Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build?

Re:Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build? by Johnny555 on Saturday January 06, 2018 @09:38PM (#16088789)

Where in SF do we have shit tons of land? Building high volume transit would take a lot of land -- the entire BART system is constrained by how fast people can load/unload at Embarcadero station. The signaling system could push more trains through the tunnel, but the station can't handle more. The solution to that is to build more platforms. It'd be easy to do that with a ground level station or a shallow cut-and-cover station, but now it'd take digging out a huge cavern 50 feet underground while avoiding existing building basements and support pilings.

BART plans a billion dollar bandaid by digging out the other side of the station to allow boarding from both sides of the tunnel. But that billion dollars doesn't buy any additional tracks, just an extra exit from the sides of the trains.

Even the new 6+ billion dollar transit center is only going to have 3 platforms and 6 tracks for Caltrain and HSR. In comparison, Penn Station has 11 platforms & 21 tracks.

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Re:Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build? by taurath on Sunday January 07, 2018 @12:07AM (#16089312)

I’m not saying we have a lot of space in cities, I’m saying we have a lot of space between them. Milpitas should be a suburbs.

China is spending trillions on infrastructure and trains and we whine about 6b for a huge train station in the center of a hundred year old city, while we give $1.5 trillion tax cuts to corporations

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Re:Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build? by vadym909 on Saturday January 06, 2018 @09:52PM (#16088825)

take the caltrain from south bay to SF and you'll see plenty of land that can be developed from warehouses to housing.

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Re:Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build? by Johnny555 on Saturday January 06, 2018 @10:10PM (#16088892)

That is where you'd build housing that lets people live closer to where they work, not where you'd built a high capacity train station to get people from a city center to city center.

What the bay area needs is a regional government that could set reasonable housing and transit policy instead of dozens of disjointed communities that only want office space and no housing and stand in the way of transit improvements.

There's no single solution that will solve the housing problem -- it'll take more housing closer to jobs, and better transit. (I purposely left out traffic improvements since that's a short-term bandaid)

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Re:Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build? by taurath on Sunday January 07, 2018 @03:41AM (#16089934)

Agreed. Municipalities are too poor to afford inter city connections, and states are probably too large and the politics get messy with the rural vs urban divide.

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