I'm all for more housing, but at least theoretically I'm on the fence about this.
The example (17 => 1) is "not optimal", but the ability to buy two adjacent strata properties and merge them solves the "2br condo vs suburban house" problem. As in, the notion of "observed preference": that given that choice, people choose the latter, and so -- here's the fallacy -- people "want" the suburban house (and therefore that's what we should be optimizing for).
Experimentation around the 'missing middle' (condo/townhouse with SFH square-footage/room diversity) seems very much a work in progress.
The numbers here are kind of funky: NYC's population is larger than it was in 1950, but population has also sprawled significantly since then. Manhattan lost 300,000 people since 1950 (and is down nearly a million since its peak in the 1910s)[1], but the other boroughs have all stayed roughly flat (Brooklyn, the Bronx) or grown substantially (Queens, Staten Island).
(This doesn't contradict your statement; only that the city's overall growth patterns can be misleading under a single number!)
A recent Reason magazine article described Hawaii’s emergency suspension of zoning regulations as “YIMBY martial law” which is exactly what the entire country needs to crawl out from under its economy-choking housing crisis. A developer who proposes housing that meets basic health and safety criteria on a site within city limits that is already surrounded on three sides by other developed parcels should walk out of the permit office with over-the-counter approvals. They should not face five years of process and appeals. The only way to counteract the trends of this article is to build!
Rate of population growth (migration) is the demand side of the "real problem".
And a slower rate of growth seems to have more benefits than fast growth with reduced building restrictions.
Migration is a very minor contributor overall. Longevity and birth rate are the main drivers of the housing crisis. Boomers squirted out the largest generation ever and then forgot to die.
Intercity/ interstate migration is a huge contributor to the pressure in major US cities. If NYC or SF were 1/4th the cost I would move there immediately, but the value would be marginal at this point.
SF has only enjoyed positive net domestic migration for one single year in living memory. Domestic migration is absolutely not a driver of housing costs in San Francisco. Over the last 40 years San Francisco has consistently failed to build enough housing for its endogenous population growth due to longevity and births.
Arguably the housing supply shortage is a better problem to have than a population shortage problem ie Japan. The supply shortage can be amended with construction. The population shortage ... not so easy. There are many problems with a declining, aging, shrinking population. Particularly the distribution in the economy between the retirees that need to be taken care of and the workers in the economy that contribute to the economy. Many western countries would face similar problems if not for immigrations since birth rates are falling.
I've heard this taking point often, but from the perspective of a resident in Japan (rather than an investor) is really not leading to observable negatives for the people... Housing and land prices are lowering, wages are increasing, and investment in working environments and labour savings technology is high... Maybe the worst is yet to come, but at the moment it looks like an overall benefit for the majority.
Sounds good, but who gets to decide what's allowed? Is a 60 story building next to single family homes OK? No? What about 20 stories, or 5? I'm conflicted myself about this.
Or someone/some company/government should look into building a new city somewhere in America. Avoid the NIMBYs entirely. Kind of like what Culdesac Tempe is doing but bigger.
Maybe if Culdesac Tempe turns out to be successful someone may attempt this.
Huh, I was going to dispute that statement, but it seems to be somewhat true. I’m actually pretty surprised by that. Interested to see if the historical pattern of growth resumes in the next couple years, or if city population has more or less maxed out at this point.
Because there are lots of non-sprawl-y parts of city of Houston, and I don’t particularly care for the sprawl, and I’m surprised so many people are in fact picking the burbs.
Here in Minneapolis the 2040 plan set up standards for where bigger buildings can go, and it’s mostly based on transit and busier arterial street corridors.
Buildings have been going up pretty quickly and none of them seem particularly out of character but density will increase a ton.
More info here[0], when looking at the map the numbers next to Transit and Corridor correspond to number of stories allowed without a variance.
On the whole I think it’s a pretty reasonable plan without ending up with a skyscraper in the middle of single family housing (which we also eliminated as a zoning restriction, any property in the city can now have three dwellings on it).
It would seem like it should be a simple rule like you can only go 1 step up. Like if it’s 50% single family you can only go 6plex but if you get over 50% 6plex then you can go 5 story etc
Why? Do you believe there is a way to replace housing in Lahaina without building any? Do you believe that the 14000 households destroyed in Butte County, CA by the Camp Fire five years ago, who are scattered to the wind because California refuses to permit any new construction, are not enough of a precedent?
