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> When population goes up: positive - the area is vibrant economically; negative - rent is spiraling upwards out of control

What's endlessly infuriating is population going up in a city should be an almost unmitigated positive. It's just our unwillingness to allow building new housing turning it into a zero sum game that makes it a mixed bag.

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But why? Are we aiming to have mega-cities of 15M people like Asia? I've been there, no thanks. It would be better if people move to other cities if SF doesn't make sense.

But does the transportation capacity also scale linearly with size?

The argument I usually see is that there would be less need for transportation as the removal of explicit zoning would be part of the effort for increasing density and that would put people closer to the goods and services that they want/need.

(I don't have an opinion on this; the closest I ever got to city planning was playing Sim City)

I think we have plenty of working proof that mass transportation systems work at scale (NYC, Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin...)

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