Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2012/05/10/why-the-bay-area-should-have-11-million-residents-today/

by Aloisius • 14 years ago

76 127 14 years ago

forbes.com

dionidium• 14 years ago

See, also, Matt Yglesias on parking regulations, among other things:

https://www.google.com/search?q=matt+yglesias+parking

ktizo3• 14 years ago

I wonder if some enterprising soul could park up some old cruise liners and rent them out if the building regulations are that much of a problem.

rdl2• 14 years ago

You would probably want to put them off half moon bay and 12+ nm out, so you can get the immigration benefit as well.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

Like BlueSeed? http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/06/blueseed-startup-ship/

(How do I create a link on HN again? The one place where a "help me with formatting" link would do some good - the reply page (http://i.imgur.com/R8oS8.png) - of course doesn't have one.)

(Edit: Turns out the "edit" page does have it, and shows that there really isn't a way.)

ktizo3• 14 years ago

Oooo.. that's nice, but a pricey way to do it.

Buying existing liners, rafting them up and retrofitting would seem like a more achievable aim in practice.

You could probably get some off Costa at the moment for less than the market rate.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

Have these people looked at North San Jose lately? They have been tearing down office buildings (Sony, on Zanker) and have been putting up huge residential complexes. One of them just opened its first phase, and many more are on the way.

Basically, anywhere between the Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek north of Montague is starting to go crazy, and if that isn't the Valley, I don't know what is.

antidoh• 14 years ago

But the real estate restrictions will never change, not in the foreseeable future.

If you imagine a world where that fact will never change in any usefully short future, then you have to work around it.

Why does the software industry need to all be located together? Yes I know, software includes startups, and it's easier to pivot and meet investors and all that when you're together. And yes, it's often more effective to be working face to face with your team mates.

Which means that development practices and industry organization are wrong for the economics of the industry, at least that part of the industry located in highly concentrated and unexpandable locations.

However we're building apps, systems and businesses right now, we're doing it wrong, if mere real estate is what's hindering hiring.

kcima• 14 years ago

I am moving there anyway. Bringing my camper.

wes-exp2• 14 years ago

Also, not as many women => not as many babies supporting population growth.

dennisgorelik3• 14 years ago

Not only that.

No urban sprawl -> no backyards & cul-de-sacs -> few babies -> no natural population growth.

ttfntatafornow• 14 years ago

there are just as many women here as anywhere else.

Males: 408,462 (50.7%) Females: 396,773 (49.3%)

if anything, when you consider that there are far more homosexual men than homosexual women, men have it good here.

http://www.city-data.com/city/San-Francisco-California.html

wes-exp2• 14 years ago

Well, whatever the population figures, something creates an overabundance of single men. This must create a drag on the reproductive rate. Also, what you're saying might apply to SF itself, but not necessarily to South Bay / Silicon Valley.

http://creativeclass.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/...

One other thought... even given a balanced overall population, we need to look specifically at those of reproductive age. Population figures will include children, which should be roughly 50/50 m/f, until they move away as adults (perhaps due to the high rents!).

hollerith7• 14 years ago

That's the ratio for San Franciso. Silicon Valley, different story.

oscardelben• 14 years ago

I just moved here from Italy, and it's almost impossible for me to get an apartment that's near public transportation. I mean, other than caltrain there's little if nothing public transportation here, and that may be part of the problem too. I certainly can't rent a house in the hills if there's no way for me to get to work from there. I ended up renting from a colleague.

mjn4• 14 years ago

Yes, unfortunately the whole area is built on an assumption that you have a car. Santa Clara County in particular is amazing in that it's one of the few places in the world that has three levels of grade-separated freeways: national highways, state highways, and county highways. The latter (San Tomas Expressway, etc.) were paid for out of the money that Santa Clara County saved by opting out of BART, which is not coincidentally why the public transit is bad.

mattdeboard• 14 years ago

I'm sorry but after living in Santa Clara Co. for a couple years, then moving back to my home state of Indiana, I can say with absolutely no compunction that Santa Clara Co. is a MECCA compared to where I live now in terms of public transpo.

