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Typical HN response. If an area is basically built out (which most of Silicon Valley is), how do you build more housing? And no, the answer is not change zoni
by jmspring 10y ago
Typical HN response. If an area is basically built out (which most of Silicon Valley is), how do you build more housing?
And no, the answer is not change zoning laws and build apartment towers -- places like Mountain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Saratoga, even San Jose -- aren't going to suddenly build dense housing on residential lots.
- jmspring 10y agoDown vote with no comment on reality of Bay Area housing dynamics? I'm a native, lived from the east bay down to Santa Cruz. The answer to every housing problem is not build more density. Sorry, the valley was built as a suburban sprawl and you have generations of families on parcels as well as recently purchased. Newly constructed housing in Morgan Hill, an hour+ commute to Silicon Valley during peak rush hour is still $1M plus. Love the down votes without comment.
- 2trill2spill 10y ago> The answer to every housing problem is not build more density. Sorry, the valley was built as a suburban sprawl and you have generations of families on parcels as well as recently purchased. Sorry the answer to every housing crisis is build more housing your attitude is the exact reason why housing is so expensive in the bay area. I mean you could try to reduce demand but good luck with that, and if you can't reduce demand you have to increase supply.
- ScottBurson 10y agoYour perspective as a native and long-term resident is of some interest, but it doesn't mean you automatically understand the economics of the situation. I don't think anyone imagines that the needed changes are going to be politically easy. But as long as more and more people want to live here -- a trend that shows no sign of slowing down -- our only choices are to bulid more housing or tolerate ever-higher housing costs. There is no third option.
- Decade 10y agoI'm a native of San Francisco, a lifelong resident. But I'm also a millennial raised with both a conservative concern for the long term and an optimism for the future via science. And the big story is that the suburbs are unsustainable in every way. Preserving neighborhood character feels nice, but life is change. Preventing old houses from being torn down does not prevent old residents from leaving. You want preservation, then you better be prepared to pay for it. But the middle class suburbs, all those miles of pipes and miles of roads and miles of wires, are fundamentally insolvent. Even before you consider Proposition 13. http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/10/10/suburban-salvage.html http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/10/10/suburban-salva... Silicon Valley is not built out. Silicon Valley needs to be torn down and replaced.
- davidw 10y ago"built out" The hell it is! Source: a number of years in Europe. And no, we're not talking skyscrapers, but more 2/3 story developments, perhaps with some businesses on the bottom floor on more frequented streets.
- jmspring 10y agoI've lived in Europe. I've lived in the east bay when the whole Fremont to Walnut Creek 680 corridor was orchards and fields. I lived in Almaden Valley when it was orchards. My definition of built out is simple -- municipalities planned for X, implemented X, and we have X. Getting a community to go to Y, yeah, no. Thought experiment - enforce denser building (maybe use eminent domain) in Atherton. What do you think will happen? (Extreme example). Apply that to Saratoga, Cupertino, etc. in the more rural residential areas, not the commercial areas. Commercial is building as they can and that won't be enough.
- redditmigrant 10y agoWell then municipalities will have to plan for X rising to Y and plan for and implement Y. Civic planning doesn't have to get frozen in time and population.
- jmspring 10y agoExplain to me how you get Saratoga, Cupertino, Atherton, etc to conform to Y. And why should they?
- redditmigrant 10y agoYou get them to conform by passing laws at the state level to take power away from the local residents. I know they wont comply, we have already seen the problems that giving local control creates in this scenario, so the solution is to make a decision for the larger and long term good.
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- jmspring 10y agoFor history sake, before everything from Almaden up to Page Mill was basically built out, Highway 85 between 17 opened up (realistically) around 1994. Within about a month of it opening, if you were driving from the south on 17, it was faster to go 17->280 instead of 17->85->280. Then if you want o talk 87/101 down near Almaden Valley... the addition of 87 and 85 turned upper middle class neighborhoods (with good schools) into way less desirable neighborhoods and the track records of the schools dropped significantly. (I lived down there pre-85/87). Sigh. I'll stop but the "we should do X" without thinking about reality around certain situations on here really reminds me that we can be wicked smart and successful in an area and completely clueless in another.
