[Meekro]

Contrast SF's dysfunction with Houston, one of the conservatives' model cities. Houston's streets are clean, public parks seem to have the quality one would associate with private ones, there's no graffiti or homeless folks in the streets.

The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices. You can actually own a huge and beautiful house in a gorgeous and safe neighborhood for under $300k.

Imagine that.

[stbtrax]

And you have to drive everywhere. Also you would live in a state where people give intelligent design serious consideration, and the weather is unbearable during the summer, and a lack of outdoor activities and an abundance of obesity(houston is #1 in the list of fattest cities).

[SirensOfTitan]

Neither the abundance of obesity nor intelligent design proponents affects me or my quality of life in any way.

So the arguments against Houston collapse to: you have to drive everywhere and weather (essentially). And taking the MUNI isn't much of an upgrade over having a car in an affordable place.

[tga_d]

Could be wrong, I interpreted the obesity and intelligent design comments as reflections of the culture. Unless you never leave your house, living in a place that promotes sedative lifestyles and intellectual crutches seems... draining.

[diafygi]

The big city culture in Texas is actually quite progressive. Houston was the first major city to elect an openly gay mayor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker

[bdcravens]

Don't forget the startup darling Austin. Lifelong Texan here, and I live in Houston. I have a cousin who has lived in Austin for a long time - 30+ years. She's conservative, and country - she describes Austin as the capital of Texas where you can almost see Texas.

[robryk]

Intelligent design proponents might affect education of children, which might affect you if you have children (now or in some future).

[Bahamut]

I thought Philly had that distinction about weight?

[Meekro]

Houston's public schools never taught intelligent design, and most people there don't give it serious consideration.

[vidarh]

> The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices.

The far more likely explanation is the almost five times higher population density in San Francisco (6800/km^2 vs 1391/km^2) due to the natural limitations on expanding due to its position on a peninsula - San Francisco is constrained to a much smaller land area than Houston.

[rayiner]

SF isn't dense enough to play that card. The core part of Chicago has 2m people living in an area as dense on average as SF. But comparably dense neighborhoods in Chicago are much cheaper. Part of that is lower demand, but it can't be ignored that Chicago builds thousands of new apartment units per year, while SF builds maybe one or two hundred.

[vidarh]

The density of Chicago is about 4500/km^2 for about 2.7m people. Substantially lower than SF, which will act as a substantial barrier to increasing the cost of land even in areas that do have high densities.

You also can't directly compare neighbourhoods by density alone - many ways of increasing density brings lower prices per unit. Consider high density housing projects with tiny apartments. Others bring higher prices - think luxury apartment buildings.

The point in any case was not that SF bureaucracy does not influence prices, but that you can't just point to differences in planning rules and lay the entire difference in house prices on that with no further justification when comparing two such different places.

[rayiner]

You have to keep in mind that city limits are rather arbitrary, and San Francisco is unusual in drawing them very tightly, excluding SFO and excluding low-density commercial areas along the bay. Meanwhile, Chicago's boundaries include both O'Hare and Midway, and stretch south through industrial areas all the way to Indiana. But the the cheap land in Pullman doesn't affect the price of land in the Loop any more than the cheap land in San Bruno affects the price of land in SOMA, city limits not withstanding.[1] Those properties aren't fungible from the perspective of potential buyers.

The part of Chicago north of 95th street (the southern boundary of the 'El' system) and outside the airports has 2.5 million people (93% the population) at a density of ~16,500 per square mile, comparable to San Francisco. Yes, it's somewhat arbitrary to exclude part of the city in calculating density, but no less arbitrary than where San Francisco's southern boundary is drawn, ten miles short of its airport.

[1] This isn't to say that those areas "aren't part of Chicago" culturally and in other ways, just that the availability of land in those areas shouldn't have much impact on housing prices in the rest of the city.

[tptacek]

Chicago is somewhat less dense than San Francisco even in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood comparison.

If you go through stats per neighborhood and cut off at 20k/sqm, you'll see that San Francisco has a lot of neighborhoods over that cutoff. It's true that Chicago's dense neighborhoods are much bigger than San Francisco's; for instance, The Mission is an SF standout at 1.4sqm, while Chicago has many dense neighborhoods at 2-4sqm (Lakeview, West Town, Logan Square).

But if you add up all the little SF neighborhoods, I suspect you'll get a bigger number of dense square miles in SF. SF also has some absurdly dense neighborhoods (Chinatown, Downtown); they're tiny, but north of 50k/sqm.

It's pretty obvious that Chicago has an inherent advantage in sheer land area; huge tracts of Chicago are residential neighborhoods of bungalows on lots with back yards, which is a kind of home you can get in Chicago very inexpensively, but is priced out of reach for most people in SF. These areas relieve a lot of density pressure in other parts of the city; if you live in a dense neighborhood in Chicago, it's because you want to.

[rayiner]

In the 2010 census, Chicago has 11 community areas above 20k/sqm, with 708k people in about 29 sqm (average density = 25k/sqm). Throw in West Town (18k/sqm) and the Loop (19k/sqm), and its 818k people in 35 sqm (average density = 23k/sqm). That's almost a San Francisco worth of dense neighborhoods both in population and area. And its not like SF is uniformly that dense. Parts remind me of the suburbs where my parents live in VA. Huge yards, etc.

I don't disagree that San Francisco is somewhat more dense as a whole, but I still contend that the density angle is overweighted. I think city planning plays a huge role, not just in limiting densities (given the geography of the city, density should be more like Manhattan, not like Chicago) and also making less dense areas harder to access. There are huge tracts of residential neighborhoods in Chicago with back yards and bungalows, but they're often pretty close to an 'El' station or a METRA station. That takes a lot of pressure off housing prices downtown. Meanwhile, tons of land on the Peninsula less than 10 miles from downtown have no practical public transit besides one BART line. The McSuburbs of DC have better rail access, and that's sad.

[bluedino]

The weather sucks in Chicago and SF is about a hundred times 'cooler', so of course it'll be cheaper.

[dredmorbius]

That's because the weather's so gawdawful hot in Houston nobody dares venture outside for 8 months of the year.

In San Francisco, you can live and sleep in the streets. Any many do!

[dctoedt]

> That's because the weather's so gawdawful hot in Houston nobody dares venture outside for 8 months of the year.

Houstonian here. I've long maintained that we have better weather than SFBA (where I was stationed, off and on, for five years) or even San Diego (where I also spent a good deal of time). That's because when Houston has a beautiful day like we're having today, we appreciate it, whereas Californians wouldn't even notice.

[dredmorbius]

On that basis, there's any number of storm-swept islands or tropical hell-holes which would be even better.

[rayiner]

Eh. Houston also has uncontrolled sprawl and major pollution issues from letting chemical companies have free reign. I'm quite impressed with Chicago myself. The business climate is a lot more stifling, but for example it has never imposed rent controls so housing is a lot more affordable than in comparable cities. Its famous for being liberal, but is a lot more pragmatic than say San Francisco. And in many parts of the city, there are two FTTC providers (ATT Uverse and RCN). I remember 70 megabit was like $55-65. Atlanta is quite good too--I was glad to see it as a Google Fiber city.