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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

NYC does not suffer this problem for some reason. Yes, of course there are prohibitively expensive neighborhoods in the trendiest areas. But if your goal is to live and work in the city, or to have a reasonable commute in, it is extremely doable on just about any salary, and you can actually reasonably expect to be able to afford a home in the suburbs some day. A one hour drive out of the city is considered “upstate boondocks” and you can still buy a 300k home. Whereas that is barely into the middle suburbs for SF, where houses still start at $800k+.

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NYC has higher density and excellent transit, things California refuses to do.

It’s still expensive but as you say it is possible to find reasonable housing that is commutable. Also not having to own a car frees up money to compensate a bit.

I would never expect hot metros to be as affordable as mid tier cities or rural areas, but when it’s extreme to the point of absurdity and there is no way to get relief something more than just regular market dynamics is happening. Markets like SF are only possible with organized restriction of supply, basically a cartel.

SF is already the second-most dense city in America. It’s dramatically more akin to NYC than Austin, LA, and so on. It’s just a lot smaller geographically.

The problem is that all of that density is delimited within a perfect 7x7 mile square. Outside of which is the worst of the worst when it comes to urban sprawl anywhere in the US. What really kills SF is just the complete inability to reasonably commute. Any form of housing anywhere within a 2 hour drive of the city is the most expensive in the country.

What SF needs is a bunch of rail way out to its exurbs like NYC. But Cali can’t do that either.

It could also be a lot denser. It should look like Hong Kong or the Tokyo core.

> It’s just a lot smaller geographically.

That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.

NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.

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