Re:Tech’s Wealthy Enclaves Hurt the Country and Tech Itself
by idlewords on Monday April 03, 2017 @05:56PM
(#14027580)
This is exactly correct.
There is no rational reason why Palo Alto should have detached houses with lawns, or Sausalito be a little town, except for terrible political decisions about land use and mass transit.
A housing shortage is trivially easy to recreate; just stop building housing while trying to pack more and more people in the same space. An SFBA-grade housing shortage isn't that much harder then, you just need to convince a small handful of people on city and county boards to stop building housing, while trying to put more people in the same space. Sprinkle some income inequality that makes Rwanda look equitable and you've got a plot of dirt going for $200k in South San Francisco.
You could pack half the Bay Area's population into Santa Clara county if you made it as dense as San Francisco but there's not the will to go even that far, never mind somewhere actually dense. New York's not even all that dense in the scheme of things, but at that level of density, you could fit almost 36 million people into Santa Clara county alone, or the whole Bay Area, and then 3 more of them.
Hundreds of companies being located in the same area isn't the problem, the refusal to build more housing is.