We are getting lost in semantics. Your original comment was clear in its intent, YIMBY martial law and "housing that meets basic health and safety criteria on a site within city limits that is already surrounded on three sides by other developed parcels".
I responded with a viable alternative: free instant permit to rebuild what was there before (regardless of current zoning). You are proposing something much more radical.
I'm not opposed to doing something crazy in Lahaina like a building free for all. I'm saying don't declare it a success and start promoting it elsewhere before it is even started, let alone a proven success.
California doesn’t want building near the tree line because those houses keep getting burned down. It’s not like Florida, where you can constantly rebuild on the beach with subsidized federal flood/hurricane insurance in play.
I am not suggesting building anywhere near the tree line, but the state of California should have stepped in and deleted the entire zoning code of Chico after the Camp Fire.
The places that burned down, maybe we shouldn’t rebuild those, or let a free insurance market determine if the rebuilt housing can get insurance or not. Zoning is one of those things that prevents you from building near the tree line or building too much when you have to rely on septic, etc…
There is very little evidentiary basis for your statements. Zoning demonstrably allowed the creation of Paradise, which should not have been built, and strangled the growth of Chico, which should be ten times as large with a bullet train to Sacramento every 20 minutes.
There is a lot of grand father clausing in zoning where what could be built 50 years ago is no longer allowed.
Chico’s growth is strangled by a poor economy, not by zoning. The bullet train might help with that, but people won’t invest in a poor housing market since they have better things to do with their money.
An interesting counterfactual I think about a fair amount is what would cities like NYC or SF look like if they just built tons of housing. Given the allure and success of the tech bubble in Northern California - would their population be a few million people higher today if we just built as fast as humanly possible over the past 25 years?
Like if we just built enough housing to keep studios at $1k/month and 2-bedroom places at $2k/month -- everything else would have been cheaper as well (you wouldn't need to pay cooks and wait staff $80k/year for them to afford to stay) -- it would greatly expand the 'service' industry of e.g. teachers & daycare providers since they could afford to stay.
Bringing SF's population density to that of Paris's would give you ~750k more residents. Bringing Alameda County's population density up to that of Long Island would give you ~1.5M more residents. Certainly capacity for a few million more in San Jose and the East Bay. You'd potentially run into water issues but with that population and tax base, it'd be easy math to justify a huge DeSal plant. I dunno.
BART is struggling to fund it's operations currently as ridership is down significantly from per-pandemic. Bart is already constructing a 5 mile extension into downtown San Jose and Santa Clara. But BART should not prioritize any more extensions after that. It is better for BART to focus on transit oriented development (TOD). There are many good opportunities for TOD. Currently. too many stations are surrounded by low density housing and surface parking lots. Also, it is better for BART to use money to improve operations as frequency is abysmal on weekends and nighttime. Better to use money on expanding service and building TOD before any further extensions.
I think the best way to do that is installing better fare gates that prevent fare evasion. Seems reasonable to believe anti-social people on BART causing trouble are fare evaders and a crack down on fare evasion would keep them off the system.
I’ve seen some supposed attempts to crack down on fare evasion but the people doing the enforcement seem to be intentionally misapplying it to say, old folks and working professionals who have only $2 on their clipper card and who are likely going to refill it when they arrive at their destination (which used to be totally normal), hitting them with $75 citations. Meanwhile the homeless and mentally unstable remain..
The public transit needs more ridership. Hasn't recovered as well as other cities from pre-2020 and is very low currently. Ridership would increase with transit oriented development (TOD). A lot of good opportunities for TOD around BART and Caltrain stations.
On the other hand a self-driving bus route that comes much more frequently than any existing Muni line would be nice and cuts down on the main cost, which is operator labor.
I can't claim to understand Muni's problems, but it occurs to me that an train is a much simpler problem (technically speaking) to solve than a self-driving bus. The former doesn't have to flow in and out of unstructured traffic, has only one degree of freedom, has well-deployed reference systems, etc.
Maybe one day we'll have fully automated buses without any operators at all, but for the time being my understanding is that even self-driving cars still need a tender. The kind of bus volume (and corresponding idle drivers) you'd need to make up for a train's worth of commuters probably takes a heavy cut into any operator labor savings.
