<i>Manhattan has twice the people with half the land area, on an island.</i><p>...that is tightly connected to <i>10 times</i> that land area as the boroughs of New York City. Everybody leaves that part out. It&#x27;s more convenient to live in Queens and commute to Manhattan than it is to live in the Outer Richmond and commute to SOMA.<p>This matters, because the part of San Francisco that people conventionally see as &quot;San Francisco&quot; in has little overlap with the parts of the city that are actually low density. The city north of Market and east of Divisadero is fairly high-density development, by any standard: most buildings are at least six stories, and often taller than that. But to make the other 2&#x2F;3rds of San Francisco viable as high-density development, you&#x27;d need to build a ton of new mass transit. It&#x27;s car country over there.<p>There&#x27;s immense hypocrisy on both sides of this discussion. I think height limits in SOMA and the Financial district and Mission Bay should be higher. But it&#x27;s hard to stomach density criticisms from people who want to live in cute, victorian, single-family housing in Noe valley <i>themselves</i>, and re-develop the places where poor brown people live. And that&#x27;s happening a lot around here.