Not all cities must be made into overpopulated ant colonies.
People love SF as it is, and if you increase density it would be not SF, it would be something else.
If you like dense cities - there are plenty of them - LA, SD, NY...
I'm sure people loved SF in the '70s, too.
I'm sure people loved SF in the '80s, too.
I'm sure people loved SF in the '90s, too.
SF has been changing for a while, most American metropolitan cities have. I always find the argument, "I love ____ as it is now" a little amusing, implying that it was either always that way or that it's finally a way that the person wants it to be.
Honestly, I miss the SF of the '90s and early 2000s, which is probably not the same SF that "people [of today who] love SF as it is."
I don't think it's that people love sky scrapers so much as they are willing to tolerate them in order to avoid paying half their salary in rent every month. In any event, we don't need skyscrapers to solve the housing problem, we need more 5-story buildings, which are currently a pain to push through the Planning Commission and BoS in SF, even along transit corridors.
Until jobs start spreading out & not get concentrated in small geographic areas, we are doomed to support the high-density metropolis or urban-sprawl-commute-hell.
It's funny, I live in SD and many say the same thing. "We don't want to increase density, we like that it feels like a small city. It's a privilege to live here, if you can't afford it too bad."
> It's a privilege to live here, if you can't afford it too bad.
From my brief stint in SD, I thought that sentiment was interesting. Especially considering that the housing market is very heavily tied into the military stipend provided for active members. There is a noticeable shift on a nearly annual basis where rental prices shift across the board all together and it doesn't have much to do with influx of residents/demand, but with the stipend increasing for active members. I don't know if this stretches to home-buying as well, but it's almost as if there's this strange symbiotic relationship between the city and military (government) and everyone else is just expected to keep up.
A city is not obligated to densify. The give is that people start to move to places they can afford to live instead of complaining about what hasn't been handed to them.
> instead of complaining about what hasn't been handed to them
While I understand this sentiment, it's certainly glossing over the opposing view of people being kicked out of the homes/neighborhoods they grew up in.
I don't think people being forced out of the neighborhood they live in is necessarily a bad thing, if it means that the new residents are paying more to society for the privilege of living there, and thus lowering the tax burden on everyone else.
The problem from my perspective is that land taxes aren't sufficiently high. Land should not be an easy, safe long term investment. Land should be something you gain title to in order to put to a highly productive use, i.e. live in. A lot of property in growing cities is owned by foreign investors who rarely (if ever) occupy it. If land was no longer a good investment, this would instantly liberate a lot of housing to be used by people who need it.
Gentrification has plusses and minuses. It is one of the processes by which a city improves in various respects. However, in spite of (very imperfect) mechanisms like rent control and caps of property value assessments, an inevitable result of a neighborhood becoming more upscale is that prior residents and business owners find it increasingly hard to remain there.
Except they are not. Anyone is free to purchase any property that someone else is willing to sell. If you don't own the property you live in then you may not always be able to live there. Its pretty simple. If you want guarantees own the things you use.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but your statements are coming off awfully privileged. From the idea that people need to "earn" things, a strangely unique American perspective that you "earn" anything at all (completely pretending that you didn't start off ahead in a lot of ways anyway). To the idea that "its pretty simple" [sic] and that the blindingly obvious solution is to just "own the things you use" - a luxury that not many people can do.
but the point is that it cant be any other way. property owners aren't going to do sell or rent below market price. if you're poor, you get shoved around, which has been more or less the same since the dawn of humanity.
the modern day of today doesn't mean that changes. not until there's unlimited frer resources.
