Tokyo has about the same density as San Francisco (6,000/km^2), though maintained over a significantly larger area. The main thing that's interesting about Tokyo is that it's medium-density but very large: http://marketurbanism.com/2012/06/28/tokyos-surprising-lack-...
> How does NYC, Tokyo, MDF, Paris and so on deal with this?
Paris has taken a split approach, where high-rises are banned in the city center, but a new high-rise-building space was set aside in the suburbs. When Tour Montparnasse [1] was built in 1972, it was so unpopular that further such buildings in the center were banned. New high-rise construction is therefore moved to a few km out of the city center, to La Défense and the suburbs. An analogy might be allowing high-rise construction in Oakland or Daly City, but not in SF proper. The mid-rise buildings are higher-density in Paris than SF, though, typically 5-8 stories throughout the city center.
With Tokyo I was referring to the 23 wards. To take the metro area and calculate the density would be like going down to Palo alto and up to San Rafael and expand the density to those areas. Yes, true, Paris is not not full of high rises, but as you mention, you don't typically have the 2 and 3-story low-rises and neither does Tokyo. Tokyo, quite interestingly for such a dense city, does not have many skyscrapers, tho it has many high rises. But anyway, I could have said HK or Singapore, both have land limits and are on quake zones and both have lots of highrises and also a few skyscrapers. The way those cities achieve their densities is not via lots of skyscrapers, but via lots and lots of mid-rises and highrises. From 8 to about 25 floors. Most in the 8-16 range, IIRC.
I wonder why there hasn't been much in the way of proposals (that I've seen) for moderate redevelopment to make SF more like Paris, versus more like NYC. Stuff like replacing a block of 2-story townhomes with a 6-8-story apartment building. Construction economics, maybe? Developers seem mainly keen on getting approval to put up 20+ story glass-and-steel condo towers with sweeping views.
Or else, cultural differences? In much of Europe, block-sized, mid-rise apartment buildings, often centered on courtyards, are seen as a very classic, nice sort of city-center construction, while high-rises are seen as a bit garish, either too much like an office building, or else too much like an ex-Soviet housing project. Americans seem to have the opposite association, of high-rises as modern and mid-rise apartment blocks as meh.
(Though on the ex-Soviet angle, I've read that as one explanation for why Berlin is one of the cheapest major cities in Europe: the East German government didn't have much patience for these bourgeois concerns about "historical character" and "neighborhoods", so just built rows of high-rise apartment blocks right in the city center. As a result, the city now has an unusually large housing stock.)
Good question. I'm not sure. Maybe it's economics, or maybe a combination of economics and zoning. The one area in SF which got the 'stamp of approval' for that vision, is the China Basin/Mission Bay area. Those tend to be 6 to 15 floor developments. I think that's a good direction. It's not super tall but also does not despoil land with awful low-rise ininspired developments with the collapse-prone first floors (the ones with 'garages' on the first floors).
On the economic side, I think cities prefer single family devs because they can levy more taxes (as they do it per acre, I think). I don't see why they don't tax by livable (inhabitable) space and land, that way they can compensate for the greater density in required services.
Anyway, I've begun reading Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"[1]. It provides interesting insight into the suburbanization of America (and other places, of course, but she looks at the American side of it) and its impact on quality of life and how it may be time to rethink the suburbanization and revitalize cities to make the inner cores actual livable places, not just places where people drive in for work. It's an old tome, but it's still very relevant today.
W:re Soviet style (and even section 8 in the US and Council Estates in the UK) the planners were kind of utilitarian and naive. They more or less saw them as solutions for housing people as if they were storing objects. Little in the way of allowances for human nature. The plans were a bit too abstract. For example, let's say they thought it'd be nice to have a community area. They'd afford a room somewhere in a building, but put little thought on where might be optimum or how people might use it and have equally easy access to it. So they might end up being dingy unused areas which might just get defaced or used by low level criminals.
Tokyo has about the same density as San Francisco (6,000/km^2), though maintained over a significantly larger area. The main thing that's interesting about Tokyo is that it's medium-density but very large: http://marketurbanism.com/2012/06/28/tokyos-surprising-lack-...
> How does NYC, Tokyo, MDF, Paris and so on deal with this?
Paris has taken a split approach, where high-rises are banned in the city center, but a new high-rise-building space was set aside in the suburbs. When Tour Montparnasse [1] was built in 1972, it was so unpopular that further such buildings in the center were banned. New high-rise construction is therefore moved to a few km out of the city center, to La Défense and the suburbs. An analogy might be allowing high-rise construction in Oakland or Daly City, but not in SF proper. The mid-rise buildings are higher-density in Paris than SF, though, typically 5-8 stories throughout the city center.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_Montparnasse