> “huge apartment buildings … 10 floors”
It’s kind of mind-blowing to remember that what’s the basic residential building standard everywhere else in the world is already “huge” in most American cities.
It’s kind of mind-blowing to remember that what’s the basic residential building standard everywhere else in the world is already “huge” in most American cities.
Weirdly enough, we have a constant housing shortage
I'm sure many other major cities are also like that, outside the few-block radius of the "central business district."
The only place in San Francisco that has many residential buildings more than 3-4 floors and is building more/new is SoMa (South of Market) and Rincon Hill. (I have not lived there for 10+ years, so please correct me if I am wrong.) Sure there are some odd ducks in Russian Hill or Nob Hill, but they are from 1960s/70s. Nothing new is built there now, except billionaires doing a tear-down/re-build.
Wild idea: What if we build 4x fifty story apartment blocks on those four blocks that I mentioned at Mission District BART stations? You could do stuff like bottom 3-5 floors are all retail (small biz plus chains), then next 30 floors are middle class housing, and the upper floors are unlimited for the rich. I think it would be a good mix. The hardest part of the build might be creating enough car parking spots for the luxury units at the top. We might need to do something bizarre/exotic underground, or buy adjacent lots to tear-down for a multi-story parking lot. To be clear: I am not excited about building new parking garages in 2020s in urban San Francisco, but it is a reasonable compromise for selling luxury units at the top of the tower. All together, this mega project could be easily a 1B USD build. Another bonus: One floor in one tower near the top could be reserved as an observation deck/floor. That would be very cool, like a modern Coit Tower for the 2020s.
1. The usual 'neighborhood groups' will rally to oppose "Big Developer" "bulldozing the Mission" "changing the character forever" etc. This alone makes this impossible.
2. BART has finite capacity per hour. Giant apartment blocks would add a large amount of people all in one spot. You're going to have a lot of crowding at that station.
3. You acknowledged this, but you'd need a lot of car spaces to sell luxury condos - the extremely rich class in SF are not wiping poop off the seats to ride BART. Those cars would cause plenty of congestion (either IRL, or the "neighborhood groups" would say they would).
P. S. I hope I'm wrong, I'd love to see that built! And would have supported it politically when I lived in SF.
But the absolute size matters. The actual “city like” part of SF is really small.
What bothers me the most is how so many Americans seem to have this irrational fear of cities. They think they are more dangerous, dirty, difficult, etc than they really are, by a wide margin. And they vastly under-estimate the amenities and quality of life they bring, along with the extent to which they make all of the wealth of the country even possible.
They wring their hands and complain that allowing more building will turn their city into NYC, which is just crazy on the face of it.
But there's not a lot of peacefulness. There's certainly not peacefulness outside my bedroom windows anywhere I could afford to live. Sleeping with windows open and waking to birdsong rather than traffic sounds is quality of life for me.
> The city boundaries
My Google searches:
> los angeles city density
> 8,210 people per square mile
> new york city density
> 29,303 people per square mile
Even still, over half of SF has almost exclusively 1-2 story buildings.