Ever wondered if it’s desirable BECAUSE it’s not a dense urban jungle?
Mild winters, mild summers.
Not too much rain.
No serious threat from tornadoes or hurricanes.
That’s a very big draw and it wouldn’t go away by making more dense housing, even if the rest of the peninsula was developed like Manhattan.
The buildings should go somewhere else, on bedrock
Considering the advances in seismic technology made over the past fifty years, it is a shame that much faster upgrades to the real estate have not been encouraged.
Londons problem for example is that they tried to be clever and cheap at the same time in the 60s and now we're stuck with it.
Spread out the pain so everyone only suffers a little. Spread out the development across different architectural eras. Spread out density to the point where you have diminishing returns.
The city shouldn't be changed overnight, but the city should be allowed to change an a consistent rate that slowly accelerates. A good example is to allow each building to only double the square footage of the median building within, say, a quarter-mile radius of the property being redeveloped. This means that SFH's can only become duplexes until duplexes are the norm. After that, quad-plexes can be built, and then when that's normal, you start building large, eight-unit, european-style flats.
This allows different areas to grow at different rates, while allowing density to remain generally uniform across neighborhoods. This incentivizes people who very much want low density to have a reasonably, predictably low-density neighborhood to invest in, while giving up the ghost when a piece of land is just to valuable to reasonably keep low density.
It would work, and would work quickly in areas where lots of development is needed.
Interesting to imagine what this city would look like. If it spread out evenly, you'd get a strange "bowl", with the original SFHs in the center, and high-rises on the periphery.
I guess in reality you wouldn't have such even growth; high rises would still potentially want to clump together for business districts, etc.
As buildings get torn down, you could do the recalculation; each new building can be x% above or below the local building density "slope". So over time, even the SFH areas could grow upwards, just at a slow pace.
No, it doesn't; existing SFHs can, and have when allowed to, become duplexes, triplexes, and sometimes even quadruplexes without changing square footage at all, with doubling, you can go even further. All it takes is remodeling so that each subdivided unit meets minimum habitability standards (separate access, its own restroom, whatever other facilities are mininally required.)