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Comment by rdouble | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of SF's bizarre city politics and NIMBYism, but... where can more housing be built?

Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out by yuppies, because that is what is actually happening. I'm not sure where the city could put more high density housing.

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You really think that if we took the time to work out the square mileage of SOMA, The Mission, downtown, Potrero, and Bayview that the population per square mileage of those areas would be competitive with Manhattan? Anything close to it?

Hmm... I'm not sure I understand what you're asking regarding Manhattan. Do I think SF will ever be like Manhattan? No.

I was just wondering where new high density housing in SF could be built.

My point is that the areas where high-density residential construction would be least "damaging" to the feel of the city are not already very dense; the "dense" areas of San Francisco are sparse compared to other cities.

Brooklyn's probably a better example that won't elicit the 'ZOMG I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN MANHATTAN' response. Twice the density of SF and no heavens-darkening skyline.

Somewhat, but Manhattan is the more accurate example because of its geographic constraints.

I think the fact the constraints happen to be geographical is kind of moot. Brooklyn can't start assimilating the rest of Long Island any more than SF can start building octopus's gardens in the Bay or housing in Daly City.

It's not that Brooklyn would "assimilate" Long Island; gentrification always displaces people no matter what the geography is. The problem with San Francisco is that gentrification is made more painful by geographic constraints.

Moving from SF to Daly City is a big deal.

I guess I don't quite follow what the difference is. Moving from Williamsburg to Jamaica (Queens) is as big a deal, if not bigger.

But we've sort of tangented off, what I meant was 'Agree with you but Manhattan is such an outlier and so evocative that the mere mention of it kind of Godwinizes any argument you're actually trying to make. That I agree with.' That's all.

Moving to an entirely different city puts you into a different school system and often a different, disjoint public transportation system.

Which seems like a or as much of a function of administrative, rather than geographic boundaries so we're completing some sort of talmudic nerdgument circle here and I still don't quite understand why Manhattan is a better or even good example in a comparison with SF.

Thread depth 8 or so, though, call it a draw by mutual confusion?

True. But Brooklyn actually isn't that much more dense than the Mission (36k ppl/sq mile versus 29kppl/sq mile).

http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Mission-District-San-F... http://www.city-data.com/city/Brooklyn-New-York.html

Oh no doubt. And in this specific case, I think 'tptacek was wrong to list the Mission but at the end of the day, that's a nit and given that I likely can't accurately name one neighborhood in Chicago, it didn't really seem relevant to his overall argument.

You can look it up ... :]

People / km^2 (all numbers obviously very approximate, so I've just rounded to thousands):

    Manhattan lower-east-side 35000 pp/km^2
    Manhattan average         26000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong kowloon         44000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong island          16000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong new territories  4000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong average          6000 pp/km^2
    Tokyo 23-ku average*      14000 pp/km^2
    SF chinatown              29000 pp/km^2
    SF nob-hill               20000 pp/km^2
    SF mission-district       10000 pp/km^2
    SF SOMA                    5000 pp/km^2
    SF potrero-hill            2000 pp/km^2
    SF average                 7000 pp/km^2

* Tokyo population is very consistent; it's not particularly dense in terms of peak density compared to other places, but it retains the same medium-high density across an enormous area...

That's misleading. Hong Kong isn't a city; it's an area composed of multiple cities. Kowloon metro has a density of 43,000 pp/km^2, six times San Francisco's average, over twenty times the average in Potrero Hill.

That's why I gave figures for both overall average and focused central areas (not sure how you found that misleading)... :)

Density figures can be tricky, no matter what the area used, because what's useful for one purpose isn't useful for another. While average density over a large area doesn't accurately reflect living condition in smaller sub-areas, it is useful for other purposes ("is the city full yet?" :). Generally it's useful to have both large-area averages and focused figures for popular subareas, maps to indicate density distribution, etc.

[As I noted in my original comment, Tokyo is notable for the unusual consistency of its population distribution, at least within the central (but still large) 23-ku area.]

You put the aggregate for Hong Kong, which is a region and not a city, alongside the numbers for San Francisco, Tokyo, and Manhattan. Was the point I was making.

Er, sure, whatever. I don't know much about HK in particular, but official designations of "city" boundaries are often pretty arbitrary, and can be downright misleading (e.g. don't reflect the distribution of population/commerce/transportation), so I dunno exactly where to draw the line... When in doubt it seems better to include more information.

[Tokyo "the city" is much larger than HK "the region", but also includes enormous sparsely populated areas... and on a practical level, the entire Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama area is really just one humungous city, with a completely different shape than anything official... deciding where to draw the line is difficult, and depends a lot on what your end goal is.]

It wasn't a big deal either way, I'm just nerding out.

> where can more housing be built?

>Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc.

You've answered your own question.

Well what I meant by that is that they are already privately owned on small lots.

Even if zoning permitted it, it wouldn't work to build a 20 unit apartment building in between two of these: http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/go8f670...

In order to build a denser apartment building, a developer would have to buy up whole blocks of these homes. Which means that clusters of home owners all have to agree to sell their property. Which seems unlikely to ever happen.

Build up. The same way every other big city deals with this problem.

http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...

Yeah, but where? That is what I'm asking.

Bayview. The Mission.

The tenderloin, soma, mission bay, dog patch, bayview. It's not like current buildings were built on empty lots.

Everywhere.

What about earthquakes? How expensive is it to build up in SF when you know that there's a 60% chance, in the next 30 years, of having an earthquake with minimum magnitude of 6.7?

Especially when a buynch of peolpe live on one of the faults, and a bunch of infrastructure goes over one of the faults.

(http://seismo.berkeley.edu/outreach/faq.html)

When you have the property values San Francisco has, even after all the earthquake protection needed, you'll still end up with positive ROI. If it is cost-effective to build 10 story complexes in Mission Bay - on landfull - I can't imagine it not being cost-effective to do the same on Potrero Hill - bedrock.

Isn't high-density earthquake-safe construction a solved problem? It's not like SF has no high-density properties.

Yes, Japan figured this out decades ago. SF NIMBYs just like to pretend it's impossible.

You talk to Japanese civil engineers and they tell you how to build earthquake-resistent tall buildings, which they have a lot of practice with.

From http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=863 , talking about the Kobe earthquake of 1995 (magnitude 7.2):

"Sixty percent of those who died were over 60 years old. The reason for this is that they were mainly the one who lived in the older houses that collapsed. Few people died in new homes. Nearly all the buildings that killed people were built before the enactment of modern building codes in the 1970s and 80s. Many newer buildings were badly damaged but they didn’t collapse."

"Kobe's modern buildings 'seemed to have performed very well,' a former Stanford engineering professor told Newsweek. 'There may have been one or two that have been damaged. But I haven't heard of any that fell.' Every building constructed according to the building codes established in 1981 was unscathed."

I bet there are many, many structures currently standing in SF that would be more earthquake-safe if they were replaced with taller, higher-capacity, but better-engineered modern buildings.

all I can say is, have you seen the existing housing stock in sf? It's not like that much of it is earthquake safe. And landlords have fought like hell to avoid retrofitting [1].

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/san-francisco-earth...

Tall buildings survive earthquakes better than low rise (odd but true) Though it does depend on ground in the area.

Would better public transit systems (clean and fast trains, with power and wifi, at a reasonable cost) help? You ship people in every morning.

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