Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

SF is already one of the most dense cities in the USA. If the government forbids people from building housing, they've historically done a poor job at it. They are the second most dense city in the USA after NYC, and no would accuse NYC of not being unaffordable either.

The real problem is that more people want to live in SF than they have allowed housing to be built for. But it isn't clear that if they went with Houston-style "anything goes", would they still be that desirable? Or only as desirable as less popular Houston?

Sf is 7 square miles. You can cut a swath out of that size out of other cities and find that density. Possibly more density. Koreatown in LA has like 45k people a square mile, over twice as dense as sf. Several other areas there clock in at a higher density too. Really you need to consider it as just a region in the greater Bay Area metro region. And given its prominence in position as a transit hub with billions invested over decades in just that effort, it makes sense to add density there.

Yes, SF is only 7 square miles, so already you don't have much to work with. The Bay Area is the 4th most populated metro in the USA. So still not as dense as NY or even LA, but still denser than the vast majority of places in the USA.

1. 2,251.1/sq mi Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA / 12,828,837 2. 2,156.5/sq mi New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA / 19,865,045 3. 1,614.4/sq mi Trenton-Ewing, NJ / 369,526 4. 1,303.6/sq mi San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA / 4,466,251

Bay Area density fairly well correlates to SF's density, actually (yes, not as dense, but neither are the metros around the other dense cities).

More housing is always great, but I think it is really idealistic to think that building more housing in a hot area is going to bring prices down much, if at all. Literally, anywhere in the world, that simply doesn't happen. At best, we get a place like Berlin that has a nice economic bust that brings housing prices down for awhile (and then they start ticking up again as the economy improves), or Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.

> Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.

Nope. Tokyo's population is still growing, and 1980s housing in Tokyo is deeply undesirable. The reason Tokyo has sane housing prices is that it continuously builds large amounts of housing, because they haven't made it de facto illegal the way too many places have. Sometimes that's all it takes.