SF Central Stubway took 20 years to construct and will take another 20 years to reach the wharf. Caltrain DTX has been in planning for 20 years, construction probably won't start until 2030s. Geary BART has been talked about since the 1960s with no motion. Second transbay tube is needed, no specific plans yet. Muni Metro is at capacity with no plans to fix.

So you can build a lot of housing and tell people to deal, but they may be retired or dead before it gets fixed.

I'd advise against this. We did that in Madison, and before we even got very far doing this, Mother Nature started to hint to us that it might not be a good idea.

Maybe there are places where you can just build Willy-Nilly. (I doubt it, but what do I know?) I suspect, however, most places are like Madison, just not quite as delicate. You probably have to be REALLY careful about what you're building.

And even more careful about where you're building it.

Could you explain what you mean by this?

So yeah, no new plans for any new massive footprint, high density buildings along that area in the near future. I suspect until they get this whole thing worked out. Point is that just digging out massive parking garages, paving over areas, building high density housing, it all sounds good on the surface. And it might be good for other cities? Who knows?

But we now have a better understanding that you need a more well thought out plan if you're a city built on a system of five lakes with a dam and locks system delicately balancing their water levels as it is.

Maybe you could claim that it is better to provide infrastructure before people, but it is actually the master planned cities that have yet to succeed, not the other way around. It's just too damn expensive to provide infrastructure for people that don't exist yet, and that deters people from moving there.

There were many ways to build upwards at the time but London favoured single family houses. Cities like Paris built upwards around that time. Even to this day Paris is more densly populated than New York because almost all buildings in Paris are around 7 stories rather than a very tall core surrounded by a lot of single family dwellings.

Nowhere? They would use public transit. If public transit didn't exist, they'd become an actual constituency forcing it to happen.

And yeah, sure, developers would have add electrical lines, substation, electrical capacity depending. Jeesh theses objections just seems substituting trees for forest.

Edit: And certainly, the calls for "just do it!" are response to a corrupt collection of interests who use "do it responsibly" to soak up vast amounts of money for doing anything and then throw-up their hands and say "see we tried", which is the way public transit has gone in the last fifty years in this country.

https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2018/07/yimbyism-explain...

Uber/Lyft and now scooters have already 10x improved transit in SF. Living without a car and even without buses is totally possible now. The cost of Lyft 10 times a week compares favorably with a car, and scooters/bikes are much cheaper. See http://www.rideordrive.org/

Improving caltrain, muni and bart would be awesome, but there's plenty of transit to handle much more housing.

So "moar housing!"

Plus a broader tax base vs relying on Prop 13 property taxes.

The reason you think more transit will be needed is because you are assuming that separate business and residential districts are required. However there is no particular reason it must be that way. If you can get people within walking distance of work and a few stores they won't needs as much transit. Transit becomes what you need for rare trips.

Much of SF is 1 story buildings. You can absolutely convert those to 3-4 story buildings and get 100% more people in SF. The first floor can be restaurants, schools and grocery stores. In this new SF, like in Tokyo, you can get a flat for $600/month.

Think of the Mission, North Beach, Noe Valley, but building that in the Richmond and Sunset. Everyone wants to live there (see the current prices), why not build more if it? Why not build a bunch in Oakland?

People can just switch to scooters and bikes and there is tons of room on the streets. I remember a NY transit authority guy at a conference, he was just amazed at how much wider our streets are. There is tons of room.

Tokyo exists, it is a real big city with low rents and a great quality of life.

> You can’t just build taller buildings and dump 50% more people in a city.

Tell that to NY.

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/04/17/supervisors-s...

(And it's another way to pay people off-the-books and under-the table in the form of discounted housing. In theory, the discount is taxable income when it's provided because of employment, but good luck getting _these_ people to pay up.)

In Madison Wisconsin there were, for a long time, policies that tended to discourage building on the main east-side thoroughfare. Over time, no one really remembered why those policies, some of which one might construe as "inclusionary zoning", were in place. So we jumped on the urban development bandwagon. We were "All In" on it. I mean getting rid of older policies, introducing things like TIF for that very east side corridor, the whole nine yards. Fast forward to today, and there are buildings built down that corridor with giant footprints. And some people even think they are beautiful. So we congratulated ourselves.

Then something strange started to happen. Whenever it rained, that very corridor would flood. Odd? It never did that before? Well, we never built like that down that corridor before. Not to worry. The flooding wasn't really that bad. But it's gotten worse and worse. And only now are people starting to realize why those old guys back before and during the Greatest Generation wanted to discourage building anything critical there. Long story short, we're a city situated on a system of five lakes, we can't just look at what everyone else in the nation does and copy them. We need to follow a plan that makes sense for our geography. We need policies that make sense for us, even if on the surface, those policies appear to hamstring us economically.

I'm sure Madison is not special in this regard. It's likely most cities have some feature endemic to them that would similarly constrain where and how a wise man would build in that municipality. Like us, most cities have probably even forgotten the why of their constraints. I sympathize. But just as a piece of kindly intended advice from a people who have "been there, done that, currently trying to clean up the mess"...

don't look at old policies and say they're "outdated", or "nonsense"...

look at old policies and ask, "OK, what was the reason for this?"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence