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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco is not nearly dense enough. It can support a lot more housing. Easily. It's just NIMBYs and cronies in the way.

Despite having significant growth opportunity San Fran is already twice as dense as Seattle. Therefore Seattle has room for explosive housing growth. It would need more changes than just housing of course. But that's to be expected and totally doable.

Cities are huge economic multipliers. We don't need more cities yet. The ones we have are perfectly great! We need to more efficiently use what we already have.

This housing crisis isn't affecting just "top tier" cities. It's not just New York and San Fran. It's Seattle. It's Denver, Austin, and Portland. It's even Nashville!

Every city, top to bottom, needs to be doing more. And they need to start now as the longer they wait the more expensive the infrastructure adjustments become.

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>It can support a lot more housing

So long as you also build all the transportation, schooling, utility, and other infrastructure needed to support it.

All the city needs to do is literally nothing. Just stand back and stay out of the way. Sadly this is one of the hardest things for a bureaucracy to do.

Because schooling and public transit and such will just happen automagically?

Public transportation is a 20th century solution. If cities do nothing autonomous vehicles will revolutionize transportation wants within 20 years. Which is as fast or faster than major public transportation projects would take.

Additional housing will result in a larger tax base which will automatically cover additional schooling needs.

It's not a guarantee that self-drive for cars will not lead to more use and more congestion in cities which are not upgrading their transit.

I am hopeful for autonomous app hailed buses, but there's definitely a big chance it doesn't all work out that way, and even then there is clearly still a physical limit on how much existing road infrastructure can handle.

More desirable areas means more areas for developers to build housing. Cities cannot do more with a citizenry that is unable to keep the local economy and government institutions afloat. These cities are in a horrendous feedback loop that is seeing their economies and tax bases decimated. It all begins and ends with income inequality.

> that is seeing their economies and tax bases decimated

Wat? That is literally the opposite of reality.

The problem is cities are TOO POPULAR. Cities so successful that only the rich can afford to live in them! Increased property values, more property tax revenue, higher resident earnings and spendings. Cities aren't being decimated. Cities are so economically successful that poor people are being forced out so more rich people can move in!

The article, titled "The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore" is about people earning $50,000 to $125,000 who can't afford housing in cities. It's not about rural or rust belt communities with no jobs. Housing is plenty cheap in those areas. They just lack the jobs to go with it. A very real but very different problem.

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