A 45-story building is much more expensive than 9 5-story buildings and causes localized transportation problems. You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.
>A 45-story building is much more expensive than 9 5-story buildings
Including land costs, is that really true? I sort of doubt it, since those sorts of high rises are built in cities where land prices aren't that high.
> You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.
Don't you want the opposite of that? If it is spread, you spend more time traveling. Public transit that is spread out is very hard to accomplish. Cities with that stuff all spread out are car cities.
If things are spread out and randomly distributed then you have a living economy reachable by foot. There will be a bakery, a barber, a library, and a cafe in your neighborhood. If you put all the houses in one place and all the bakeries in another, then you have to get in your car or on the bus to travel between them.
I always trot out Paris, but that's only because it's such a good example.
There are examples of that working and there are examples of shorter heights working equally well. I enjoy them both (Manhattan and Paris as examples of the two types) but what SF is doing doesn't really work for me. All the high rise residences are being built in a small area south of Market, but in the same neighborhoods there's nothing to do, nothing to eat, no public spaces. It's not very livable.
Nightlife I'll grant you. But I bet if you moved into the new apartments on Beale and Folsom you'd take an Uber everywhere, because there's nowhere to eat lunch on a Saturday within half a mile, and the nightlife is 1.5+ miles away.
That part in the middle of South Beach is a weird little restaurant desert. However if you are willing to make the 10 minute walk I'd recommend the Delancey Street Restaurant for a nice place for brunch with a good social mission. I had many a mimosa there when living in the corporate housing across the street.
High-rise buildings really aren't necessary for a walkable lifestyle. 5-6 stories (Berlin style) and everything you need is within a couple of blocks. Even with UK style terraced streets usually mean you have shops/cafes/pubs within easy walking distance.
I actually think it would be very hard to soak up demand at this point.
I think adding high rise is the right choice, as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links. It's all very well to add in a couple of thousand people, but they all have to get in and out and buy groceries etc. you don't want each of those people owning a car and making the traffic worse.
I think there should be mor emphasis on making other parts of the Bay Area more like the things people want from the city / peninsular proper. Whether that is transport, cultural or liveability, it should all be possible.
>as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links
That point so often seems ignored in these discussions (with respect to many growing/popular cities).
So an example of the reality in the Boston area is that the Green Line extension is on hold last I read because costs have doubled to $2 billion or so. (And the Green Line is basically the oldest and crappiest line in the overall not-bad Boston metro system. It's essentially a trolley with underground sections dating to the turn of the last century.)
So 20 years and $20 billion or so in transportation infrastructure would certainly set San Francisco up to do more building in areas where there are good opportunities to expand housing stock beyond what's already being built.
You also have to consider that decreasing cost in SF will lead to increased demand.