

Schools are similarly prone to this: standardized test scores closely track family socioeconomic status so if you're in an area where there's limited family-friendly housing, lack of areas for kids to exist safely without getting hit by cars, etc. the scores will go down as the most affluent parents move without any change in the quality of the school's education.

[quadrangle]

Seems we're talking past one another. The point isn't that people can afford whatever they want, the point is that people don't directly want car-dependent suburban sprawl.

Sure, people want the impossible: quiet beautiful wilderness where you can also walk to school, groceries, concerts, and medical centers.

But the question at hand is actually how much of all the good things we are capable of having. And we really can do a lot better than sprawlville USA without the only alternative being San Francisco.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/3/our-self-impos...

[refurb]

People want the impossible, but if they can't have it they will make trade-offs. And it's pretty apparent the trade off is "I'll put up with having to get a car in order to get more space at an affordable price".

[quadrangle]

Yes, but that's not an argument for anyone wanting car-dependent life. It's an argument for people being willing to tolerate car-dependent life (in order to have some benefits like affordability and more space), and that was never a disputed claim.

Incidentally, car-dependent affordable space is a farce. It's not actually more affordable, it only externalizes the costs. The huge infrastructure costs to support sprawl-style development are subsidized by denser parts of town. This is laid out bluntly in the articles on https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme and that's not to mention the externalized costs of the pollution of all the car traffic and many other things we could bring up.

In short, the car-dependent suburbs are artificially more affordable. And yes, tons of people will accept car-dependency in order to get the benefits and affordability of those places as we know them.