As San Francisco grapples with an affordable housing crisis, attention has turned to the city’s relatively low housing density: In its 13 square miles of housing-zoned land, the city still has less than half the population density of Paris and almost four times less than Manhattan. There just aren’t many places to live in SF, as anyone who has tried to find an apartment in the last couple of years can attest.

With more and more people moving in and locals resisting new development, a team of architects decided to answer a question: What would the city look like if it actually had enough housing for everyone?

“The reality is our population is expected to hit a million people around 2030,” says Amanda Loper from David Baker Architects. “There isn’t an option to not change. So how can we accommodate people? When you say something like that, people get scared–thinking the character of the city is going to change, it’s going to be like living in Tokyo. David and I wanted to know what that kind of density would look like.”





Surprisingly, it wouldn’t necessarily have to be that different from the San Francisco of today. The architects mocked up a few different versions of a nine-block chunk of the city.

One ultra-dense option, at 270,000 people per square mile, included high-rises like you might see in Hong Kong or New York today. But it turns out it’s possible to reach Manhattan-level densities with lower buildings that match the city’s existing character.

“When we realized that you could actually house 100,000 people per square mile in a way that uses a language that San Francisco is already immersed in, we wanted to show that,” Loper says. “And say look, this city isn’t actually as scary as it seems.”

With some additional six-story buildings in a neighborhood, suddenly it would be possible to accommodate the number of people who want to live in the city.