So is New York City. See Brookln, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island. This comment doesn't say much. When people talk about density in SF, they are talking about the northeast quadrant. That is some of the most dense urban residential areas in the United States.
And LA is more dense than NYC
But the absolute size matters. The actual “city like” part of SF is really small.
Where do you draw the boundaries or LA and NYC? This is imporant to test your hypothesis.
The city boundaries, which I admit is kind of arbitrary/weird for LA (city). If you include the county, or MSA it's obviously way less dense.
What bothers me the most is how so many Americans seem to have this irrational fear of cities. They think they are more dangerous, dirty, difficult, etc than they really are, by a wide margin. And they vastly under-estimate the amenities and quality of life they bring, along with the extent to which they make all of the wealth of the country even possible.
They wring their hands and complain that allowing more building will turn their city into NYC, which is just crazy on the face of it.
Look, I've visited NYC and there's a lot of nice things, such as mass transit that basically works, food options everywhere, etc. I liked it more than I expected I would.
But there's not a lot of peacefulness. There's certainly not peacefulness outside my bedroom windows anywhere I could afford to live. Sleeping with windows open and waking to birdsong rather than traffic sounds is quality of life for me.
You don't have to live in a city if you don't want to. In Japan you can choose if you want to live in the countryside or in the smack middle of Osaka.
Yeah, cars are the #1 of quality of life problem in cities.
Honestly a lot of arguments will be settled if the posters location was known. Culture influences a lot of wrong opinions.
Brooklyn is more dense than San Francisco proper though.