The main limit there is usually transportation infrastructure, but there is not exactly room for more lanes on any of the Bay Area's highways, let alone space for new highways.

Rail scales better, but that's also not really getting a move on anytime soon, and in any case rail scales better if density is high development and nearby.

Ah yes, just tear down the redwood forest.

Or farmland, because that's just unused space, right?

That's how it's been seen traditionally in the US, unfortunately. Silicon Valley in California used to be the site of the largest fruit producing area in the world from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s, but technology turned out to be more profitable. The Orlando area in Florida was also a major citrus producer until the 1970s and the coming of Disney World and other theme parks that located there to get traffic from Disney visitors.

What about the empty, smelly, marshland? Sure there may be some limited wildlife there but what about you know, people who want a house affordable enough to have a family?

Limited wildlife in wetlands? No. Wetlands are among the most richly bio diverse ecological niches. Humans regard themselves as somehow outside the system in which they evolved.

Smelly? The presence of volatile compounds interacting with your olfactory receptors that trigger certain aversive reactions is a poor justification for destroying a natural habitat.

The smell they're referring to is probably the Milpitas Stench, which is probably coming from a San Jose garbage dump. It is quite… noticeable.

https://milpitas-odor.info/about/

There are millions of square kilometers of undeveloped land that are not within 30 minutes of the most expensive real estate in the USA. Preserve it elsewhere, let families have homes here.

Low density areas do not produce enough property taxes to fund the infrastructure required to maintain them. They're not sustainable.

Pretty sure the taxes in this area would. And besides, most of the USA is low density. Why does this specific area need to remain unbuilt?

Pretty sure based on what?

"As a young engineer, I remember sitting in a city council meeting where a senior colleague presented my analysis on the massive backlog of road maintenance the community was facing. My estimation was that the city's capital budget needed to be increased by five times just to keep from falling further behind"

"Analyses of new developments suggest that a minimum of $20 in private wealth is needed to sustain, for the long term, each dollar of public infrastructure investment. A ratio of 40:1 would provide an optimal buffer for future uncertainty. Yet, when we examine modern North American localities, it is common to find ratios of 1:1 or worse. That is, in the current development pattern, it takes one dollar of public infrastructure investment to create one dollar of private wealth. That’s a formula for economic disaster."

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/22/the-more-we-gr...

The Strong Towns argument is not convincing. Most local governments spend far more on public safety than on road maintenance. The roads are generally fine. Sure public works department employees can always point to long lists of needed maintenance work, but if it takes a few weeks to fix a pothole on some residential street that's not a crisis.

This is just bad reasoning. How much they spend on other items is irrelevant to whether the amount they spend on roads is sufficient. The effects of deferred maintenance take years or decades to show up. Then a bridge collapses or a road needs to be completely redone and there’s no money to fix it.

The same effect scales to other services anyway. You need more cops to cover 50 square miles than 10 square miles and if the areas is low density it’s producing less $ / square mile in taxes so they can’t afford it.

No that's not how it works. Many low-density areas have very few law enforcement officers, and still have low crime rates. Whereas some of the densest cities actually need more cops because the residents act out in antisocial ways.

Strong Towns just cherry picks data to support their preferred political narrative. I actually agree with some of their recommendations, but let's not be fooled into believing that they're doing high quality analysis.

Maybe, maybe not. That doesn't change the fact that "we spend more on public safety so the amount we spend on roads is enough" is straight nonsense. They are two different things with different requirements. How much is spent on one has nothing to do with how much needs to be spent on the other. You can underspend on roads for quite a while before things start obviously falling apart. People notice pretty quickly if the cops or ambulance aren't showing up though.

Since this area seems to mean Silicon Valley, you're aware of Prop 13, yes? Ain't nobody paying property taxes here.

The density is required if you don't think that commuting for a hour by a slowly moving car is the best use of everyone's time, and building and maintaining a huge highway is the best use of your limited tax funds.

Density + public transportation save a lot, on both counts. You may not be a fan of Manhattan, but 1/10 of its density, aka low-rises, already make proper urban infrastructure sustainable.

Is density or the huge highway required? We're commuting to a huge number of white collar jobs completely unnecessarily. Move information, not people.

So much property value is tied up in this assumption we need to be close to jobs to work and it's all a lie. Many of the jobs that do require an in-person presence are only located where they're located because the assumption is the jobs need to be there to serve the workers who don't need to be there in the first place. I don't think any part of how we're making cities actually makes sense, because they're designed for the world of 2020, and not the world of 2030.

People have this mindset that's outmoded, they think about how to get the workers into offices. The thought now should be how to get goods and services to the workers.

Let's look at projections for the world of 2030, shall we?

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

Most jobs are not office jobs and cannot be done remotely.

As a software engineer, I work from home, and it's OK. Living in a dense city means I can walk to a park, or a grocery store, or a to my doctor, but it's a just a nice bonus.

But the article is talking about factories, blue-collar jobs that require actual physical presence.

Factory jobs are a small fraction of the overall economy. Take the white collar cars off the road and you've freed up capacity. Then build roads for industrial purposes.

I do some work with blue collar industrial clients now and again as a favour. I work remote and contract out the various things I can't do remotely to an MSP or various local installers. A factory has an accounting department, it has managers pushing paper all day (although these usually can only be hybrid remote positions), that sort of thing.

You certainly need to build a freaking road to the facility and arrange for the transport of workers but honestly congestion on these roads isn't as much as an issue as disrepair and maintenance because of the heavy trucks driving across them. Talk to anybody running anything industrial and they want to hire some white collar people to automate some stuff to either cut labor costs or expand the business, hopefully the latter, and these people are likely to work hybrid.

I guess you are right and I should give more consideration to industrial uses of transportation infrastructure which are just as relevant as ever.

Where I live (in Europe), every factory has buses which ferries the workers to and from the factory even from remote villages. It isn't hard to do.

Density appears to be required because letting people do remote work causes them to live in cities /even more/. When they do spread out, it doesn't encourage low density, but rather even far out places like Spokane become unaffordable.

Besides that, low density suburbia is a very artificial post-WW2 invention, traditional villages were dense enough.

Indeed so; I've been to small towns in western Poland which are many centuries old, and they are pretty dense, sometimes downright tight. I've been to a number of small towns in Ireland and England, and they look properly urban, nothing like suburban sprawl.

> and building and maintaining a huge highway is the best use of your limited tax funds.

And once again, the growth ponzi scheme strikes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

It's not strictly required, but it is desired if you don't want to keep cutting into nature. Not to mention more efficient all-around. Car-dominant suburban sprawl is a terrible model in the long run for a variety of reasons.