Waymo does have a support team, but it is not 1:1 with its vehicles. Trains a transportation system from a different era when there were peak commute times. They run at a fraction of their capacity now.
The trains seem busy enough here in NYC (too busy: they need to run more of them).
I'm not aware of a city on Earth that's been able to obtain the kind of simultaneous density and livability that places like NYC have without mass transit. Comparatively dense cities without mass transit (like Manila) are choked in traffic; changing that traffic to electric traffic will make the air cleaner (good!) but will not address the latter problem.
NYC transit is great. Citibike and the ferry are my favorite parts. Crazy that you can't get a train from LaGuardia to Manhattan. $3.5 billion/mile is a lot to pay for new track! It's yet to be seen, but I'm hopeful that widespread use self driving vehicles of calm, quite, and safe transportation that flows like water.
> $3.5 billion/mile is a lot to pay for new track!
That's mostly paying for the tunnels, not the track. It shouldn't cost nearly that much, but it's not surprising that it isn't cheap either: the tunnels are being constructed under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the world, and the resulting stations are significantly larger than others in the system.
And note: if you think that's expensive, you won't believe what it costs to repair highways in NYC[1].
Unfortunately, MUNI is not grade separated and the Muni trains do have to interface with traffic. Still easier than cars but similar challenges. And unlike the private industry in SF, the public agencies seem allergic to technology.
What's not sustainable? Low infrastructure cost because they don't use expensive and custom rails. Infinitely flexible because they connect any two points on any schedule. Low operating cost because there are no human operators and they are mainly based on commodity vehicles. Rides could be subsidized for low income and would be a huge timesaver for things like grocery trips. They don't currently work well for extreme surge like concerts and sporting events, but there could still be custom shuttle buses for that. The technology isn't here yet, and it sucks that only one vendor is close, but it seems very promising.
That "infinite flexibility" is the road network's greatest advantage and greatest curse: you can connect any two points because the network is built for individuals in private vehicles, not mass movements.
Self-driving cars may make our highways more efficient, but they can't change the basic fact that a road with individual-sized cars on it carries far fewer people per square foot than mass transit does.
(And note: we currently subsidize the hell out of our road network, in a way that's far less obvious to the public mind than our comparatively light subsidization of mass transit. It remains to be seen whether the average car trip is actually net cheaper.)
That's a good reminder that there are a lot of hidden subsidies for roads too.
I imagine that we'll always have roads, but rails systems are optional, so the cost of roads is a given. Widespread use of self-driving vehicles should dramatically reduce the amount of lanes that need to be maintained though.
I'm familiar with the arguments about rail capacity vs cars, but I live by main road and train lines. The road is in use 24 hours a day, and the rails are mainly idle. My dream scenario is self-driving vehicles become ubiquitous and we replace all commuter rails systems with foot and bike paths.
> The road is in use 24 hours a day, and the rails are mainly idle.
This is a measurement error: you might see 300 cars in an hour and only two trains, but those 300 cars are carrying 600 people while the trains are carrying 1500 each. The road appears busy and the rail system idle, but the exact opposite is true in terms of volume of people moved.
(It could also be true that the train system isn't well utilized in your area, but the fundamental point about scale and measurement is the same.)
As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the main cost of mass transit is actually labor, not the rails (or even trains) themselves. The US is somewhat behind the times in realizing this; just about everywhere I've been in Europe has healthy mass transit systems that run cheaper and more reliably due to increased automation.
Absolutely. I don't know how many cars/trucks/people are using the road (it's a highway, so it's a lot). I do know that the trains are mainly empty, just 40% of their pre-COVID usage. (Chicago)
SF public transit is actually decent. It was just a little pricey especially if you had to combine BART with Muni. And some people had a bad view of it as dangerous.
New housing is pretty much the only valid reason to build public transit.
Good transit is expensive. The people who already live in the area are not willing to pay enough to justify the investment. They have already figured out their lives without the transit. If you want transit, you have to build it primarily for new residents. And the costs should be covered by increased land value, usually either by taxing the land, selling it, or developing it. Trying to cover investment costs with fares just destroys the value of the investment.
The population would absolutely be higher and the economy would be better. More startups and more people willing to work for startups since housing costs are less of a burden.
