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by tptacek
4495 days ago
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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. |
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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.