Maybe it could be a ton better but my god I cannot wait until it's time to move back there.

gobbluth11• 14 years ago

Agreed with you and MJN. The US is in desperate need of investment in public transportation. Europeans have absolutely mastered the art of urban design and public transportation, and I wish we'd learn from their example.

But try telling 99% of the US that 1) their shitty sprawled real estate is effectively worthless, 2) their obese asses will have to give up their cars, and 3) we've spent 70 years of infrastructure investment supporting the dumbest possible lifestyle choice.

cageface• 14 years ago

The problem is that the U.S. is huge compared to Europe. I agree that we need more mass transit but it's a different problem here.

briandon8• 14 years ago

I don't disagree with you per se, but I have spent nearly a decade living in a city which has amazingly great public transport, very dense living arrangements (30-story highrises are the norm), and people walk constantly.

Are you ready to go grocery shopping pretty much every single day or every other day? Or can you manage to be at home during a 6-hour window for the grocery delivery if you want to shop once a week for that stuff?

Would you get stressed waiting, at least twice a day (leaving from your floor and returning from the lobby), for elevators in a 30-story building? Remember that people in wheelchairs, kids taking their bikes downstairs to ride, workmen w/materials/tools, people moving house, etc. are all going to be using the elevators.

If you're out somewhere and buy anything (in my case, yesterday, it was a new electric toothbrush) that's not groceries or something large, like an air conditioner, you're going to have to lug it around with you until you go home, even if you have several other stops to make or errands to do. There's no such thing as going to your car and putting something in the trunk until later.

Are you ready for even short trips to take much longer? You'll need to get out of your highrise, walk for some time until you get to the public transport pick-up point (bus stop, train platform, etc.), wait a while, ride the public transport (which usually moves slower than a car even if it weren't making a bunch of other stops between your home and ultimate destination's drop-off point), and then, finally, you'll have to walk some more to reach wherever it was that you wanted to go.

If you already live in a highrise, use public transportation exclusively, and don't own a car, then I'm glad that the experience hasn't soured you on high-density living and public transportation.

spullara3• 14 years ago

You really can't compare Europe to the US. They are tiny. For example, one of the largest countries in Europe is France: slightly less than the size of Texas. It's metropolitan population is 65m. Texas is only 28m. Other countries there are even more lopsided. Just as with cellphone networks, smaller area is easier.

hollerith7• 14 years ago

Europeans tolerate more onerous restrictions on individual liberty than Americans do. The combination of high degrees of individual liberty and high population density tends to produce a less predictable, sometimes disheartening and sometimes dangerous environment that wealthy people in the U.S. tend to prefer not to live in (at least after their young adulthoods).

The point is that there are good reasons why most Americans with the ability to do so choose to live in areas low enough in density that cars work better than public transportation and that America cannot simply copy Europe's urban planning without also copying some of Europe's laws and attitudes regarding individual liberty. (And laws and attitudes are hard to change.)

vannevar2• 14 years ago

In short, the reason there’s too much money chasing too few businesses isn’t that the country is running out of people with good technology ideas. It’s just that bad housing policies mean that there’s nowhere for additional people to live.

Well, you could spend millions and take years to move thousands more engineers to Silicon Valley. Or you could just get on a goddamned airplane and invest your money more than a few miles from your house. Silicon Valley self-absorption never ceases to amaze me.

redditmigrant• 14 years ago

I think you are ignoring the fact that Silicon valley is an ecosystem of engineers/product managers/sysadmins etc. all of which a growing startup needs. Hence, while a remote area might have people with ideas, it most likely will not have the eco system to sustain the growth of the startup.

Cariapa• 14 years ago

True. But I think his point was that by not investing in other parts of the country, people are not giving a chance for the ecosystem to develop.

I think local culture plays a big part as well. In most other parts of the country people join big large companies and then spend their entire life being the company man or woman.