I'm saying that 9/10 startups in Chicago could move 70 miles north to Milwaukee, pay less in taxes, offer their employees a shorter commute and a more favorable housing market, and position themselves in the "internship sphere" of three Big 10 universities instead of two, but they don't. The reasons for that trace back to the basic fact that there are fewer people in Milwaukee, fewer people who have been there, and thus, fewer people willing to move there sight unseen. Not to mention the perception of status that comes with the California tech valleys. I use Milwaukee as an example, but the same logic applies to Detroit and Minneapolis, among others.
There are benefits from economies of agglomeration that are lost when relocating to distant areas for affordability which is the main reason the midwest or other parts of the country haven't been able to scale up startup economies. If everyone (founders, investors, employees, customers, vendors, etc.) are in one area, it facilitates better collaborations and also increases chances of random collisions. Employers get wider pool of talent; employees get greater options of employers that they can bounce around without having to relocate.
Edit (meant to add): I believe these factors explain this better than simply reputation or prestige.
You have a point, to be sure. For context, I live in Milwaukee and work for a Chicago startup. I recently found out that my current CEO is friends with someone I used to work with at a previous Chicago startup.
For fully or mostly-remote workplaces, to what extent does "economies of agglomeration" affect that company, relative to a more traditional workplace?
Also, in my experience, startups don't benefit from a plain ol' big talent pool in the same way that larger companies do. Startups require a very particular kind of talent, one whose supply is very limited no matter where you go, and doesn't correlate solely with total population. Here in the midwest, that supply seems to be directly correlated with proximity to the big engineering schools, which is why I mentioned the Big 10 (MSOE is also held in very high regard regionally, but again: prestige matters). Every Chicago startup I'm aware of has some tie to Northwestern, for example.
Not saying it applies to everyone. I'm sure they matter to some. But i'd also bet there are many people that would launch their own start up or work for one if housing costs were less of a concern.
FLOSS power the world IT essentially, and was born distributed, with typically 100% remote developers since most projects do not even have a forma HQ.
Density for IT is the least thing we need, communication, like classic Usenet, yes, but not physical density.
For economy in general beware: economy of scale works with a good but not too much density. If you densify too much the model collapse being unable to evolve at reasonable costs. Nowadays since we dream a near future with cars substituted by flying drones the right density is less than any modern city typical density and the right scale is being spread over vast territory.
Only few, industrial, activities demand higher density and localization.
nah, density and scale go hand-in-hand, but broken ass-backwards governance prevents adoption of techniques appropriate for the density to provide the services at scale.
it's ridiculous that we are still not building housing and transportation at scale. the automotive industry can churn out complete series of vintages faster than the construction industry sends an email.
housing is still this "my house my castle", which is fine until everyone starts to fight for, conquer and eventually annex the neighborhood.
the same sorry ass techniques are used to build housing as half a century ago, when total population was a billion less, when not 70% of the population lived in cities, and so on.
keeping housing density very high leaves space for other things around housing, eg. hospitals, schools, or ... ugh. parks. makes a lot of mixed development suddenly becomes economically worthwhile.
Theres a NYC nonprofit named Picture The Homeless that contends that if all the boarded up apartment buildings that have open storefronts on the first floor were lawfully required to open their stock to renters, rent in NYC could go down significantly just because of the sheer number of these apartments that are excluded from the market, to the point that there would be significantly less need to build new housing units.
Increasing utilization requires a massive effort and cannot solve the crisis. Vacancy rates are currently at all-time lows. NYC's vacancy rate is the lowest in the nation, and the lowest ever measured in that city. To intuitively understand why increasing occupancy from. 97% to 98% is difficult, try filling your refrigerator to 97% by volume and then try putting one more thing in there.
Counterintuitively the way to attack the housing crisis is to increase vacancy. 10% is a robust vacancy rate that allows the market to function. New buildings are vacant by nature, so building new buildings until the vacancy rate hits 10% is the way to go. The market will clear, rents will decline, developers will make reasonable profits for providing a needed service and landlords will get kicked in the teeth, which is right and proper.
I wouldn’t be surprised (though I could be wrong!) if more housing stock and a larger population in SF/the bay proper would mean a commensurate decrease in the population in the suburbs and exurbs. There are a lot of lower wage workers who now commute from Stockton/Pittsburg/the Sacramento area who I’m sure would prefer to be closer to their jobs.
