That's pretty reductionist. San Francisco's housing policies are definitely responsible for some of the price difference between here and Tucson, but you can't ignore the geography. SF is a 7x7 mile square surrounded by water on three sides. Tucson is a sprawling mess that go on for dozens of miles.
Dense, desirable, naturally bound cities are always going to be more expensive than endless exurbs. Look at housing prices in Hong Kong if you think that looser zoning is a cure-all for high prices.
San Francisco isn't all that dense. It's boundaries are just drawn so as to exclude the outer semi-urban areas most cities have. E.g. the sparsely-populated neighborhoods around Midway and O'Hare are part of Chicago proper, but SFO is well outside city limits.
San Francisco is about 47 square miles of land area. The densest 47 square miles of Chicago has a population of 1.1 million people and a density of 23,500 people per square mile (versus 825,000 people for San Francisco and density of 17,600 people per square mile). If you look at the subset of Chicago neighborhoods that have the same combined average population density as San Francisco, they have a combined population of about 2.3 million people.
Housing prices are much lower in Chicago than in San Francisco, despite comparable density over comparable areas of the cities. A big part of that is lower demand. Chicago has fewer job opportunities and is stable/shrinking in population while San Francisco is growing. At the same time, supply is also a huge issue. As of last year, there were seven residential skyscrapers under construction in the downtown Chicago neighborhoods: http://www.domu.com/blog/apartment-projects-under-constructi.... These projects are adding thousands of new units to a market that is by all measures growing much more slowly than downtown San Francisco.
Is this a continuous 47 square miles, though? San Francisco is always a little difficult to compare to other cities that are much larger metro regions. If you were to replace the lower density parts of SF with the dense urban areas in Oakland and Berkeley, you might end up with something much higher than what you sectioned off from Chicago - and as a region, that comparison might be more accurate.
Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest, most space-constrained places on the planet, and remains far cheaper than areas of similar population density and economic role. Compare Hong Kong to Manhattan, Tokyo, London.
Looks like they include a lot of land for whatever reason that's not really "city" - and don't include some that is.
I don't know what the job climate is like there, or life in general, but it seems like a fairly nice place: college town, desert climate, but they also have a ski resort (!) just out of town, because to the north east they have a 3000 meter mountain that juts up out of the plain.
It used to be much worse -- a lot of the land grab was due to Arizona law years ago. But Tucson, as it has grown, has seen a lot of infill. Even so, places that look empty often have 1 per 3 acre housing.
Interesting, thanks for all the info! I've only been there once, and it the hills outside town were on fire at the time, but it still seemed like a cool neighborhood and cool town over all if you can handle the desert thing...
I can see the point from a supply-and-demand perspective. But on the other hand, isn't more densely populated areas more efficient, leading to less costs and less prices in the long run? Is there simply not enough initiative for more dense developments, leading to the relatively few dense areas going up in price. Are the property costs the critical factor? I'm talking in general here, not about any specific city.
Vancouver seems to have had a successful high-density residential zoning, but I've also heard that it's become very expensive... maybe because the greater Vancouver metro area is big (I don't know how it compares to the norm though).
Dense, desirable, naturally bound cities are always going to be more expensive than endless exurbs. Look at housing prices in Hong Kong if you think that looser zoning is a cure-all for high prices.