San Francisco's population density is 7,000 people per square kilometer. There are many beautiful, beloved cities throughout the world that manage to accommodate far greater density numbers:

* Barcelona: 16,000

* Buenos Aires: 14,000

* Central London: 13,000

* Manhattan: 25,846

* New York City (overall): 10,100

* Singapore: 7,600

* Paris: 22,000

* Central Tokyo: 14,500

Here's a map of the zoning ceilings throughout San Francisco: http://i.imgur.com/Tn7CSTX.jpg

Every yellow block in that picture is zoned 40-X, which means that buildings taller than four stories are not welcome. If we raised that to six stories (as is the norm, e.g., throughout most of Paris), we could easily accommodate hundreds of thousands of new residents.

That would make NYC 5x as dense as SF. But your numbers are wrong. San Francisco's land area is 46.9 square miles. New York's land area is 304 square miles. New York's density is about 50% higher.

But it's not clear that New York shows any a path forward. They did build up, and prices are still high. Maybe that's a sign that blindly increasing housing supply doesn't actually solve the problem.

San Francisco is only 46.9 square miles. It is dense (17,246 people/sq.mile) but not as dense as NYC (27,016 people/sq.mile).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...

We need Hyperloop so that you can live in LA and work in SF!