Counter example - the suburbs around NYC have not suffered population loss to Manhattan. Though unlike the bay area, there is an extensive public transport system to get people into the city.
But let's assume the whole thing is a money blackbox, you must realize you cannot output that much good from the little change "build build build" without inputting something.
This something, the tax rate increase, or any other way to finance this whole operation like an increase in loan risk by large builders, would probably be phenomenal enough to make it completely off putting to most workers. People are not rational long term altruist thinkers: they want the best deal possible, and it's not to make SF more affordable in 30 years by over financing house construction today before they finally die of proud exhaustion like "I contributed to cheap rents for my descendants".
I prefer natural selection: you talked of Paris, the city is half stable now. It's always been the hyper center of France, we've always had higher inflow than outflow, prices have raised slowly every year since 1800 at a higher pace than wages, and now it's going down. We're developing stuff elsewhere, not only the outskirt but other part of France entirely that people would dream to move to after a stay in Paris.
The alternative you propose is to build the city I live in now: Hong Kong. Here, since we can't escape anywhere, all we can do is build build build. Our long inflow of desperate Chinese has made construction efficient, fast and cheap enough. Price are more commensurate with wages than Paris, even if they can appear absurd to the poor people in America. But, do you want to live like me in a small 2-room flat on the 44th floor of a giant tower surrounded by other towers ? That's the future you propose, eventually. Lots of homes in the single most important city, the dream !
I like the alternative: to just jump elsewhere and start over. Let the people starve due to mortgages in California and build a new hub in Ohio or whatever, they'll figure it out eventually.
The economy is not a zero sum black box. With a better allocation of resources, (the density of paris in the most desirable areas) it can actually result in lower taxes, shorter commutes, etc.
But why oh why does everything need to be in Paris ? We're not retards in Lyon, Rouen or Bordeau. Even Marseille can handle some stuff. See the point ? Why waste to hyper densify one crappy city/area when we could spread development keeping low density ?
Or maybe I guess I mean: low density provide more benefit to more people than hyper density, the only future proposed by OP, will ever compensate due to "low rent" (which will explode once there's not one single meter square free left), because once you chose SF as the only IT hub that ever will be and commit for 25 years of future development, then no IT worker will ever think of any other city and will move there faster than you're building anyway. Just like Paris for French people: the only place I wanted to go after Uni was there, because that's the only place with interesting/important/paid jobs: isn't THIS the issue ?
Transportation costs in hyper dense cities are not cheap either. Tokyo spends a lot of money on new metro infrastructure, they have a world class system but it isn’t cheaper per person than what they have in other smaller cities.
I live in NY metro and my 2 bed apartment has $2k/mo city tax. As cities get denser costs get more expensive. I replaced my HVAC, hot water heater and rebuilt a bathroom and it cost me the same price I could buy a whole detached house in Chicago.
Urban sprawl Houston style is the only way to keep costs low as you suggest, and I wouldn't want to live there.
New York has been getting less dense though, which is the point of TFA. As demand has outstripped supply, prices of real estate and everything consequent to that (labor, professional services, retail goods, transportation etc.) will increase in price as well.
"Costs" in Houston don't look so much better than NYC when you add the significantly higher transportation expenses to their lower rents. Also, local salaries are a third less, so you have that much less money for everything.
Of all the cities that have been rapidly expanding housing, the zero of them have become more affordable. I used to think market rate housing would bring down prices but it has proven to not. What we need are affordable housing units, price caps, rent as percentage of income, rent control, and things along those lines. Singapore and Vienna have done a good job but 70% of all housing in Vienna is government owned and 80% of all housing in Singapore was built by the government.
Cities that rapidly expand housing are much, much cheaper than cities that don't. Houston vs Austin, Chicago vs. new york, phoenix vs LA. Yes all metros are getting more expensive, that's because there are no cities in this country that are building faster than people are arriving.
Forget about the housing market, take a step back for a second and try to rationalize the idea of cramming millions of people into a small area to work on their computers together? I don't think so.
Computers didn't exist when Manhattan grew, there were natural reasons for people to cluster together and live on top of eachother. Now, not so much.
Related -- Toronto, which has been building like crazy for many years -- lost over 7,000 housing units in a recent 5 year span. Despite many new residential towers being built.
This, of course, has been disastrous for the cost of housing, which has ballooned.
