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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but for the record: Manhattan is surrounded on 4 sides by water, and is much hillier than people think (only the southern part of the island is flat). The parts that flat are filled-in salt marsh.

There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land.

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

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Briefly:

* NYC is a lot more than Manhattan.

* NYC is a substantially larger area than SF.

* SF is also substantially built on top of reclaimed mud flats.

* NYC is tectonically stable.

All of these things mean that comparisons between the two cities approach to land use are basically meaningless.

[edit] to fight HN’s formatting

Right, that's why it's still apples-to-oranges. My only claim was that "surrounded by water" and "has hills" are not the reasons why comparisons between NYC and SF are invalid.

Plus Manhattan is schist that never moves, so you can build as high as you want without worrying about your building falling over.

SF is the second densest city in America outside of NYC.

Second densest large city. But if you do it by municipality, SF is the 21st most dense in the country. Four of NYC's five boroughs (coextensive with counties, the way SF is coextensive with SF county) are individually denser than SF.

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