San Francisco and the Challenges of American Urbanism

Discourse around zoning, housing and density in San Francisco are incomplete without a compartive perspective.

I try to stay away from writing explicitly about housing in San Francisco mostly because  inevitably anything I, or anybody else, write about housing ends up being filtered through a nonsensical and destructive nimby-yimby discourse which invariably sheds considerably more heat than light.

Additionally, like most people in San Francisco or New York or ot…