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Originally Posted by animatedmartian
I'm not so sure it's an apples and oranges comparison to Detroit in either of those cases. For one, both SF and NYC are major coastal port cities. So naturally, either respective cities will grow and centralize around their big harbors.
Two, NYC is still pretty massive. Its defined urban area is about two and a half times bigger than Detroit's so I don't think there's really much in the way of restrictive land for development. However, it's still more beneficial to be as close to the center of the city as possible because of the convergence of land, air, and sea routes.
For the Bay Area, it more like two central cities competing for the same area. Without San Jose, the SF Metro wouldn't be that much larger than Metro Detroit. And if San Jose didn't exist, that part of the Bay area would probably be a lot more spread out or still farmland.
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Both regions are rebounding from the exact same issues afflicting Detroit, just with less severity. There was a period of 3 or 4 decades in both cities where the urban cores were not able to compete with suburban sprawl. That started to shift for both places in the 1980s, and really took off during the 1990s. The difference is that Detroit has never been able to get the policy changes that makes inner-city land as competitive.
In NYC, that shift has gotten so thorough that it has completely absorbed most of Manhattan, which even 20 years ago had no shortage of derelict buildings and low-income neighborhoods. Now that absorption is pushing far out of Manhattan, and very deep into Brooklyn, Queens, the New Jersey cities bordering Manhattan, etc.
For instance, take a look at this stretch of Brooklyn in 2009:
https://goo.gl/maps/JbvyxCtebLw4Eh7w8. On one side it was a gas station, on the other side was a massive surface parking lot.
Look at it again in 2014:
https://goo.gl/maps/D9TrxiDHBFu5hdHh6.
Again, massive surface parking lot and gas station are both still there.
Now, check out the most recent photo available on Google:
https://goo.gl/maps/D9TrxiDHBFu5hdHh6
Not only have those two lots changed, but just about every empty lot on Fulton St. from downtown to deep into Bedford-Stuyvesant is being infilled. This area five years ago had no shortage of under-utilized space.