Are you addressing what the author wrote because it seems like Scott Alexander says it may be more complicated than you claim. He wrote:

>suppose San Francisco dectupled its housing growth for decades, until it was packed border to border with skyscrapers, and was exactly as dense as Manhattan. In a simple supply-based model, the glut of supply should make rents crash to only a few hundred dollars a month or less. But in actual Manhattan, single-bedroom apartments cost $3800 a month – even more than in San Francisco! If your theory predicts that turning a city into Manhattan will make rents plummet, then consider that turning Manhattan into Manhattan made rents much worse, and so maybe your theory is wrong.

Also how many of those high rises are residential?

Single bedroom apartments within a short, reasonably efficient, rapid transit commute of midtown can and do go for drastically less money.

The world is literally full of cities that have sane housing and transit policy. If you don’t like New York, try Barcelona or Paris as examples.

The Bay Area is just an abject failure at this, and it’s getting worse. My argument stands, commenting on this topic is like watching one of those “My 600lb Life” shows or something and screaming at the TV. Sure, I get that eventually there’s subtlety to this topic, but for now maybe stop eating 15,000 calories a day.

Or, in this case, stop building massive centers of employment that are 3 stories tall and surrounded by parking lots and wondering why shit isn’t working.

And this phenomenon is unknown in other cities?

NYC was able to do this because they did it 50, 70, 100 years ago. Today, they're just building over the same footprints as they had already carved out. Property was less expensive, and the government/companies under fewer moral constraints then.

If you dispute this, go look at how much unused transit capacity exists in East and South San Jose while places like Mountain View and Cupertino receive no attention. You can't even take the VTA to San Jose airport, because flying is also something rich people do. It got so bad that Palo Alto threatened to leave the VTA entirely.

This is what happens when a transit agency stops addressing transit needs to focus on "justice". If you think anything has changed, go look at the VTA's projected plans...dumping even more government spending in places where their existing investment sits idle. Indeed, the VTA is actually reducing their commitments outside of San Jose over time...its all in their plans available for public review.

It's not Apple that's responsible for building rail, for zoning for apartments, it's the city. The city itself is not responsible for Apple's success either, and many of the residents would rather that Apple had never been sited in Cupertino so they wouldn't have to deal with all those other people.

That's the problem with Cupertino; a bunch of people moved there and changed it, and thought, "now that I'm here it's finally perfect and we shouldn't let anybody else in." That type of planning attitude, of "build it once and never let it change," is not something that's succeeded ever in the history of mankind. But we'll see how long it lasts this time.