If I did that I'd cry just like the other guy said he would if the Bay Area got paved over.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

If you have remote workers, you have a very very large ecosystem.

vannevar2• 14 years ago

I think 'the ecosystem' consists mostly of people with connections to money. Which of course is true, since the money is so provincial. Yes, there are lots of engineers there too, but as the article points out, they all have jobs plus back-up offers lined up three deep. Instead of going to the trouble to import people, why not invest in them where they're at? I'm not talking about farm towns in Iowa, I'm talking about places like Boston, New York, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, etc, etc.

mahyarm3• 14 years ago

More offices in the East Bay/Berkeley would be an improvement. Maybe a mini air taxi bus to go from one tip to another. (Berkley Airport - San Carlos/Palo Alto Airport - Reid Airport)

redwood3• 14 years ago

Spot on, we need to see more business move into the east bay where there's plenty of room for it and transportation infrastructure already in place... it's only natural

DanI-S• 14 years ago

The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry.

This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the first place.

Androsynth2• 14 years ago

Have you ever been south of Palo Alto? There is not much of a difference between San Jose and LA (I have lived in both).

Besides, LA is not ugly because of the population density, but because of the endless sprawl.

Apocryphon• 14 years ago

How do the two cities resemble each other? SJ seems sleepy and is basically a giant suburb.

rsl7• 14 years ago

so the high cost keeps out the riffraff?

maratd• 14 years ago

You're making kittens cry! Stop pointing out the obvious. Nobody wants to hear why zoning and rent control is still around.

StuffMaster• 14 years ago

>Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not.

The article was arguing for density, not sprawl. Also that affordability is more important than desirability.

mjn4• 14 years ago

I would say that building regulations are precisely what is causing the the area to following an LA-style trajectory. San Francisco is one thing, and reasonably dense. But the huge sprawl of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Gatos, etc., is caused by all these communities wanting to be LA-style suburbs with no dense housing, and enacting laws accordingly.

luser001• 14 years ago

Hmm, there's a HUGE difference between LA-style suburbs and the Bay Area. In LA-style suburbs, you have drive about 10 miles to a shopping mall, i.e., residental areas have no businesses apart from the occassional gas station.

That's because these areas were unpopulated desert or something which got converted into housing.

By contrast, each of the towns in the Bay Area was a standalone town of its own with its own downtown and rail station etc for a long time. Even today, most Bay Area towns are reasonably mixed wrt residental and business.

All (afaik) new construction for about 10 years has been townhomes, not single-family homes, so I'm not even sure this author is correct wrt housing code.

Just my two cents.

mahyarm3• 14 years ago

I was surprised how much of the housing was just... mediocre in SV. Even if everything was $500'000 cheaper.

gobbluth11• 14 years ago

I also love San Francisco, but you have the wrong target in mind. Urban density is GOOD. What sucks is a car-centric culture that forces sprawl.

You want a NYC or European-style transportation system, where it's completely unnecessary to own dangerous, unreliable, expensive automobiles. Cities designed around walking -- like the good parts of San Francisco -- are WAY more human-friendly and memorable. I guarantee that whatever parts of San Francisco you love, they're almost definitely not parts you're forced to drive to.

nickpinkston2• 14 years ago

Agree completely!

kitsune_• 14 years ago

You can have sprawl without having to rely on individual transport by car. This is precisely what is going on in smaller European countries such as Switzerland. Cities and villages are connected through an extensive rail and bus network.

From my city, trains are leaving for Zurich, Geneva, Bern, Lausanne, Basel etc. every 30 minutes.

Most commuters take the train even if they own a car.

I'm still a proponent of urbanization because suburbs seem to disrupt natural spaces. If you travel from east Switzerland to Geneva in the west by train, you will always see a house somewhere, on the entire 400 kilometres of journey. Every village looks alike.

