The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry.
This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the first place.
I would say that building regulations are precisely what is causing the the area to following an LA-style trajectory. San Francisco is one thing, and reasonably dense. But the huge sprawl of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Gatos, etc., is caused by all these communities wanting to be LA-style suburbs with no dense housing, and enacting laws accordingly.
Hmm, there's a HUGE difference between LA-style suburbs and the Bay Area. In LA-style suburbs, you have drive about 10 miles to a shopping mall, i.e., residental areas have no businesses apart from the occassional gas station.
That's because these areas were unpopulated desert or something which got converted into housing.
By contrast, each of the towns in the Bay Area was a standalone town of its own with its own downtown and rail station etc for a long time. Even today, most Bay Area towns are reasonably mixed wrt residental and business.
All (afaik) new construction for about 10 years has been townhomes, not single-family homes, so I'm not even sure this author is correct wrt housing code.
I have to say - whenever I drive the 101 - I'm reminded of LA. It's actually less dense than most of LA. I live in the Richmond which is probably about twice as dense housing wise as most of LA's working class neighborhoods.
I also love San Francisco, but you have the wrong target in mind. Urban density is GOOD. What sucks is a car-centric culture that forces sprawl.
You want a NYC or European-style transportation system, where it's completely unnecessary to own dangerous, unreliable, expensive automobiles. Cities designed around walking -- like the good parts of San Francisco -- are WAY more human-friendly and memorable. I guarantee that whatever parts of San Francisco you love, they're almost definitely not parts you're forced to drive to.
You can have sprawl without having to rely on individual transport by car. This is precisely what is going on in smaller European countries such as Switzerland. Cities and villages are connected through an extensive rail and bus network.
From my city, trains are leaving for Zurich, Geneva, Bern, Lausanne, Basel etc. every 30 minutes.
Most commuters take the train even if they own a car.
I'm still a proponent of urbanization because suburbs seem to disrupt natural spaces. If you travel from east Switzerland to Geneva in the west by train, you will always see a house somewhere, on the entire 400 kilometres of journey. Every village looks alike.
That said, I do think mega-cities can be very tiring and demanding. I only have limited experiences in this regard but cities like Seoul or Istanbul are not the most relaxing environments for its inhabitants.
Agreed on basically all counts. But you're critical because you're spoiled... just visit anywhere in the American Midwest for a week to truly understand how blessed Switzerland is.
Parts of it are sleepy, parts of it arent. But really its just endless tract housing and strip malls.
(also similar: minimal amount of nature within the city itself; lots of concrete but not in an elegant urban way; not much in the way of historical sections)
Parts of the western San Fernando valley, which lies within LA proper, are not that dissimilar from SJ.
And, when people say "LA", they really mean the LA area, which contains not only the city itself, but outlying/surrounded cities like Pasadena, Santa Monica, Compton, Long Beach, etc.
This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs
It's pretty simple. Communities tend to "clump", and people generally aren't willing to commute a really long way so the diameter of each "clump" is limited. Now, this wouldn't be an issue if our population was so massive the entire USA was covered in continuous urban sprawl, but I don't think that would make you happy.
This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the first place.