The solution isn’t to celebrate how families need to live in tiny apartments. The solution is to expand new housing outside of the main areas into new developments, and create new business centers or allow for remote work.
I was struck by the home / house contrast in the original headline but left as is because, in American English, home is a nice way of saying where someone lives regardless of the type of structure, apartment or house or even a houseboat. The flip side is someone can be homeless and living in their car or a shelter, neither would typically be thought of as homes.
Just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.
The opposite process also happens, though... not just a 3- and 4-story residential buildings demolished for large residential towers (plenty of that in NYC) but single-family brownstones carved up into smaller dwelling units.
The map caption "Conversions Have Erased Some Gains in NYC's Housing Stock" would make a less deceptive headline. The map shows data from a defined timespan ("between 2010 and 2021") and shows that there's not a single community district that hasn't added housing units. The headline, meanwhile, refers to a vague "70-plus years" timeframe. That's long enough that you could probably find hundreds of buildings that have bounced between single- and multi-family several times.
And in fact the underlying research characterizes any building that was ever recorded as multifamily and currently isn't as a "loss." I fear it risks romanticizing the 20th century's cramped tenements.
(And again, just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.)
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here that is being lost. The second paragraph says:
"Take for example 34 E. 68th St. in Manhattan: The 1879 row house, located in the Upper East Side Historic District, once housed 17 separate apartments, according to property records. Now, it is a 9,600-square-foot single-family mansion after changing hands for $11.5 million in 2011 and a subsequent gut renovation."
1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today.
As a single person living in 55 m^2 bedroon + decent kitchen + small bathroom(including waching machine) + large living room. I don't see much issue with that floor space. Probably could be even enough for two people.
It is reasonable trade to live affordably in a city.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadThe example (17 => 1) is "not optimal", but the ability to buy two adjacent strata properties and merge them solves the "2br condo vs suburban house" problem. As in, the notion of "observed preference": that given that choice, people choose the latter, and so -- here's the fallacy -- people "want" the suburban house (and therefore that's what we should be optimizing for).
Experimentation around the 'missing middle' (condo/townhouse with SFH square-footage/room diversity) seems very much a work in progress.
(This doesn't contradict your statement; only that the city's overall growth patterns can be misleading under a single number!)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan#Demographics
Politicians like to point at foreign investment, empty houses, immigration, anything except acknowledge and fix the real problem.
May cities that pursue that strategy suffer the exodus of people, wealth, and jobs that they deserve.
Which part of "martial law" is unclear :-) The whole point is to abrogate local powers.
Maybe if Culdesac Tempe turns out to be successful someone may attempt this.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/...
Buildings have been going up pretty quickly and none of them seem particularly out of character but density will increase a ton.
More info here[0], when looking at the map the numbers next to Transit and Corridor correspond to number of stories allowed without a variance.
On the whole I think it’s a pretty reasonable plan without ending up with a skyscraper in the middle of single family housing (which we also eliminated as a zoning restriction, any property in the city can now have three dwellings on it).
[0]: https://minneapolis2040.com/implementation/built-form-regula...
They definitely should suspend permitting to expedite the process, whichever way they choose to go.
https://www.hawaiibusiness.com/hawaii-building-permit-delays...
A common belief, but throughout America the zoning regulations prevent the construction of that which already exists.
I responded with a viable alternative: free instant permit to rebuild what was there before (regardless of current zoning). You are proposing something much more radical.
I'm not opposed to doing something crazy in Lahaina like a building free for all. I'm saying don't declare it a success and start promoting it elsewhere before it is even started, let alone a proven success.
Chico’s growth is strangled by a poor economy, not by zoning. The bullet train might help with that, but people won’t invest in a poor housing market since they have better things to do with their money.
Like if we just built enough housing to keep studios at $1k/month and 2-bedroom places at $2k/month -- everything else would have been cheaper as well (you wouldn't need to pay cooks and wait staff $80k/year for them to afford to stay) -- it would greatly expand the 'service' industry of e.g. teachers & daycare providers since they could afford to stay.
Bringing SF's population density to that of Paris's would give you ~750k more residents. Bringing Alameda County's population density up to that of Long Island would give you ~1.5M more residents. Certainly capacity for a few million more in San Jose and the East Bay. You'd potentially run into water issues but with that population and tax base, it'd be easy math to justify a huge DeSal plant. I dunno.
