No!
Why more density? What will that accomplish?
There are a lot of cities that could use the business.
The other side of the Bay. Stockton.
Stop cramming people into a closed space, it will result in a miserable and still expensive place.
Why more density? What will that accomplish?
There are a lot of cities that could use the business.
The other side of the Bay. Stockton.
Stop cramming people into a closed space, it will result in a miserable and still expensive place.
People in SF right now are already OK with a high density environment. Lots of people who want to move to SF are, too, but can't because there is no space for them.
The idea that "density" is "miserable" is a uniquely post-war american one. It really doesn't work that way.
Right, once Americans were able to afford cars and could physically remove themselves from urban density, they did, and it became part of the "American Dream". More so on the East Coast, where farm-land for development was cheap and relatively accessible to urban centers of business. On the West Coast where cities are either crammed between mountains and coast, or stuck in the middle of a desert, owning property required paying the higher prices driven by high demand and little supply.
> It really doesn't work that way.
It works that way for anyone who doesn't want to live in dense urban environments.
Yes, I lived in a college dorm, tiny, but not miserable (college helps, of course ;) ).
Now, see this: "http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2013/03/07/san-francisco-micr...
160 sq. ft. (or around 14m2 for the metrically able, or my favorite measure, this is the size of a square with a side of 3.7m)
That college dorm I lived, no kitchen, no shower, was around this size.
You're equating living space with physical land area, and that's not right at all.
Increasing build height poses a burden on the road/transport system.
Believe me this is a bad idea. You can't do that with either a good investment in public transport and road work (which is usually not possible since you can't reduce the size of the buildings to make roads wider)
That's one of the reasons for massive traffic jams in cities like Sao Paulo for example.
New York has a higher density, but a very good public transport system.
It's fine that you don't want to live in SF. But that simple fact doesn't make increasing density a bad idea for those who do. And to be clear: there are a lot of people who want to live in SF.
100,000 per square mile is not at all miserably crowded. I was working here right after Hurricane Sandy when all the commuters were staying home, and it was not crowded at all. My neighborhood in Chicago, which is probably around 50,000 nighttime density, feels positively empty on the weekends.
You could double the density of most parts of San Francisco and still not even be approaching "uncomfortably dense" (that would take the CBD to ~100,000 and areas like the mission to ~50,000).
Like anything else, it just has to be done well.
Not to mention London and Paris have a very good public transport system
In the Bay Area you have Caltrain and company shuttles mostly.
But yes, the SF<->SV corridor is Caltrain and company shuttles mostly.
Nor will you have people in San Francisco saying they don't want to become the next Paris.
In a lot of people's mind there's only one way to have a high population density. And they're just incorrect.
... and it is our best hope against climate change: http://www.alexsteffen.com/carbon-zero-2/
The general idea is that more housing supply should drive the cost of housing down.
Doesn't it make sense to keep cities confined to relatively small areas? It helps eliminate the need to travel long distances, waiting in traffic jams.