That said, I do think mega-cities can be very tiring and demanding. I only have limited experiences in this regard but cities like Seoul or Istanbul are not the most relaxing environments for its inhabitants.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs

It's pretty simple. Communities tend to "clump", and people generally aren't willing to commute a really long way so the diameter of each "clump" is limited. Now, this wouldn't be an issue if our population was so massive the entire USA was covered in continuous urban sprawl, but I don't think that would make you happy.

rbranson• 14 years ago

Those types of regulations exist in every city. The problem isn't housing, it's transportation. Without the necessary transit infrastructure, it's pointless to just build buildings. It seems as if it was up to the author of this piece, the Bay Area would look a lot like LA. Please, for the love of all that is good, do not make this place like LA.

benmccann4• 14 years ago

The two are fairly related. Without sufficient housing density, it's difficult to build efficient mass transportation.

joelandren• 14 years ago

I'll try to be nice here, but the author is a fucking idiot.

To posit that the Bay Area can handle the population growth of sprawling and ill-planned Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas is patently ridiculous. The Bay Area is already one of the most dense metro regions in the US and to think that the area could see growth like that without a MAJOR disruption in quality of life is absurd.

I also think many engineers, who can usually pick where they want to live, already find the Bay Area to crowded and have decided upon less lucrative opportunities elsewhere.

delackner• 14 years ago

It is all about perspective. Compared to London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, most of the bay area is incredibly low density. Huge chunks of SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Redwood City are 1 or 2 story single-family homes with huge lots. Regulations prevent even a modest 10 story condo.

You don't have to make it into a false dichotomy of LA-like insane urban sprawl vs. the current situation.

binarybits• 14 years ago

The Bay Area's density is a fraction of of New York City's density. Yet rents in the densest parts of NYC are even higher than those in the Bay Area, which suggests that many people want to live there.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

You're sort of both right. One reason I don't want to relocate to the Bay (despite several offers) is when I do the math, my quality of life is substantially higher here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico on astonishingly less money. If you're not after the glory, it doesn't necessarily make economic sense. Doubly so if you don't like the kind of work that exists in the bay. If the housing and commute time issues weren't so dramatic, I would think about it, but still probably would stay out here.

dennisgorelik3• 14 years ago

If you are single or DINK (double income no kids) - moving to Bay Area (or NYC for that matter) can have economic sense.

DanBlake4• 14 years ago

As a new landlord in San Francisco, I can tell you that the biggest issue forcing this is rent control. The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing.

Without rent control, the market is free to compete and suddenly open up a ton of bottled up apartments. The issue is, a family on welfare with a income of 40k a year should not be living in a 4 bedroom apartment in pacific heights for 1k a month. I have no problem with giving affordable housing to those in need, but rent control is not the answer as it places the burden on individual landlords to provide social security.

The biggest gap of people who can live in SF are not the poor (taken care of by rent control) or the rich (dont care/buy homes) but those in between. Run of the road engineers and others who make between 75k and 150k a year. These are the people who are hurt most by san franciscos crazy rent laws.

If rent control was abolished, the one thing you would see is that rental rates would lower significantly as supply starts to balance with demand. Yes, some people would be displaced but the question is- If the city of san francisco wants to provide affordable rental units, why dont they instead just pay lower income people directly, letting them be free to choose where to live?

mjn4• 14 years ago

From the numbers I can find, I don't think this is true. The biggest population constraint in the Valley by far comes in the form of explicit density constraints, such as minimum lot sizes, not rent control. Palo Alto has no rent control, for example, but is less dense than SF, despite the fact that demand exists for much denser housing to be built (especially near Stanford) if it were permitted. Some kind of scared-rich-person-club mentality going on where they're worried that allowing apartments, or even townhomes, might bring in too much riff-raff, so by law everything has to be an undivided and large single-family home (in a large portion of the total area).

hollerith7• 14 years ago

Do any parts of the Bay Area south of San Francisco have rent control? I do not know of any.

raldi2• 14 years ago

To put it another way, when someone can't afford food, we provide them food stamps, paid for by our shared tax revenue. We don't make grocery store owners grant them discounts out of pocket.

DanBlake4• 14 years ago

Thats a pretty good analogy. I am absolutely for helping out those in need- I just dont think it should be shelved on the landlords shoulders- It should be a responsibility of government.

rayval2• 14 years ago

This has nothing to do with rent control.

San Francisco is just one part of the Bay Area, and the Bay Area is just one part of California.

