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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> We should build enough normal houses in areas people want to live such that 90%+ can afford them, make owning and operating a car affordable, and make raising a family affordable.

That hasn’t really worked anywhere: popular places attract so many people that you literally can’t put supply into synch with demand. San Francisco is already a dense city, would it be as cheap as Manhattan if it had Manhattan like density? Maybe, but Manhattan isn’t cheap.

It might be better to focus more on better intercity and intracity transport like they do in Japan, or allow for smaller cheaper places to live like they do in Tokyo (incidentally, aggressively deprecating the value of structures like they do in Japan might help as well).

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> San Francisco is already a dense city

The vast majority of residential there is single family homes. Why do you think this?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-map-single-family-...

> 38% of the city’s land is zoned for single-family homes, which is almost two-thirds of all the land zoned for residential purposes.

You can’t say building density doesn’t work when it hasn’t even been tried in the last 30 years.

By American city standards, San Francisco is dense. Even if they have a lot of SFHs, they are counting Victorian row houses that are placed next to each other.

> You can’t say building density doesn’t work when it hasn’t even been tried in the last 30 years.

What do you mean? I lived in Beijing for 9 years, and it was plenty dense, and plenty expensive to rent for locals.

> Even if they have a lot of SFHs, they are counting Victorian row houses that are placed next to each other

Is that supposed to mean something? Most housing there doesn’t look like a The Painted Ladies anyways, and being denser amongst the most middling cohort possible isn’t an accomplishment.

> I lived in Beijing for 9 years, and it was plenty dense

What’s plenty? Why do you think it’s enough? And idk if you’ve noticed, but China has had an insane urbanization rush for the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in their cities isn’t surprising.

> Is that supposed to mean something?

Row house are dense housing. No yards, they don’t take up much space on the ground. If you are comparing it to people who live in apartments sure, not as dense, but the SFHs you think exist in SF don’t really, the neighborhoods are all fairly dense given the land costs involved.

> And idk if you’ve noticed, but China has had an insane urbanization rush for the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in their cities isn’t surprising.

How is that different from “The popular place everyone wants to live should build enough housing to support that affordably”? Consider:

IDK if you’ve noticed, but a lot of people want to live in Seattle in the last 20+ years, so high housing costs in Seattle isn’t surprising.

Are you just using another standard for China, or do you mean the situation is truly different?

An apartment is not a normal house, density is not what I'm advocating here.

The vast majority of people don't want that. It's a sticking plaster.

People want normal lives. Not pokey flats with no car and eating vegetables. That's a 1, maybe 5% bizarro world coastal thing.

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