Maybe one day we'll have fully automated buses without any operators at all, but for the time being my understanding is that even self-driving cars still need a tender. The kind of bus volume (and corresponding idle drivers) you'd need to make up for a train's worth of commuters probably takes a heavy cut into any operator labor savings.
I'm not aware of a city on Earth that's been able to obtain the kind of simultaneous density and livability that places like NYC have without mass transit. Comparatively dense cities without mass transit (like Manila) are choked in traffic; changing that traffic to electric traffic will make the air cleaner (good!) but will not address the latter problem.
That's mostly paying for the tunnels, not the track. It shouldn't cost nearly that much, but it's not surprising that it isn't cheap either: the tunnels are being constructed under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the world, and the resulting stations are significantly larger than others in the system.
And note: if you think that's expensive, you won't believe what it costs to repair highways in NYC[1].
[1]: https://ny1.com/nyc/brooklyn/news/2020/02/25/city-council-fl...
Self-driving cars may make our highways more efficient, but they can't change the basic fact that a road with individual-sized cars on it carries far fewer people per square foot than mass transit does.
(And note: we currently subsidize the hell out of our road network, in a way that's far less obvious to the public mind than our comparatively light subsidization of mass transit. It remains to be seen whether the average car trip is actually net cheaper.)
I imagine that we'll always have roads, but rails systems are optional, so the cost of roads is a given. Widespread use of self-driving vehicles should dramatically reduce the amount of lanes that need to be maintained though.
I'm familiar with the arguments about rail capacity vs cars, but I live by main road and train lines. The road is in use 24 hours a day, and the rails are mainly idle. My dream scenario is self-driving vehicles become ubiquitous and we replace all commuter rails systems with foot and bike paths.
This is a measurement error: you might see 300 cars in an hour and only two trains, but those 300 cars are carrying 600 people while the trains are carrying 1500 each. The road appears busy and the rail system idle, but the exact opposite is true in terms of volume of people moved.
(It could also be true that the train system isn't well utilized in your area, but the fundamental point about scale and measurement is the same.)
As others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the main cost of mass transit is actually labor, not the rails (or even trains) themselves. The US is somewhat behind the times in realizing this; just about everywhere I've been in Europe has healthy mass transit systems that run cheaper and more reliably due to increased automation.
Good transit is expensive. The people who already live in the area are not willing to pay enough to justify the investment. They have already figured out their lives without the transit. If you want transit, you have to build it primarily for new residents. And the costs should be covered by increased land value, usually either by taxing the land, selling it, or developing it. Trying to cover investment costs with fares just destroys the value of the investment.
Reputation matters. Stereotypes matter.
This is very oblique. What do you mean?
Edit (meant to add): I believe these factors explain this better than simply reputation or prestige.
For fully or mostly-remote workplaces, to what extent does "economies of agglomeration" affect that company, relative to a more traditional workplace?
Also, in my experience, startups don't benefit from a plain ol' big talent pool in the same way that larger companies do. Startups require a very particular kind of talent, one whose supply is very limited no matter where you go, and doesn't correlate solely with total population. Here in the midwest, that supply seems to be directly correlated with proximity to the big engineering schools, which is why I mentioned the Big 10 (MSOE is also held in very high regard regionally, but again: prestige matters). Every Chicago startup I'm aware of has some tie to Northwestern, for example.
Density for IT is the least thing we need, communication, like classic Usenet, yes, but not physical density.
For economy in general beware: economy of scale works with a good but not too much density. If you densify too much the model collapse being unable to evolve at reasonable costs. Nowadays since we dream a near future with cars substituted by flying drones the right density is less than any modern city typical density and the right scale is being spread over vast territory.
Only few, industrial, activities demand higher density and localization.
it's ridiculous that we are still not building housing and transportation at scale. the automotive industry can churn out complete series of vintages faster than the construction industry sends an email.
housing is still this "my house my castle", which is fine until everyone starts to fight for, conquer and eventually annex the neighborhood.
the same sorry ass techniques are used to build housing as half a century ago, when total population was a billion less, when not 70% of the population lived in cities, and so on.
keeping housing density very high leaves space for other things around housing, eg. hospitals, schools, or ... ugh. parks. makes a lot of mixed development suddenly becomes economically worthwhile.
