When Houston wants another housing unit, they just sprawl out into the plains to make it happen. (Not incidentally, this is why the city was devastated by the last hurricane: huge portions of it sprawl into floodplains.)
The San Francisco height / bulk map is pretty enlightening. https://sfgov.org/sfplanningarchive/zoning-map-heightbulk-di...
All those light colored areas are max 40 feet.
It’s why it’s cheaper to live in Brooklyn than Manhattan, even though Brooklyn is mostly low-rise construction.
However there are important second order effects to consider too. The density is a big part of the appeal of Manhattan. If it was lower then it might push economic activity away and make people not want to live there as much. Maybe finance sector might move to say Chicago. This would push prices down.
Yes, Manhattan is more desirable than Brooklyn. It’s desirable for many different reasons; scarcity is a big reason.
Would Manhattan be even more expensive if it didn’t have skyscrapers? Sure. But it’s irrelevant to my point: skyscrapers are not a magical panacea to housing prices. Objectively, factually, a short subway commute lowers prices significantly in NYC, even if you’re commuting to a land of low-density construction. Thus, again we see that Land is the high-order bit on real estate prices. Aways was, always will be. Everything else is a detail.
If SF is to fix it’s housing crisis, there are exactly two ways: reduce demand, or increase accessible land area. The only way to effectively do the latter is good transit. All of the rest of this stuff is wishful thinking by people who don’t understand real estate.
Neither is Silicon Valley.
This is a tired argument that has been debunked many times before.
As soon as people view “San Francsico” and “the valley” as the same place, you might have an argument. Right now, the only people who believe this are people who haven’t spent any time there.
Building more housing in Palo Alto might help Palo Alto, but it won’t do much for prices in SF.
And there is a lot of single family housing in SF alone that can be converted into 6 story apartment buildings. Plentttyyy of space available for the demand. By-right up zoning with a 30 day limit on permitting processes would do miracles for housing affordability here, but the Olds want to profit off the immigrants and cast their neighborhoods in amber.
Also the cheapest form of housing construction as far as sqft and price / unit is the fourplex. Housing cost is mostly land price & bureaucracy here, not the cost of construction, so many developers will find 6+ floor apartment buildings feasible.
Ask a 30-something FAANG employee living in SF if they’d take a nice Menlo Park apartment over their place in the Mission. Or Palo Alto. Or even South SF. It’s just bizarre to suggest that these are equivalent.
But almost nobody will live in Reno, Salt Lake and commute daily via airplane to menlo park. You might find the 3 outliers on the news who do this, but I've never met or found anyone who actually does. The ones that have a life in a city that is a flight away will tend to rent a room in the work city and fly over once a week, thus participating in the local housing market.
This commute distance limitation creates the city labor and housing market, and thus people who work in Mountain View would consider living in Santa Cruz, Berkley or San Jose, but they won't actually live in New York and fly over daily to make a silly example.
Within any city itself, local variations exist. There are bad neighborhoods, nice neighborhoods. Party ones, not party ones. Big mansions and small studio apartments. Places close to lucrative jobs (mountain view) and ones that are far away but still commutable for the price a very long commute (Stockton). They will all be available in a housing market, but because they all participate in the same market, the supply / demand equation will still apply and thus set them all within a certain range of each other. An identical mansion in reno is a lot cheaper than the mansion in atherton for very good reasons.
Jobs are what determine the demand for housing in a city, and interaction of that demand with the supply of housing available is what sets the price of housing in a place.
Have you ever taken a economics class? I would suggest reading a book like order without design (twitter preview: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1079407914715103232 ) to understand how cities work and to take some sort of econmics 101 class with the many online resources out there.