Call me crazy, but that's what I love about SF. It feels so much more (friendly? approachable?) than other cities because of the architecture and height of buildings. It's quite unique and I'd hate to see it go.
It's an understandable stance, but IMO a disastrous one.
I lived in SF for a year, and to be honest I found it to be somewhere between "cool" and "intolerable". The city is filled with transplants who, the moment they set foot in the fair city, turn around and try to slam the door shut behind themselves as hard as possible, and this has so many negative effects.
San Francisco is a city devoid of pragmatism - it is a fairy tale theme park run amok. Instead of getting more people to and from work faster, it is hostile to most forms of mass transit. It is hostile to the population growth necessary to un-fuck the city's transportation disaster (aka MUNI and BART).
A city is a naturally-arising conglomeration of people that will happen anywhere you combine places people want to live, with places where they can work. The key word here is people. The city has entirely forgotten that - zoning for new office spaces is onerous and slow. Zoning for housing developments nearly non-existent outside of Mission Bay. It has gone out of its way to act directly against the very basic interests of its constituency in favor of maintaining this picturesque, fairy tale backdrop of the 1930s frozen in time.
After experiencing the SF housing market first-hand I honestly have a changed view of the city. When you're just visiting, the old houses, the low density, the unique architectural style, it all feels so picturesque and lovely. Nowadays to me the city feels like a an embalmed corpse - superficially resembling some idealistic long-ago era while lacking any real semblance of function. It is utterly broken, mismanaged to absurdity, all so a small number of people can live in a slowly-crumbling fairy tale.
Nowadays I live in NYC, and frankly have no desire to go back to SF. It's cheaper (!!!), the city has done a remarkable job of preserving old architecture, mixing old with new (see: Hearst Building), and new development. There is a constant stream of development that keep both commercial and residential prices in relative check. And despite the loud cries of San Franciscans, the density and Manhanttanization has created no shortage of culture, interest, and unique neighborhoods.
Hardly surprising. After all, a city is primarily defined by its people, not colorful paints and period-architecture. Keeping people around, at the end of the day, is your best shot at preserving the spirit and character of a place than any sort of architecture.
You're not crazy, lots of people agree with you. Just please don't be like so many SF residents and complain that all the people "who made SF what it is" are being replaced by tech hipsters making 6 figs, while simultaneously complaining about any new construction in their neighborhoods. It's a hypocritical position. There either needs to be more tall buildings or people with sub 90'th percentile incomes are going to have to GTFO from SF until Silicon Valley collapses.
Transportation. The bulk of the economy is still on the west side of the Bay, and crossing the Bay can be a huge pain in the ass. BART is frequently unreliable, expensive, infrequent, and stops early.
On top of that the transportation on the Oakland side is also highly lacking, further increasing the friction for people working in SF but living in the East Bay.
On top of that the transportation on the SF side is also highly lacking. If you work within walking distance of a BART stop, power to you. For everyone else it means catching a transfer to the worst transit agency I've ever seen: MUNI.
In other words, the only commute that really competes with living in the city proper is one where you're living walking distance to a BART stop, and you work within walking distance to a BART stop at the other end. Any other use case becomes an irredeemable mess, substantially limiting the attractiveness for residents.
Transportation has, and is, and will continue to be, the Achille's Heel of San Francisco and its surroundings. The continuing utter failure to invest in transit infrastructure will be the city's undoing.
Says someone not looking at $2,800 for an apartment right now.
And the peninsula isn't really much better. They tend to be bigger, but nothing is within a half mile, nobody walks on the street, it's a miserable place to be. All that, for an apartment that's $300 cheaper? It makes no sense.
What exactly are the density restrictions on residential buildings in San Francisco? I'm slightly familiar with DC and Philadelphia and in neither case is building height or zoning the key issue. Unions and crime figure in.
I'm rather against high-rise residential construction. Big buildings are fine for hotels, but for homes it leads to really shitty residential neighborhoods where people can't recognize their neighbors. I'm all in favor of three story limits. Just make thin row homes. God forbid people actually have to deal with neighbors and maintain sidewalks and so-forth. Maybe some people actually do like checking in and out of their concrete cell block on floor 50.
Call me crazy, but that's what I love about SF. It feels so much more (friendly? approachable?) than other cities because of the architecture and height of buildings. It's quite unique and I'd hate to see it go.