alt Hacker NewsSF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.
New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
The US simply needs to build new cities, and link them with high-speed rail. You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries) and directing it to places that would fit according to a high-speed-rail master plan. Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions, but the lack of a larger master plan in helping link these regions with better transportation links and job creation has prevented them from reaching their full potential.
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> SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.
> New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
All kinds of places overcome these things. Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Bridges and tunnels. NYC was doing this, but mysteriously stopped. SF and NYC don't even come close to densities in many Asian cities. You can think two things about this: we reject that kind of density, or we reject moving a city's center of commerce to a more geographically scalable area. For some reason, we put a low ceiling on density and refused to move where the jobs were, and I'm saying that reason was liberals culturally resisting it. We simply liked the status quo.
> The US simply needs to build new cities...
Extreme, full agree. Even if I disagree w/ you as to the causes of building woes in blue cities, I think we agree it's not worth it to fix. Let's try some new things.
> You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries)
Something that's different now than the last time we did this is that those large industries aren't gonna be (well, at least shouldn't be) places like auto plants or steel mills. I think the "large industries" part of your prescription should be some level of new tech.
>Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions,
Not really. All of downtown Portland, OR has been designated an Opportunity Zone[0]. "the Ritz Carlton Hotel that’s going up in downtown Portland was partly funded with these tax breaks."
[0]https://www.opb.org/article/2021/10/22/new-book-looks-at-por...