2001 even more than 2008 as it was a long slog with lots of bankruptcies.

It really was. I still see ghosts from that time as I move through the city.

The early 90s were hard on the city as well.

Mature cities like NYC* find ways to incorporate new industries and grow with them. SF doesn't want to grow up apparently. That's fine, but the seagulls aren't to blame. SF could have used their tax revenue to build something awesome.

[*] I guess the cities which successfully do this have a long history of being centres of trade and commerce. Those activities facilitate pro-tolerance and anti-zero-sum thinking.

So has SF.

You’re comparing apples (the Big Apple, it turns out) and oranges. SF is 7 miles by 7 miles of hilly, earthquake prone land, surrounded on 3 sides by water. There is literally no “new land” available to build on, and redeveloping existing lots to rezone, or increase density, or whatever is costly and slow (and that’s true in most US cities, not just SF).

These are _essential_ complexities of land use in SF that are fairly unique to it, and hence comparisons to other cities are rarely useful.

Which is one reason why "Silicon Valley" never included San Francisco: There's no place to build fabs there. It's only been in the last 20 years with the rise of software-only startups that everybody decided they needed to be in the city proper (mostly because VCs wanted to live there and they wanted their funded companies to be close by).

Not that San Mateo and Santa Clara are much easier to find real estate in these days, but they're easier than San Francisco. Just not as cool.

I agree that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but for the record: Manhattan is surrounded on 4 sides by water, and is much hillier than people think (only the southern part of the island is flat). The parts that flat are filled-in salt marsh.

There's a reason the top 8[1] most dense municipalities are in the NYC area: there's limited developable land.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Briefly:

* NYC is a lot more than Manhattan.

* NYC is a substantially larger area than SF.

* SF is also substantially built on top of reclaimed mud flats.

* NYC is tectonically stable. All of these things mean that comparisons between the two cities approach to land use are basically meaningless.

[edit] to fight HN’s formatting

Right, that's why it's still apples-to-oranges. My only claim was that "surrounded by water" and "has hills" are not the reasons why comparisons between NYC and SF are invalid.

Plus Manhattan is schist that never moves, so you can build as high as you want without worrying about your building falling over.

SF is the second densest city in America outside of NYC.

Second densest large city. But if you do it by municipality, SF is the 21st most dense in the country. Four of NYC's five boroughs (coextensive with counties, the way SF is coextensive with SF county) are individually denser than SF.

Weird to use NYC as the example here, given the ghost town that is Manhattan.

I mean, TFA literally pulls up NYC as a supposedly-flattering point of comparison:

> An ambitious young person can now have that awesome Google job while living in the Meatpacking district and walking to the Google office in Chelsea.

Although this is in itself a bit of an odd take given that this has been the case for over fifteen years— I was literally living this life as an intern at Google NYC in 2007.