Counterintuitively the way to attack the housing crisis is to increase vacancy. 10% is a robust vacancy rate that allows the market to function. New buildings are vacant by nature, so building new buildings until the vacancy rate hits 10% is the way to go. The market will clear, rents will decline, developers will make reasonable profits for providing a needed service and landlords will get kicked in the teeth, which is right and proper.
This something, the tax rate increase, or any other way to finance this whole operation like an increase in loan risk by large builders, would probably be phenomenal enough to make it completely off putting to most workers. People are not rational long term altruist thinkers: they want the best deal possible, and it's not to make SF more affordable in 30 years by over financing house construction today before they finally die of proud exhaustion like "I contributed to cheap rents for my descendants".
I prefer natural selection: you talked of Paris, the city is half stable now. It's always been the hyper center of France, we've always had higher inflow than outflow, prices have raised slowly every year since 1800 at a higher pace than wages, and now it's going down. We're developing stuff elsewhere, not only the outskirt but other part of France entirely that people would dream to move to after a stay in Paris.
The alternative you propose is to build the city I live in now: Hong Kong. Here, since we can't escape anywhere, all we can do is build build build. Our long inflow of desperate Chinese has made construction efficient, fast and cheap enough. Price are more commensurate with wages than Paris, even if they can appear absurd to the poor people in America. But, do you want to live like me in a small 2-room flat on the 44th floor of a giant tower surrounded by other towers ? That's the future you propose, eventually. Lots of homes in the single most important city, the dream !
I like the alternative: to just jump elsewhere and start over. Let the people starve due to mortgages in California and build a new hub in Ohio or whatever, they'll figure it out eventually.
Or maybe I guess I mean: low density provide more benefit to more people than hyper density, the only future proposed by OP, will ever compensate due to "low rent" (which will explode once there's not one single meter square free left), because once you chose SF as the only IT hub that ever will be and commit for 25 years of future development, then no IT worker will ever think of any other city and will move there faster than you're building anyway. Just like Paris for French people: the only place I wanted to go after Uni was there, because that's the only place with interesting/important/paid jobs: isn't THIS the issue ?
Low density development isn't sustainable because it greatly increases transportation costs, long term maintenance costs aren't sustainable
Urban sprawl Houston style is the only way to keep costs low as you suggest, and I wouldn't want to live there.
"Costs" in Houston don't look so much better than NYC when you add the significantly higher transportation expenses to their lower rents. Also, local salaries are a third less, so you have that much less money for everything.
Forget about the housing market, take a step back for a second and try to rationalize the idea of cramming millions of people into a small area to work on their computers together? I don't think so.
Computers didn't exist when Manhattan grew, there were natural reasons for people to cluster together and live on top of eachother. Now, not so much.
This, of course, has been disastrous for the cost of housing, which has ballooned.
https://www.thestar.com/business/despite-downtown-constructi...
The opposite process also happens, though... not just a 3- and 4-story residential buildings demolished for large residential towers (plenty of that in NYC) but single-family brownstones carved up into smaller dwelling units.
The map caption "Conversions Have Erased Some Gains in NYC's Housing Stock" would make a less deceptive headline. The map shows data from a defined timespan ("between 2010 and 2021") and shows that there's not a single community district that hasn't added housing units. The headline, meanwhile, refers to a vague "70-plus years" timeframe. That's long enough that you could probably find hundreds of buildings that have bounced between single- and multi-family several times.
And in fact the underlying research characterizes any building that was ever recorded as multifamily and currently isn't as a "loss." I fear it risks romanticizing the 20th century's cramped tenements.
(And again, just to be clear, I find conversion of viable multifamily buildings into mansions generally repugnant.)
"Take for example 34 E. 68th St. in Manhattan: The 1879 row house, located in the Upper East Side Historic District, once housed 17 separate apartments, according to property records. Now, it is a 9,600-square-foot single-family mansion after changing hands for $11.5 million in 2011 and a subsequent gut renovation."
1879 and an average of 565 sqft each. I don't think what those apartments were is what we want today.
That's ~50 m^2, pretty decent for young people (can have separate living room/bedroom/bathroom/kitchen if split properly)
So, instead of housing 17-34 young people that could contribute a lot to the area it now houses a single family.
It is reasonable trade to live affordably in a city.