> SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.
> New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
All kinds of places overcome these things. Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Bridges and tunnels. NYC was doing this, but mysteriously stopped. SF and NYC don't even come close to densities in many Asian cities. You can think two things about this: we reject that kind of density, or we reject moving a city's center of commerce to a more geographically scalable area. For some reason, we put a low ceiling on density and refused to move where the jobs were, and I'm saying that reason was liberals culturally resisting it. We simply liked the status quo.
> The US simply needs to build new cities...
Extreme, full agree. Even if I disagree w/ you as to the causes of building woes in blue cities, I think we agree it's not worth it to fix. Let's try some new things.
> You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries)
Something that's different now than the last time we did this is that those large industries aren't gonna be (well, at least shouldn't be) places like auto plants or steel mills. I think the "large industries" part of your prescription should be some level of new tech.
> All kinds of places overcome these things
Yes, but it requires political will. America is rather characteristic (I want to say unique, but that's probably false) in its lack of political will to increase density anywhere that isn't already dense. Like I said, you're not going to suddenly see 50 story towers blanket San Francisco. This is why, as cities develop suburban and exurban sprawl to the point where the distances no longer become feasible to commute in an automobile, we need to develop new cities, with a strategy for reducing commute time between them (i.e. high speed rail).
> some level of new tech
I mean... it's not going to be datacenters, seeing as how they require a minimum of people and lots of power generation. So unless you have a suggestion, I would go with tried-and-proven approaches, yeah? A master plan for high-speed rail, with the budget to boot, is already a big spend of the innovation budget, the rest should be boring choices, right?
Nah I think we need to go big. This will require a big investment and we won't recoup it unless a big part of it is redoubling our high-end manufacturing and agriculture. This is stuff like robotics, sensors/chips/solar panels/batteries, biopharmaceuticals, modular housing, sustainable farming and textiles, etc.