Re:The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics
by IndianAstronaut on Sunday January 25, 2015 @02:03AM
(#8942264)
Nimbys are strong in SF and prevent building up. Tokyo, which has a similar earthquake problem has built up.
Re:The $3500 Shirt – A History Lesson in Economics
by jpatokal on Sunday January 25, 2015 @07:59AM
(#8942818)
Not really. Japan's "sunlight laws" make it really hard to go above around three stories or so, meaning that nearly all of Tokyo's skyscrapers are concentrated in a few hot spots with commercial zoning (Shinjuku, Marunouchi) plus a few mega-developments like Roppongi Hills where the developer could pull enough strings to buy a large chunk of land and bulldoze their way to an exception.
Of course, compared to Silicon Valley, even the suburbs of Tokyo are indeed densely packed -- but then, Tokyo also crams in something on the order of 7x more people into the same area.
Nor are SF's roads and bridges really all that complex. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has 446 bridges, and is one of the cheapest cities to live in in the United States. Maintaining two big bridges just isn't that complex, certainly not enough to explain a 10x factor in the cost of living. Sure, SF has a high minimum wage for construction employees, but so does California in general. And somehow it is not that expensive to live in Fresno or Sacramento.
If anything, rural and suburban areas tend to have to maintain more infrastructure per taxpayer, since people are more spread out.