The entire state has high real estate prices, despite pockets of low-priced housing (Stockton, for example).

Law of supply and demand: a lot of people don't want to live in freezing Minneapolis or bleak Detroit. Or Mumbai or Monterrey, for that matter.

Rich or poor, they would rather be in place where there is a chance to bask in the sun by the ocean, even if requires an hour or two drive from their gritty neighborhood.

bgentry• 14 years ago

Stockton hasn't had high real estate prices since 2008 when their market crashed harder than anywhere else in the country.

mahyarm3• 14 years ago

If it's really weather, why are almost all of the east coast sun states significantly cheaper? And two of them don't have a state income tax! (Florida and Texas). New York also has fairly shitty weather comparatively and it's even more expensive.

It's more complicated than that. Prop 13, cities forcing a lack of density and other polices and forces I don't know about push California to it's sky high rates.

dennisgorelik3• 14 years ago

Actually rent control tends to push poor people out, because with rent control landlords are forced to chose between multiple applicants before letting them in. Landlords would clearly prefer to deal with wealthier tenants than with poor tenants.

thrownaway2424• 14 years ago

What's your thought on Prop 13? It's hard to imagine why owners should be insulated from tax increases while tenants should not be insulated from rent increases.

DanBlake4• 14 years ago

The 1% is tied to the market value of the home, at the time of taxation. Its saying, they will never tax you more than 1% of the market value of your home.

Rent control is tied to the time of original purchase. If you want to say that your rent can never be more than 1% of market rent, sure- sounds good.

dfc4• 14 years ago

The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing.

I am having trouble wrapping my head around this quote. How could this be? Do you mean supply? There is always more demand for a good at lower prices than higher prices. If you took rent control away poor people would still want to live in nice places and pay low rent.

benmccann4• 14 years ago

From the Wikipedia article on price ceilings:

"A price ceiling set below the free-market price has several effects. Suppliers find they can't charge what they had been. As a result, some suppliers drop out of the market. This reduces supply. Meanwhile, consumers find they can now buy the product for less, so quantity demanded increases. These two actions cause quantity demanded to exceed quantity supplied, which causes a shortage"

Price ceilings are monumentally stupid. Unfortunately, the government rarely seems to be run by people who have much of an economic education.

DanBlake4• 14 years ago

Check these articles out for some good points

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-274.html http://www.nmhc.org/ResearchReport.cfm?ItemNumber=55262

narrator• 14 years ago

If they didn't have rent control in San Francisco half the population would clear out every bubble. The city is already transient enough as it is. Having lived in and around San Francisco I have seen the mega-booms and busts. I think that rent control keeps the housing market from being warped by the gigantic tidal waves of money that slosh in and out of San Francisco every couple of years.

hristov2• 14 years ago

As a new landlord in San Francisco, you want to get rent control abolished so that you make lots of money. But of course when you bought your property you knew it was rent controlled and what the rent control price was, so if you do own rent controlled buildings you should have known what you were getting into.

Rent control does not really affect growth of housing, because new housing is almost never rent controlled. Furthermore, abolishment of rent control would also create a lot of inflation in a city because a city cannot function on engineers only. And once low income people get forced out of town they will want more money commute to the city.

So it is not such a black and white issue.

bfrs2• 14 years ago

As a former Civil Engineer [4] and advocate of commodity-housing [1], I can tell you that rent control [3] is the minor issue here. I'm glad that HN is finally paying some attention to the elephant in the room...zoning laws. I bet that for most HNers who pay rent, it is about 50-60% of monthly expenses. This is freaking ridiculous! Look at it from a Civil Engineer's perspective: modern houses are built from very durable materials, and once constructed the maintenance expenses are minimal.

Is it that hard to connect the dots? People in power are all landlords, and they get a big chunk of their idle income via rents [2]. All they need to do is make sure that no new housing is constructed where they own rental property...basically protection racketeering. Next time you visit the Golden Gate park just spare a few minutes to read the plaque next to Joseph Strauss' statue. It says, "the biggest opposition to building the bridge came from the landlords of San Francisco, who feared that once the bridge was built, it would lead to a nose dive in rents".

