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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally against zoning restrictions. But, there's only so much a city's infrastructure can take. Let's say they build another 100k 3 bedroom units, where is all the waste going to go?

Is there a good reason for all of these people to live in one little area? No, I don't think there's a really good reason. Everyone wants to take advantage of what the city has to offer, but nobody actually wants to pay fair market value.

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Where did those people live before? How did the Bay Area grow to its current size if people kept saying the same thing?

"We only have one bus route and a school, how can we grow this place? It's too crowded". Complete BS.

How many is too many then? Clearly any given area has a maximum support capacity for humans. Is it good for the environment or quality of life to keep packing people into mega-cities?

I would suppose that packing people into high density housing is great for efficient distribution of goods, and seeing as dense megacities support great public transit I would wager that this is clearly better for the environment than the alternative.

It's much better for the environment to pack the people into a dense urban area where they area easily served by transit (or can walk to where they want to go), goods delivery, etc than to have people commuting 60 miles from Tracy where they live in a 3000 sq foot house on a half acre of land.

Yes. Urbanisation into massive cities is vastly more efficient in terms of environmental impact than sprawl.

Those people still need to live somewhere, but bringing everyone closer together increases efficiencies by enormous amounts. Cities are the thing helping to save the environment.

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