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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

B.S. You just need to re-zone massive sprawling single-family zones into mid-rises.

The "american dream" of a massive house for every couple can't survive the 21st century without triggering a revolution.

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Have you been in the area? There's no single family housing there at all for quite some distance (I'd say a few kilometers in each direction at least). It's mostly densely built-up with 3-5 story apartment buildings.

3-5 story isn't very tall. Tear them down and go taller.

This "tear it all down and just go higher" attitude pisses people off to an extent that is difficult to convey. People are sick of being mugged by economics and having their homes, neighborhoods, villages, streets ravaged by "more at all costs." People are sick of being priced out to the suburbs, displaced by rich corporations and all these rich young people.

Come to a European city and walk through streets with hundreds of years of history for some perspective. Then you can advocate to tear it all down and build it all up for some passing tech bubble fad straight to their faces and see what kind of response you get.

> People are sick of being priced out to the suburbs, displaced by rich corporations and all these rich young people.

"these rich young people" are people, too

Firstly, the higher you build, the more space you need between buildings, and the more space inside the buildings is used for infastructure. There are diminishing returns, and it runs out that areas with good coverage of 5 story buildings can have very high density, often more than areas with high rises.

Plus, Berlin likes to protect their heritage; often tearing down and rebuilding whole neighborhoods turned out to be a very bad idea.

> Plus, Berlin likes to protect their heritage; often tearing down and rebuilding whole neighborhoods turned out to be a very bad idea.

As I mentioned further downthread: This is especially pronounced in Kreuzberg, the whole district was supposed to be torn down and turned into a planned utopian living quarter. The Kottbuser Tor was supposed to be turned into a highway crossroad and the buildings there stem from those plans.

>often tearing down and rebuilding whole neighborhoods turned out to be a very bad idea.

Reminds me of this

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...

After the big pan-european city teardown of the mid-twentieth century that was mostly invented in Berlin, people have grown kind of fond of the surviving buildings. If anything gets torn down in Berlin to build new highrises it will be existing, unfashionable highrise. Plenty of those available for teardown, just not at popular locations. Not popular precisely because they are not surviving pre-war stock.

Please walk us through how "Tear them down and go taller" works in practical terms? Do you just throw those occupants out on the street? Families, the elderly etc?

If not where and how do you relocate them? Where does that money come from? How about the apartments that are privately owned? How does that work?

I used to live a couple of blocks away from the Umspannwerk. The area is almost entirely built up with 5-6 story buildings. Due to the latitude of Berlin, building higher would mean lower floors don't get any natural light in the winter. This is not something that people in California see as a concern, but it's extremely important for people's mental health that live in northern latitudes. In the eastern parts of Berlin that have high rise housing from the DDR time, the buildings are spread out so that the buildings don't make shadows on each other that last all day. Then you end up with these islands of people separated by big open areas. The density isn't much higher overall, and you don't get the cozy feeling of Kreuzberg where it's continuously built up, and there is street level retail on the ground floors.

As it is, Kreuzberg, the district we're talking about, the population density is 15,000/sq km, about half the density of Manhattan, and about twice the density of San Francisco as a whole.

I think one of you is talking about San Francisco and the other Berlin.

I'm talking about Berlin since the whole thing is happening in Berlin. How things are in SF is of no relevance.

Did you not read my comment?

Fully agreed. I spent most of my life in San Francisco, and the past 5 years living abroad has been eye-opening. Many people move to SF from the 'burbs / New York / Dallas and think that the answer to the housing problem is Manhattanization. The reason they think this, is that they have never been to a well-designed city like Barcelona. 3-5 story units, at max, cover most of San Francisco. It could be just as lovely as a city with 6-10 story buildings, and without being as ugly or unlivable as New York. We would just have to have sane zoning that didn't hamper new housing with antiquated parking requirements.

SF is home and I love it, but not all of it is as worth protecting as my nimby friends think. The Richmond, the sunset, ingleside, bayview / hunter's point, South SF .. Most of that wastes space, and could easily be rebuilt to be as dense and beautiful as Paris or Barcelona, but it would require courage and a more social government than what we actually have.

It sounds like you have never even been to Kreuzberg then.

There are no "massively sprawling single-family zones" in the area.

Maybe you could do just a modicum of research before you call "B.S." on people.

I was talking about San Francisco, but it got lost

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