4 ms·

"They can move elsewhere" is not a reason to not build more housing - it is reasonable (and desirable) for people to live in the city that they work in. If your

"They can move elsewhere" is not a reason to not build more housing - it is reasonable (and desirable) for people to live in the city that they work in. If your argument is that they can pay 3,000 a month for the privilege of living 50 (!) miles away from work in Gilroy then that still doesn't do anything for the "teachers, police officers, and other working and middle class people" - you know, the people who actually keep the city running.

vasilipupkin 10y ago
Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city. I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? why does Palo Alto have to shoulder the solution to this problem? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I certainly can understand current homeowners. They want to keep their city a certain way. Why can't they ?
- twblalock 10y ago
  > Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city How far away does said land need to be before you think current homeowners shouldn't have a say anymore? Should someone who lives on the border of Palo Alto and another city be able to prevent housing being built in that other city, or just in Palo Alto? It's pretty arbitrary. The people who are trying to prevent housing being built today are the same people who benefited from lots of new housing being built during the 1960s-1980s. Why should they have the right to prevent other people from doing what they themselves did? Should the Palo Alto residents in the 1960s-1980s have been able to prevent the newcomers at that time? I suspect very few current residents would agree with that, which is hypocritical. I think there is a much simpler way to deal with this -- if land is zoned for housing, allow housing to be built. If some rich guy in Palo Alto wanted to control what happened on that land, he should have bought it. Why should anyone be able to veto the development of housing on land they don't own, if it is zoned for housing?
  - vasilipupkin 10y ago
    so, should a town be allowed to decide what kind of zoning it wants to have, or should it be decided by a decree from Federal government? So, suppose people in a town decided they want their town to be a town of 2 story single family homes. Should they be allowed to make that decision or not? Suppose all of New York decides to move to Palo Alto within the next 5 years. Should current homeowners in Palo Alto have the ability to decide how much housing and what kind of housing should be built to accommodate that demand?
- natrius 10y ago
  It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing. It directly causes economic segregation. Only the wealthiest get the homes allowed by law while everyone else gets pushed further out. The market does not do this. Our segregation laws do. If it were legal to build fourplexes anywhere in Palo Alto, merely wealthy families would be able to outbid some of the insanely wealthy with their four rent payments combined. For the most part, single family homeowners can't actually afford single family homes in such desirable locations, but our laws make it illegal for middle class families to outbid the wealthy the way they always have: using less land. This is an obvious injustice, and the people who insist on laws that exclude others will soon find themselves in our history books. Stop letting Dixiecrats call themselves progressives.
  - vasilipupkin 10y ago
    "It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing" for which government? federal, state, local? Is it really that unreasonable for homeowners in a town to exercise some measure of control over their own town?
- fpgeek 10y ago
  > I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? I mean, climate change is a worldwide problem, why can't all the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions be done outside the US?
  - vasilipupkin 10y ago
    so you think that a town should have no say whatsoever in deciding what should be built in its borders? By this analogy ?
toomuchtodo 10y ago
Or move the jobs out of ridiculously high COL areas? An area of land has a carrying capacity dictated by the will of the people who live there through their votes. Why fight it when you can simply move work elsewhere?
- twblalock 10y ago
  > Why fight it when you can simply move work elsewhere? You can't really do that. You underestimate the powerful network effect Silicon Valley has on the tech industry. Almost all of the investors are here, and many of the world's best software engineers choose to live here and will not move elsewhere for work. There are only a few other cities that have a lot of software jobs and also a large pool of software talent, and they also have a high cost of living -- NYC, Boston, and Seattle come to mind.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Go remote. High quality engineers, project managers, designers, etc can be had all around the world, and if you're seeing a drop in team or employee performance from working remotely, you're not managing properly. Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman. There are successful startups all over the world. Unicorns? Probably not, but that's a perception issue, not a quality issue (current unrealistic valuations will continue to come back down to Earth) The number of orgs supporting remote, even fully remote, grows all the time: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#companies-with-remote-dna https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#companies... ; if an employee chooses to expose themselves to outrageous housing expenses due to the employer's ability to externalize this cost to the employee (with no penalty to the employer, because "that's just the way it is"), this will never change.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      > Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman. That was not my argument. I said most, or "almost all," not all. And that's true! Even the NYC startups have to come to the Bay Area to meet with VCs.
sjg007 10y ago
The teachers, police and fire fighters all moved out a long time ago.
- lindenksv1 10y ago
  The problem is that they continue to be pushed out further and further from their jobs every year because cities like Palo Alto keep adding thousands of jobs and almost no housing. That means professionals like me get pushed out of PA, move somewhere cheaper, and end up pushing out people that make less. All of these things are tied together and at the end of the domino what you get is homelessness which we've seen spike in the last 5 years.
- _ph_ 10y ago
  Isn't it a very unhealthy thing for a "community" to be protected and serviced by people who do no longer live there? Who get pushed out further and further from it? A city, where you have separate classes of homeowners and all the service personal commuting in sounds pretty dystopian to me.

