6 ms·

> The lack of any substantial quantity of residential development other than large single-family detached homes on large lots in cities like Santa Clara, Palo A

> The lack of any substantial quantity of residential development other than large single-family detached homes on large lots in cities like Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. is absolutely destroying the Bay Area. My Caltrain commute takes me from Santa Clara to Redwood City every day. I see quite a few new apartment buildings nearing completion along the line from Santa Clara through Sunnyvale, and again in Redwood City. Driving around Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, I can see even more. Most of them are between three and five stories tall. A lot of new construction is going into multi-unit housing around here, in some cities but not others.

jdavis703 10y ago
That's true, but those places aren't employment hotbeds. We need housing by the jobs. It should be easy to walk or bike to work. Caltrain is overloaded as it stands already.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  Electrification with a much more frequent schedule and shorter trips will help alleviate that.
- chetanahuja 10y ago
  Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Redwood city etc. are employment hotbeds. Lots and lots of companies, especially startups but also more established firms, are based in these areas
- tajen 10y ago
  There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming. As long as people live >20 minutes from work, there will be many reasons to take the car, and own a car. In Sydney, most of my colleagues didn't own a car. Cars mean parking lots, hence lower density, hence long distances to travel, hence cars are required. America won't reduce their dependency on carbon emissions as long as everything relies on cars.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    "There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming. " Truthfully, on that scale, it doesn't matter. Seriously. On that scale, we will run out of space everywhere, no matter what we do (unless you limit the population or expand to other planets). It's not even clear that we could do anything to change the timeline there, either. Really, no matter what we do in the bay area - turn it all into highrises, whatever, is going to matter a few centuries from now.
  - gaius 10y ago
    There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming You're being orthogonal there. Electric cars powered by carbon-free sources (solar, hydro, geo, nuclear) won't have that impact. The economy of scale of cars and other road vehicles is that roads are cheaper per mile to build and maintain than rails, and have fewer constraints on their routing. You can be ideologically anti-car if you like (it's a free country) but be honest in your arguments.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Building cars is incredibly energy/resource intensive, even if nobody ever drives them (which is why they cost tens of thousands of dollars). Organizing urban design and the rest of society around car travel also directly and indirectly leads to hugely inefficient land use and additional infrastructure construction, which is also energy/resource intensive.
    - jdavis703 10y ago
      I don't think the argument here was about rail, it was about moving housing closer to jobs so human-powered transit (i.e. biking, walking, skateboarding etc) becomes viable for more people.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    The other responses to your comment seem to disregard that fact that even electric cars don't have an infinite life span, and still require the production of tyres, paint, lubricants, not to mention batteries. As car tyres wear out most of that rubber ends up in the ocean as it's washed in to the drains by rain. Probably not a good idea. In my opinion we need a strong reduce, reuse, recycle ideology. Good design comes from the earth and returns to it. It's a closed system. We need to radically rethink how we do things.
- scharfstevenm 10y ago
  How do you force people to live near their jobs? San Francisco rents are higher than rents in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino, but younger workers at Apple, Google, Yahoo, etc., still choose to live in San Francisco because these suburban towns are so fricking' boring. Try to go to a restaurant after 9 p.m. in Cupertino. The theory that people want to live adjacent to where they work is bogus. They want a way to get to work without driving or massive congestion. In this area, the private transportation networks set up by companies solve this for a lot of workers. And the same sorts of transportation systems exist in other countries. I've seen them in Taiwan and Korea as well.
jacobolus 10y ago
There’s certainly some development in parts of the valley, but not nearly enough to meet the past 2 decades’ increase in employment and housing demand. And a large proportion of the prime transit-accessible real estate is covered by parking lots, strip malls, and low-density residential neighborhoods.

jdavis703 10y ago

That's true, but those places aren't employment hotbeds. We need housing by the jobs. It should be easy to walk or bike to work. Caltrain is overloaded as it stands already.

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
Electrification with a much more frequent schedule and shorter trips will help alleviate that.
chetanahuja 10y ago
Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Redwood city etc. are employment hotbeds. Lots and lots of companies, especially startups but also more established firms, are based in these areas
tajen 10y ago
There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming. As long as people live >20 minutes from work, there will be many reasons to take the car, and own a car. In Sydney, most of my colleagues didn't own a car. Cars mean parking lots, hence lower density, hence long distances to travel, hence cars are required. America won't reduce their dependency on carbon emissions as long as everything relies on cars.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming. " Truthfully, on that scale, it doesn't matter. Seriously. On that scale, we will run out of space everywhere, no matter what we do (unless you limit the population or expand to other planets). It's not even clear that we could do anything to change the timeline there, either. Really, no matter what we do in the bay area - turn it all into highrises, whatever, is going to matter a few centuries from now.
- gaius 10y ago
  There's one more reason why we need housing by the jobs. Global warming You're being orthogonal there. Electric cars powered by carbon-free sources (solar, hydro, geo, nuclear) won't have that impact. The economy of scale of cars and other road vehicles is that roads are cheaper per mile to build and maintain than rails, and have fewer constraints on their routing. You can be ideologically anti-car if you like (it's a free country) but be honest in your arguments.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Building cars is incredibly energy/resource intensive, even if nobody ever drives them (which is why they cost tens of thousands of dollars). Organizing urban design and the rest of society around car travel also directly and indirectly leads to hugely inefficient land use and additional infrastructure construction, which is also energy/resource intensive.
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    I don't think the argument here was about rail, it was about moving housing closer to jobs so human-powered transit (i.e. biking, walking, skateboarding etc) becomes viable for more people.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  The other responses to your comment seem to disregard that fact that even electric cars don't have an infinite life span, and still require the production of tyres, paint, lubricants, not to mention batteries. As car tyres wear out most of that rubber ends up in the ocean as it's washed in to the drains by rain. Probably not a good idea. In my opinion we need a strong reduce, reuse, recycle ideology. Good design comes from the earth and returns to it. It's a closed system. We need to radically rethink how we do things.
scharfstevenm 10y ago
How do you force people to live near their jobs? San Francisco rents are higher than rents in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino, but younger workers at Apple, Google, Yahoo, etc., still choose to live in San Francisco because these suburban towns are so fricking' boring. Try to go to a restaurant after 9 p.m. in Cupertino. The theory that people want to live adjacent to where they work is bogus. They want a way to get to work without driving or massive congestion. In this area, the private transportation networks set up by companies solve this for a lot of workers. And the same sorts of transportation systems exist in other countries. I've seen them in Taiwan and Korea as well.

jacobolus 10y ago

There’s certainly some development in parts of the valley, but not nearly enough to meet the past 2 decades’ increase in employment and housing demand. And a large proportion of the prime transit-accessible real estate is covered by parking lots, strip malls, and low-density residential neighborhoods.