That’s kind of the big failure of post-WWII 20th century American urban planning. People, especially young ones, want to live in the fun cities they saw on TV where you can live in fun neighborhoods and walk to cool restaurants on the way to a show, so they move to places like SF, LA, NY, etc. but unless you bought in the 90s anyone without family wealth has the abrupt disappointment that they’re actually in some suburb 45 minutes away and spending a couple hours a day driving and trying not to think about how much they’re paying for even that.

I don’t know how quickly we’ll find the political will to break that since everyone who owns property in a city has a financial incentive to keep prices artificially high. Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals but the degree of uncertainty we have now is going to slow that down, too.

If you want to live in a house, then yes, you will have to commute potentially far distances. But if you're willing to live in an apartment then you can still live in the core of the cities mentioned. This just makes sense, if everyone got to live in a house then it'd hardly have the density required to be considered a city anymore. And actually the existence of 45min away suburbs from the heart of the city is exactly the problem with post-WWII development, if anything you should pay a much heavier premium or live even further.

> Removing density restrictions helps by making redevelopment financially advantageous for individuals

The big problem with changes like this (which I support, btw) is that the changes get immediately reflected in land prices, which means that you basically can only put the maximum number of units on the land, which tends to increase prices.

If you build enough, this doesn't happen but I don't think any western urban area is anywhere close to that point.

Yup. The Bay Area just seems like endless suburbia with a small city hidden inside. Nice weather though, to be fair.

Along the 101/El Camino more like a series of small towns that blend into each other. Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View at least have walkable streets with restaraubts, shops, etc, clustered around a “Main Street”, and residential areas laid out on a grid that mostly blend in to this area not sealed off in some way. Yes it is mostly single family homes and smaller apartments, with almost no high rises.

But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.

> But when I think of “suburbia” I think of a series of housing developments, strip malls p, golf courses just off all major highways/roads. Cul de sacs as opposed to grid pattern. Generally hostile to pedestrians getting fro residential to commercial and business areas. On,y part of the Valley is like this, mostly the richer areas more towards 280, such as Los Altos, Portola Valley, Cupertino.

I guess this is reflective of US/Europe suburbia. From my (Irish) perspective, the valley is clearly suburbia given the density. I'll never forget taking the caltrain from Palo Alto to SF and seeing basically low-density housing with sporadic strips of shops. That would be clearly suburban to me (but obviously other people's opinions will differ).

They're more like denser regions inside El Camino Real tbh

Sure, the South Bay is hell, but that's why plenty of startups are in SF proper.

Plenty of large corporations have headquarters in suburbs (where the rich execs want mansions) but in a close enough commute to a major city where more of the employees want to live.