I would not say that dense city living is not without its downsides. But if people need to work in these cities, they may as well get to live closer. And if you are already living in an apartment, it's not that much different to live in a 6 story apartment building vs a 4 story one.

> There would be 3-4X the people, yet still the same amount of roads, services, and public utilities.

That's the point! Per capita, it should be cheaper to live in cities because infrastructure goes so much further. And if you are arguing for better mass transit, you will have to build many, many more miles if you also want to encourage people to sprawl.

Although I think the strongest case for allowing cities to get dense is it allows greenbelts and less dense areas closer to the city. You can build a big dense city UP and make it easier for people to get out and enjoy nature and farms and etc. Or you can build a city OUT and then it's just desolate city for hours around.

Is it cheaper because the infrastructure is going farther, or because every individual is getting less and less of an overburdened commons?

If you build out instead and everyone gets the SFH white-picket-fence life, the escape to nature is suddenly less important. Even if it's more expensive to connect, in the process we develop ample capacity in the commons.

Maybe it's just not possible with so much cost focus and so many competing incentives in the West. And no superseding body who can make it happen like China.

Converting 4-story to 6-story isn't really what I see pitched either, it's generally rezoning SFH/2/4-plex to 6-story+ with subsidies, which is really a huge remaking of neighborhoods.

> Is it cheaper because the infrastructure is going farther

Yes, that's exactly it!

> or because every individual is getting less and less of an overburdened commons?

No, it's not that at all. Why would common services be overburdened? Everyone still gets their water, sewage, electricity, internet, etc., but it's far cheaper to provide per-person.

And with the density you get to build public transit, so people aren't burdened by having to necessarily own a car.

>Why would common services be overburdened?

Water restrictions? Fatbergs? Brownouts? Congestion? Traffic? Breathing room? Not to mention increasing demand on any inelastic local supply will drive up prices. To my initial point, the upscaling of utilities and infrastructure is often magically handwaved alongside the up-zoning demands. There are real negatives to cramming more and more people into one place!

Fatbergs and brownouts point to underinvestment in utilities (budget problems / many historic, undemolishable buildings)

You need to keep less $ invested in infrastructure per person if everyone lives on top of one another in a condo.

If everyone lives in a white picket fence SFH then you have to build miles of extra roads, pipes, cables. Every trip for every bus, truck, and car is a bit further.

There's a lot to be said for both rural and city life but cities can be much cheaper if there's unrestrained development.

It’s not actually handwaved when in a lot of cities, fees are charged to property developers to pay for the necessary infrastructure upgrades

The only reason why suburbia is possible is because it is _heavily_ subsidized.

If you had to pay the real bill for road maintenance alone suburbs would no longer be viable.

So the suburbs take from the commons and don't give back in your example.

Would be interested in reading more about this claim, but it is not true for my suburb which raises plenty in development fees and property tax.

Looking at a random SF suburb, "Pleasanton" [0] - it looks like 72% of their budget is funded through taxes and only ~7% is transfer payments.

[0] https://www.cityofpleasantonca.gov/assets/our-government/fin...

I’ve been to Atlanta. A hundred miles of suburbia is not an improvement and is actually a dystopia.

Dystopia usually conjures up a neon bright towers of an overwhelming big city. I've been to Atlanta too and I quite liked it. Low density, lots of green space, decent public transit (MARTA). Lots of interesting neighborhood variability.

Atlanta is beyond overwhelming big. It can literally take 3 hrs to drive across.

It is currently being force "low-densified" by restrictions. If those restrictions and force were removed, it would densify itself due to market demands. It would be much, much less forced than the current paradigm.

I enjoy both low and high density living.

The argument in favour of density is that if you increase density, then you also decrease the average distance that people have to travel until they get somewhere interesting, like a job or a shop.

Vehicle-delivered utilities like garbage collection, package deliveries, and mass transit get more efficient, and the same goes for tunnel-delivered utilities like fiber internet and water.

San Francisco is economically one of the world's most impactful cities; it'd be good for all of us if there was more of it. You get all sorts of interesting multiplier effects when you put lots of a certain kind of person in one place.

- all the theater kids in one town: LA

- all the bankers: NYC, London

- all the computer people: SF

Granted there are economic efficiencies. But I'm not convinced the fully expanded multipliers from one Super SF with 4X the density - turning it into somewhere like Manila - would be better across all metrics (economic and human) than fostering four easily interconnected mini-SFs.

Public schools are closing due to lack of enrollment. Transit agencies are cutting back from low ridership and lack of fare revenue. If housing costs were low enough for more people to move in affordably it could be a boon for the city.

Maybe a boon for the city, but is definitively a boon for the people? Or could they be better served by building up another nearby town and connecting it?

There are also a lot of nearby towns already connected by somewhat frequent rail service that could also do well to densify

Public schools are closing because of DILDOs (dual income, little dog owners). If people aren’t having children, there’s no need for the schools.

Not because their budgets are being slashed every year?

Why wouldn’t you slash the budgets when enrollment is decreasing? And when you expect a 15% decrease in enrollment over the next 10 years?

Chicken, egg?

Have you actually checked on those Chinese cities to see how they’re doing? Many are literal vacant ghost towns because it turns out people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere.

Not saying those don't exist but China also has like 50 tier-3 cities significantly larger than SF. And for the most part, really great transit between them.

Mass transit isnt a silver bullet either. Here in Brisbane, they standardized around a narrow gauge designed to pull cart loads of timber down mountains. They duplicate it where they can, but effectively its a city of technical debt. Theres a maximum size of train we are already at, and a maximum number of trains per minute we can sustain.

So we have a decent mass transit system but its not far from peak capacity, and most of what the government has been doing is hacking around that. Trammish busses, cross river rail etc.

So we need to attack the issue from the other side too. We have a weirdly non dense central region, largely due to single issue anti development voters, who dont want apartment buildings right where they should be (on top of mass transit hubs). Instead the inner suburbs are littered with 1950s character homes, battleaxed once for massive profit.

We can take significant load off of a system close to a decade from collapse by simply removing outdated zoning.

And the way the council here operates, utilities and road upgrades necessitated by development are borne by the property developer. So there's really near zero cost in approaching things this way. And they have also used priority approvals, where if a certain amount of floor space of a development is earmarked for light commercial, they can cut a few years off approval time. So theres absolutely no reason not to, as the big residential buildings grow, they grow their own services and utilities.