[1] Housing so abundant that rents are on the order of maintenance costs, about $50-100/month!

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959941

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finan...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959500

[3] http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/elizabeth-lesly-stevens/sm...

This article describes in depth the problem you are facing, and since you are a new landlord it does seem like the biggest issue ;)

[4] One of the reasons for leaving Civil Engineering was the realization that the problem of high-cost-of-housing was not an engineering problem, but completely a political and social one. Constructing abundant, high quality and cheap housing was declared a solved problem in Civil Engineering by the 60s!

staunch• 14 years ago

Maybe you're someone to ask. Why don't we have sweet apartment buildings like the kind you find Tokyo? In the heart of Tokyo you can rent a tiny (but complete, clean, modern, beautiful) apartment for < $1k. In most major US cities that's totally impossible.

They're small as hell, but totally sufficient and way nicer than living in a bigger shittier place.

I think someone could make a killing bringing these kinds of buildings to the US.

Any reason it's not possible?

nnnnnnnn• 14 years ago

The author uses three examples to assert his 11 million number, but he doesn't explain why he believes the bay area should model these growth points.

In the case of Detroit, the boom was driven by many cheap manufacturing jobs available to all. This differs significantly from the fairly specialized and specific technical positions available in the valley. Cheap, uneducated labor isn't seeking out the valley -- in fact the economic incentive is an exact opposite: If you can't earn a high salary, you flee to a cheaper state.

Las Vegas has a booming service industry, which is much more in line with the manufacturing boom in Detroit.

Phoenix is where people go when they flee expensive southern California life. Phoenix is also close to Mexico, and the hispanic population is by far the fastest growing demographic (46% growth vs 17% for all other demographics per 2010 census).

The author of this Forbes article ought to spend more time analyzing the cause of population booms, rather than trying to rely weak and unsupported correlations. What a disappointment.

rizzom5000• 14 years ago

This article seems to have missed or glossed over a number of critical relevant points:

1. Few people on this planet would consider Atlanta, Phoenix or Las Vegas as cities to emulate. They are all excellent examples of unsustainable growth - and to the point where water shortages are a very real future possibility for any or all of the three.

2. The 'nut' of the story is that Silicon Valley needs more engineers, and that more engineers would move there if only the cost of living were less. By this logic, Silicon Valley investors should be able to take a quick drive over to the cheaper Las Vegas, where all the cheapskate engineers must be hiding out waiting for a Silicon Valley investor to show them the way to the riches that can be found building web services and phone apps for sweat equity.

3. No mention of telecommuting? Still a taboo topic? If it's such a problem, maybe one of those start ups should start looking for a solution to that problem - that way engineers could live wherever they wanted and we wouldn't have to contemplate what the Bay Area, Phoenix style, would be like.

guelo• 14 years ago

Coincidentally this other article also published today has a similar theme making the case that California's previous prosperity was caused by higher population growth and advocating construction in Silicon Valley. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/14/the_decline_o...

balloot• 14 years ago

All I know is I have lived in and visited many other places in the US, and the SF Bay Area (and especially San Francisco proper) is hands down the most distinctive and beautiful. Whatever is being done here needs to be done more and not less.

If the author wants to take his ball and stomp off to some urban-sprawly McMansion-filled city that is supposedly more optimal for talent, go right ahead. You have your choice of the vast majority of the country. There is a wonderful lack of regulation and population density out in the plains of South Dakota - just go there and I'm sure all the talent will follow in droves.

pwthornton• 14 years ago

Silicon Valley has some of the least progressive views on housing in the country. Limiting people to single family homes, which much of the valley does, is terrible for the environment and drives housing prices up. Space is finite. Building up leads to more affordability, shorter commuters and more creativity (by making it more likely that smart people run into each other).

The issue in the Valley is that there isn't enough housing stock. That's not hard to fix, unless you have too many regulations and nimbys.

Steve Jobs was a genius about a lot of things, except housing and work environments. The new Apple campus is almost laughably stupid. Everything we know about cities and their ability to forward humanity and creativity can't happen in Apple's new campus. It's disconnected from the larger community and sits next to a freeway.

