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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

As usual, the “speculators” and “out of towners” and others are convenient scapegoats, lest we have to face the underlying supply and demand and barriers to development.

You want to have a monopoly on housing in a major city? I’d be hard pressed to point out an industry where that would be harder. You have literally millions of competitors.

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Absolutely this.

The out of towners, who are mostly Blackrock, is just a fella with a spreadsheet tracking new dwelling approvals vs demand.

All the Bay Area has to do is approve new dwellings. The issue is the politicians are landlords with investment properties.

San Francisco is already the second most densely populated city in the USA (the first being NYC). SF is actually already slightly more densely populated than Tokyo, which many like to tout as a mecha for de-regulated zoning.

But the difference is, NYC is constantly building new housing inventory, with constant construction and developments going up left and right.

Meanwhile most of San Francisco is just streets of old single-family homes.

Do you mean streets of Victorian row houses? I didn’t notice many SFHs in SF unless you count row houses that are more commonly seen as town homes.

See https://westlinevillage.com/townhouse-vs-single-family-whats...

I'd guess no. The neighborhoods west of Twin Peaks and south of the Mission are dominated by single family homes.

I guess you mean the housing that you see coming on Caltrain after pass through south San Francisco? 30% of SF’s housing is classified as single family, so there must be some in the city. Just not as common as it is say, here in Seattle.

Not quite. The Brisbane project was an old Southern Pacific (Union Pacific?) yard that's right by the Caltrain station. AFAIK there's still nothing there.

South of the Mission take a look at Oceanview/Merced Heights/Ingleside (OMI). That's largely SFH. BVHP (Bayview + Hunters Point) as well and parts of it are visible from Caltrain. Heading west you'll find basically all of the Presidio, Forest Hill, Sunset, and Richmond neighborhoods are SFH or maybe low-rise apartment buildings.

A lot of the single family houses in SF have walls right up next to each other but do not actually share a wall. While Forest Hill properties historically had racially themed covenants, most of those neighborhoods predate HOAs and the worst of the covenants have been discarded.

With around 6,300 people per km2, "it is similar in terms of population density to San Francisco. In Tokyo’s 23 wards, however, the density is 15,381 people per km2, making it 50% higher than New York City as a whole."

https://japanpropertycentral.com/2021/12/housing-in-tokyo-is...

The 23 wards of Tokyo are 5 times the land area of SF city proper.

Let’s get in the full context:

>Nakano ward’s density of 21,956/km2, does rank a little closer to Manhattan (around 28,000/km2).

NYC is quite large. Huge areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island have low-risers or single family homes.

Which if course brings the average down.

My comment was more about the parent comment's poor comparison between SF and Tokyo by using Tokyo Metropolis (Tokyo-to) population density – which includes large areas of rural land and mountains – instead of the 23 Wards which is still not perfect but a better approximation of the "city" part of Tokyo Metropolis.

I agree that the link's comparison of Tokyo 23 Wards with all of NYC is not an appropriate comparison. But not necessarily because of single-family housing as you describe. Even for Nakano Ward (with population density nearing Manhattan's), 20.8% of residential buildings are detatched single-family homes and 48.9% of residential buildings are less than 3 stories tall [0], surely a higher proportion than several NYC boroughs. Its high density is more due to having fewer areas with offices, narrower streets (compared to NYC), and barely any green space.

[0] https://www.city.tokyo-nakano.lg.jp/dept/505700/d026142_d/fi...

>San Francisco is already the second most densely populated city in the USA

This isn't true, even if you limit it to cities with population over 100k. New York City, Jersey City, and Paterson, NJ are all more dense than SF.[0] San Francisco is effectively tied with notoriously anti-development Cambridge, MA. Quite a few smaller cities around the country are more dense as well.[1]

The housing situation in San Francisco is nothing to be proud of, unless you think that having the highest median home prices or median rents is a laudable achievement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

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