>> we’re out of space to put suburbs in a reasonable commute distance of jobs

San Mateo County is 69% rural, Santa Clara County is 74% rural, Alameda County is 63% rural, Contra Costa County is 57% rural and Marin is 84% rural. There are plenty of places to put suburbs. It's just not allowed. Yes you would need to build more roads.

But progressives don't like roads. And progressives don't like suburbs. If they have to choose between new roads and suburbs on one hand and a housing shortage on the other had, well visit San Francisco. You can see and smell the choices they've made.

Sure if you plan to pave over huge swaths of currently protected wilderness you can find more land. But there is no universe in which 280, 101, or 880 can be built to handle the extra demand that would cause. They couldn't adequately handle pre-pandemic traffic. And if you stick with SFH zoning that land would be gobbled up fairly quickly and we'd be in a worse version of our current situation.

There's an exceedingly obvious third choice, increase density. There's no reason for transit connected areas of a major city to be legally limited to single family zoning.

>> Sure if you plan to pave over huge swaths of currently protected wilderness you can find more land

That's exactly my point. You don't have a shortage of land in the Bay Area. You have progressives who would rather have people sleep on the street than build on that land.

Paving over forests and wetlands to make more suburbs will not solve homelessness. I legitimately don’t understand how that seems like a more reasonable choice than infill, changing zoning, and public transit improvements within existing urban and suburban areas.

>> I legitimately don’t understand how that seems like a more reasonable choice than infill, changing zoning, and public transit improvements within existing urban and suburban areas

That's called false dichotomy. If you took all the land in the bay area that people aren't allowed to build on and you allowed developers to build single family homes on all that land, that's what, a million homes? You tell me. You could do infill, zoning, transit, all that, and still build a million new houses too.

It's a choice. And the choice people are making is let's do none of that, let's do precisely none of that. Which is fine, but just stop with the whining.

People made choices.