> San Francisco Richmond neighborhood [...] most would consider my neighborhood urban
The whole western half of San Francisco is zoned to mostly only allow 1 unit per lot, much of it requiring detached houses. Here’s a map, see the sea of pale yellow low-density residential. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
The Richmond is definitely not “urban” by standards of people living in cities. I would rate it much closer to “sleepy beach town” than “dense cosmopolitan city”. The “most people” in your description must be suburbanites through and through.
(This zoning should change; SF housing would be a lot more affordable if every part of the city were zoned to allow 3–4 story buildings with multiple units per building. We should get rid of RH-1 zones altogether, and upgrade most of the pale yellow part to e.g. RC-3 or NC-2 zoning. The increased density would then support better infrastructure, such as dedicated bus lanes with frequent and reliable service, significantly improving quality of life for people living in those neighborhoods.)
And yet many days I take one of 4 bus lines (each two blocks apart, traveling in parallel) which collectively move more than 100,000 people per day.
I used to live in Lower Pacific Heights, two blocks from Van Ness, and walked ~1 mile to the Financial District every day. We regularly ate out at North Beach and Chinatown (and still do, as my office is still downtown). There may be more bars downtown and around Japantown, but the Geary corridor all the way up to 25 Ave has a far more diverse and trafficked street scene. The Judah and Irving corridors in the Inner and Outer Sunset even more so. The Mission more so still, but it's not skyscraper-urban, either.
Relative to almost any neighborhood outside San Francisco, the Outer Richmond is absolutely urban.[1] And I can say this because even though my commute takes 45 minutes (30 minutes if I drive, 15 minutes without traffic), it's about on par with almost everybody else in the city and incomparable to those living outside city limits. More concretely, the Outer Richmond has a population density of over 20,000/sq mile--not bad for a sleepy beach town of single family homes.[2] And ultimately that's what I'm getting at--we should be using objective criteria, both to describe existing situations as well as trends.
FWIW, I agree with you that zoning needs to change and that the Outer Richmond could use more density.
[1] I first moved to San Francisco in 2000. My first place was in the Outer Richmond, moving from Foggy Bottom in D.C. My roommate, from Philadelphia, used to say it was too far from downtown. Fast forward 20 years and after having lived in multiple cities and towns around the country, he told me that he changed his mind about the Richmond. His conception of what urban meant has changed, especially after he realized how difficult it was to find a job in a locale as dense as that. I also moved around a bit after that (Arlington, VA, Long Beach, New Haven, and several months in Quito and then Santiago), though I never held the opinion that the Richmond wasn't "urban" enough to be urban.
[2] Which says something about how dense cities and towns can get while still clinging to the ideal of single-family homes.
You’re right, the parts along Geary and Clement are fine. Looking more carefully at the map, the Richmond is mostly RH-2 (allows duplexes) and RM-1 (1 unit per 800 sf). It’s the Sunset (pretty much everything south of Golden Gate Park) and all of the that is really absurdly low density (RH-1).
The Richmond feels significantly more suburban than the Mission (where I live) though.
I don’t think “skyscraper urban” is all that necessary (in SF, my impression is that the skyscraper boom is mostly a result of a few areas with very lax zoning combined with massive demand because everywhere else the zoning is absurdly limiting), but the USA could use a whole lot more low-rise and mid-rise apartment buildings.
Relative to almost every other locale in the United States, and especially according to most Americans' perceptions, it's a stretch to call any neighborhood in San Francisco suburban.
Relative to urbanized areas in the rest of the world, especially Asia, only a few neighborhoods in the U.S. are comparable, and only one or two in SF, if any. (Northbeach/Chinatown has the population density of Manhattan.) But that gets back to my basic point--urbanizing and suburbanizing trends are principally functions of various costs, most importantly those relating to housing and commuting. And whatever we want to call it in the U.S., the trend is still clearly toward greater density after decades of fanning out.
"Streetcar suburb" is correct. The Outer Sunset formed around the old "Carville" site, and the district's development was mostly complete by the '50s. But the blocks of row houses on a grid are such an old planning concept that it's almost unrecognizable when compared with late-20th century suburbs. The hills are a bit too steep and the streets a bit too busy for a young child to safely bike around or play in. On the other hand, skaters enjoy the slopes and curb cuts and often film there.
The whole western half of San Francisco is zoned to mostly only allow 1 unit per lot, much of it requiring detached houses. Here’s a map, see the sea of pale yellow low-density residential. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
The Richmond is definitely not “urban” by standards of people living in cities. I would rate it much closer to “sleepy beach town” than “dense cosmopolitan city”. The “most people” in your description must be suburbanites through and through.
(This zoning should change; SF housing would be a lot more affordable if every part of the city were zoned to allow 3–4 story buildings with multiple units per building. We should get rid of RH-1 zones altogether, and upgrade most of the pale yellow part to e.g. RC-3 or NC-2 zoning. The increased density would then support better infrastructure, such as dedicated bus lanes with frequent and reliable service, significantly improving quality of life for people living in those neighborhoods.)