vasilipupkin 10y ago

Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city. I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? why does Palo Alto have to shoulder the solution to this problem? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I certainly can understand current homeowners. They want to keep their city a certain way. Why can't they ?

twblalock 10y ago
> Indeed. but it's also unreasonable to expect that homeowners in a city should not be able to decide how much building they want to allow in their city How far away does said land need to be before you think current homeowners shouldn't have a say anymore? Should someone who lives on the border of Palo Alto and another city be able to prevent housing being built in that other city, or just in Palo Alto? It's pretty arbitrary. The people who are trying to prevent housing being built today are the same people who benefited from lots of new housing being built during the 1960s-1980s. Why should they have the right to prevent other people from doing what they themselves did? Should the Palo Alto residents in the 1960s-1980s have been able to prevent the newcomers at that time? I suspect very few current residents would agree with that, which is hypocritical. I think there is a much simpler way to deal with this -- if land is zoned for housing, allow housing to be built. If some rich guy in Palo Alto wanted to control what happened on that land, he should have bought it. Why should anyone be able to veto the development of housing on land they don't own, if it is zoned for housing?
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  so, should a town be allowed to decide what kind of zoning it wants to have, or should it be decided by a decree from Federal government? So, suppose people in a town decided they want their town to be a town of 2 story single family homes. Should they be allowed to make that decision or not? Suppose all of New York decides to move to Palo Alto within the next 5 years. Should current homeowners in Palo Alto have the ability to decide how much housing and what kind of housing should be built to accommodate that demand?
natrius 10y ago
It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing. It directly causes economic segregation. Only the wealthiest get the homes allowed by law while everyone else gets pushed further out. The market does not do this. Our segregation laws do. If it were legal to build fourplexes anywhere in Palo Alto, merely wealthy families would be able to outbid some of the insanely wealthy with their four rent payments combined. For the most part, single family homeowners can't actually afford single family homes in such desirable locations, but our laws make it illegal for middle class families to outbid the wealthy the way they always have: using less land. This is an obvious injustice, and the people who insist on laws that exclude others will soon find themselves in our history books. Stop letting Dixiecrats call themselves progressives.
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  "It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing" for which government? federal, state, local? Is it really that unreasonable for homeowners in a town to exercise some measure of control over their own town?
fpgeek 10y ago
> I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto? I mean, climate change is a worldwide problem, why can't all the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions be done outside the US?
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  so you think that a town should have no say whatsoever in deciding what should be built in its borders? By this analogy ?

toomuchtodo 10y ago

Or move the jobs out of ridiculously high COL areas? An area of land has a carrying capacity dictated by the will of the people who live there through their votes. Why fight it when you can simply move work elsewhere?

twblalock 10y ago
> Why fight it when you can simply move work elsewhere? You can't really do that. You underestimate the powerful network effect Silicon Valley has on the tech industry. Almost all of the investors are here, and many of the world's best software engineers choose to live here and will not move elsewhere for work. There are only a few other cities that have a lot of software jobs and also a large pool of software talent, and they also have a high cost of living -- NYC, Boston, and Seattle come to mind.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Go remote. High quality engineers, project managers, designers, etc can be had all around the world, and if you're seeing a drop in team or employee performance from working remotely, you're not managing properly. Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman. There are successful startups all over the world. Unicorns? Probably not, but that's a perception issue, not a quality issue (current unrealistic valuations will continue to come back down to Earth) The number of orgs supporting remote, even fully remote, grows all the time: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#companies-with-remote-dna https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#companies... ; if an employee chooses to expose themselves to outrageous housing expenses due to the employer's ability to externalize this cost to the employee (with no penalty to the employer, because "that's just the way it is"), this will never change.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman. That was not my argument. I said most, or "almost all," not all. And that's true! Even the NYC startups have to come to the Bay Area to meet with VCs.

sjg007 10y ago

The teachers, police and fire fighters all moved out a long time ago.

lindenksv1 10y ago
The problem is that they continue to be pushed out further and further from their jobs every year because cities like Palo Alto keep adding thousands of jobs and almost no housing. That means professionals like me get pushed out of PA, move somewhere cheaper, and end up pushing out people that make less. All of these things are tied together and at the end of the domino what you get is homelessness which we've seen spike in the last 5 years.
_ph_ 10y ago
Isn't it a very unhealthy thing for a "community" to be protected and serviced by people who do no longer live there? Who get pushed out further and further from it? A city, where you have separate classes of homeowners and all the service personal commuting in sounds pretty dystopian to me.