- tmh79 10y agoThe concept of zoning laws are less than 100 years old, and their spread was mostly due to racist exclusionary policies in the 50s/60s. San Francisco just wrapped up changing the zoning of western SOMA. Mountain View has 28k new apartments in the pipeline, increasing the population of the city by 50% [0]. There are plans at the state level to remove local control of housing development from municipalities that fail to build enough housing [1]. "Zoning Laws" are not a static, immutable fact of life. 0. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/one-advocates-take-on-bay-area-housing-crunch-theres-progress-being-made/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/one-advocates-take-on-... 1. http://asmdc.org/members/a17/news-room/press-releases/assemblymember-david-chiu-joins-colleagues-to-announce-bills-to-address-affordable-housing-crisis http://asmdc.org/members/a17/news-room/press-releases/assemb...
- redditmigrant 10y agoWhy is the answer to not change zoning laws? Why is the answer not to remove local say over what gets built and whats not? Why should the area's property laws remain frozen to an arbitrary point in time? Silicon valley is not "built out". Single family homes in what happens to be a big congregation point for workers in a high growth area like tech is just not the right idea. We dont have to go full Manhattan. Even if most Bay area cities developed like Barcelona or Paris(4ish stories) we would dramatically change the housing affordability.
- stuckagain 10y agoThere's a spacious middle ground between single family ranch-style houses, and "apartment towers". A handful of four-story buildings would make Mountain View a much nicer place. If there's a multi-story dwelling anywhere in Mountain View, I haven't seen it. As for "built out", most of Silicon Valley consists of parking lots and freeway interchanges.
- nradov 10y agoThere are multi-storey apartment buildings all over Mountain View. Have you ever been there?
- llukas 10y agoOffice buildings. Not apartment ones.
- crazy2be 10y ago"multi-story" => "two stories tall maximum, and half of ground space is parking lot" Places like Paris are entirely (or nearly entirely) 4-5 stories tall, with no parking lots. This allows incredible density simultaneously with great livability (especially for pedestrians). (See [1]) So technically the gp was incorrect, but I would posit there are few (any?) places in Mountain View, or even most of the bay, with a floor area ratio (FAR) > 1.0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris#Cityscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris#Cityscape
- wott 10y ago"Paris" and "liveability" together is weird. The only reason people move to Paris is because the country is hyper-centralised and 'all' the jobs are in Paris. That's also the only reason that limits the rate at which people are moving away from Paris. Housing in Paris is unaffordable for low wages. People who can get rid of their job move to smaller cities across the country, people who cannot move to suburbs and undergo more and more commuting. Concentration of jobs in the same place, unaffordable housing, does this ring a bell? :-)
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- mratzloff 10y agoWhy not? Seattle is built out, but apartment buildings are going up regardless. In West Seattle, they are going up near commercial areas and will spread out from there. (I'm not particularly happy that so many people are flooding into the city at an unsustainable rate, but it's not like the city wants to clamp down on Amazon for increasing their tax base.)
- pfarnsworth 10y agoExactly. And people keep forgetting about more common things like parking and traffic. If you increase the number of people in the area, then traffic is going to suffer exponentially without a proper mass transit system. But the Bay Area doesn't have even a half-way competent MTS. BART is basically end of life, and it doesn't connect effectively with Caltrain. It requires multi-billion dollar investments in MTS, but there has been none since BART in the 60s, which is inadequate and run down now.
- nopinsight 10y agoIt is true that traffic problems could suffer temporarity as density increases and the infrastructure does not keep up. However, if it can be anticipated, and in SV it is, that the demand will be continue to be high, the municipalities can plan for increased public transportation with better service schedule for everyone. This includes larger investments like roads and subways in the long run. In particular, increased tax base from new homeowners and commercial properties can be earmarked to support mass transit infrastructure and schools.
- redditmigrant 10y agoThis is a bit of chicken and egg. There is very little appetite for building mass transit until there is density and thus cost effectiveness, but your point is how can you increase density without first building out mass transit. So they would have to go hand in hand, where you build up and increase mass transit at the same time. Obviously mass transit is going to take longer to build than housing, so there is going to be short term pain.
- pfarnsworth 10y agoI'm assuming by "short term" you're talking geological time, because in the 20+ years I've lived in Silicon Valley, I've seen almost zero improvements to the Mass Transit. I've seen some minor upgrades, but it's still generally terrible. So unless concerted effort and a lot of taxpayer money is dumped into Mass Transit, I don't think anything is going to happen. The simple fact that BART still doesn't go down to San Jose yet, or extend out to Tracy is embarrassing, but it's been talked about for decades.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoEvict every land rentier (aka "homeowner") in Palo Alto and Atherton, seize their idiotic ranch properties, and build dense apartment buildings. You can't talk about a housing shortage in an area where most of the land is spent on quarter-acre, single-family, one-floor suburbia.