See Triumph of the City as to why density of knowledge workers leaders to more innovation and creativity (or why the Renascence would never happen in rural America).

I bring up Jobs because I think his ideas on housing is common in the area. He loved the suburbs and perhaps the suburbs of the 60s and 70s were nice for a kid growing up. But Apple doesn't employ kids and our country's populations has doubled since 1960 and shows no signs of slowing down.

redwood3• 14 years ago

I'd love to see the bay area achieve a level of density that makes mass transit (and not cars) the norm everywhere.

There has been a lot more progress, at least in areas like Palo Alto, than this article makes clear. Throughout my life countless properties have been turned into relatively high density homes.

redwood3• 14 years ago

There's another problem: integration of mass transit across counties... BART and Caltrain each have their advantages, especially BART which is truly rapid. But those are arteries, and we need to see veins also connect across counties.

For example it's a pity that Palo Alto, being at the county line between SAMTRANS and Valley Transit, does not have any good street car service. The light rail that ends in Mountain View should continue to Palo Alto, and I hope the density will push that.

hristov2• 14 years ago

I am going to be captain obvious here and mention that you cannot compare the growth rates of a city that is on an enormous flat desert plateau with that of a city on an already crowded peninsula.

rdl2• 14 years ago

The big hack for living in the Bay Area seems to be having roommates. I'm currently trying to find a really nice, big house in San Mateo County (the only Bay Area county which is pro firearms ownership, thanks to an excellent sheriff, Greg Munks).

There's really spotty availability of nice houses in a "reasonable" price range (2-3br/2ba for $3000 or less) anywhere reasonable, but a lot of huge, absurdly nice houses (8-12br, 8+ ba, multiple pools, etc. for about $10k/mo). The rent vs. buy calculation is totally rent for properties like that too.

Clearly the arbitrage play, assuming you don't mind sharing a $300k gourmet kitchen, housekeeper, chef, etc., is to rent a house like that and share it. $1-2.5k/mo, and you get to live as well as you would in Texas, while being in SFBA.

ahh• 14 years ago

I've been looking all over for such a situation--can you show a link to one such house? I'm not convinced they exist.

ebiester• 14 years ago

So long as you don't go too many months with too many vacancies and suddenly your rent doubles.

tom_m• 14 years ago

Haha that's nit why. The reason why is living cost. I live in Palo Alto (rent of course) and its STILL increasing in cost. Startups can only pay so much. Since this area carries prestige from Stanford and the tech industry its expensive. Always has been. But real estate sees all this glamour and wild success stories as an excuse to charge lots of money. It's an inflated area...in the cost of homes, rent, and food. The crap I overpay for at most restaurants downtown is insane. Coming from NYC, I had far more options and better food for cheaper. Why? Size. Competition, sure...But also no bubble. Ladies and gentlemen we are in the middle of another tech bubble here. Prices are outrageous and companies are over valued. So it'd the cost. That's why. People do their best to find places to live and they over extend themselves. I know doctors (both husband and wife) who are struggling. A nice profession...Still not enough. If you actually look at the stats (there's a map/site for this) most people move out after moving here. So "growth" and how many people actually do try to move and live here are two different things. It's not the running out of space...it's the cost.

vorg• 14 years ago

> A variety of regulations—minimum lot sizes, maximum building heights, parking mandates, restrictions on renting out basements,...

Are you still allowed to start a business in your garage with a friend building, say, printers? What about hooking up a server to the web running a search engine?

rsanchez1• 14 years ago

This presents an opportunity that other cities in the US should be taking advantage, but aren't. There aren't enough engineers in Silicon Valley? Move somewhere that has enough engineers. If a city provides enough incentives for tech companies to move there, and attracts enough recognizable companies to increase its reputation, then that represents an opportunity to bring some of that Silicon Valley money home. I wonder what it will take for entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors to consider other locations instead of Silicon Valley first.

cafard• 14 years ago

Are you weeping for the engineers or for the developers?

Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

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