It helps Manhattan a lot that it has one of the world's best-engineered public transportation systems to connect it to the other boroughs and to Jersey.

The problem with construction booms in East and South Bay is that the transportation infrastructure in SFBA is barely keeping up with the population as-is, and however asymptotically it approaches "adequate" today, it is also one of the country's most poorly managed systems: it's underinvested, hemmed in by a dysfunctional political system, freighted with union, tenure, and retirement problems, and poorly maintained.