Comment by seanmcdirmid
3 days ago
Yes, SF is only 7 square miles, so already you don't have much to work with. The Bay Area is the 4th most populated metro in the USA. So still not as dense as NY or even LA, but still denser than the vast majority of places in the USA.
1. 2,251.1/sq mi Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA / 12,828,837 2. 2,156.5/sq mi New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA / 19,865,045 3. 1,614.4/sq mi Trenton-Ewing, NJ / 369,526 4. 1,303.6/sq mi San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA / 4,466,251
Bay Area density fairly well correlates to SF's density, actually (yes, not as dense, but neither are the metros around the other dense cities).
More housing is always great, but I think it is really idealistic to think that building more housing in a hot area is going to bring prices down much, if at all. Literally, anywhere in the world, that simply doesn't happen. At best, we get a place like Berlin that has a nice economic bust that brings housing prices down for awhile (and then they start ticking up again as the economy improves), or Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.
> Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.
Nope. Tokyo's population is still growing, and 1980s housing in Tokyo is deeply undesirable. The reason Tokyo has sane housing prices is that it continuously builds large amounts of housing, because they haven't made it de facto illegal the way too many places have. Sometimes that's all it takes.