[pibaker]

> You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso

Well, yeah, a human can only run so fast, but San Francisco is not even trying to run — it's barely crawling. Go to the sunset district, or Bayview, or any neighborhood in the western or southern half of the city and you will see nothing but rows after rows of single family homes — and yes, the car is a part of the family. Replace it with something like new york's west village and you will more than double its density.

> There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at

Yeah, just tell everyone to move to somewhere in the rust belt where the only job opening is in public sector health care that may or may not get cut by the current administration, that will help.

[ieatcandlewax]

I don't understand how people can see San Francisco and think "I wish this entire skyline was all 20 story apartment buildings so that rootless cosmopolitans can have marginally cheaper rent". If you want to live like that, new york is a great place and there is no need to sacrifice a beautiful and historic (by american standards) city for it.

This is all on the backdrop that the only reason people are complaining about this is because they want to pay Midwest prices for rent to go work at Amazon and make 250k.

These companies didn't build the city themselves, and they'll be gone as soon as you turn it into seoul with a higher corporate tax.

[slibhb]

It doesn't have to be 20 story apartment buildings. Start with duplexes, fourplexes, or townhomes -- none of which have to be ugly. It simply makes no sense to zone these densely populated urban areas for detached, single-family houses.

[scoofy]

What the hell are you talking about? I live in SF. Like half the city is literally single family homes. You could trivially double or triple the population of the city by just legalizing the cute, three-story Victorians they have in the Haight city wide.

People live here and would like to build a life for themselves instead of living with roommates into their 40s and 50s.

[ieatcandlewax]

I'm guessing you live in the northern half if your using cute and Haight in the same sentence. Esp when Inner Sunset has effectively the same architecture.

You could feasibly quadruple the population if you wanted to, I guess my question is to why? It wouldn't decrease rent appreciably, and you would have to move out to daly city to raise your family in something other than an apartment.

You could do all this building and ruin the atmosphere of the lower half of the city just for Amazon, Salesforce and whatever other software companies are still downtown to move to some desert and have the rents drop back down to normal ranges.

[scoofy]

>You could feasibly quadruple the population if you wanted to, I guess my question is to why? It wouldn't decrease rent appreciably

You live in a fantasy world if you don't think increasing the housing supply by 4x will do anything to prices. Austin is a near-perfect natural experiment... not that you likely care about good-faith discussion with a month old throwaway account.

[rsynnott]

> rootless cosmopolitans

???

I hadn't realised _Stalin_ had a HN account.

[ieatcandlewax]

My bad, I thought it was just an apt way of describing modern tech workers, didn't know it was an antisemitic slur.

I love Isreal and pledge my allegiance to the Zionist cause.

[disgruntledphd2]

Or Theresa May, perhaps?