4 ms·

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even

Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. So much so, that local politicians even brag about how much housing developments they've stopped. Why fight such a huge uphill battle in trying to get housing in the Bay area? Wouldn't it be easier to start from a city or town outside of CA? or at least outside the bay area? Maybe somewhere in the middle of no-where (there's still so much unused land immediately outside the Bay area - even within -> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land), where NIMBYs have no jurisdiction. Then create a high speed train or subway system connecting it to the rest of the world. Since out there land should cost very little, it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot! I know in the past new towns have failed, but that's because they didn't put employers there first. If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there.

jofer 7y ago
> If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there. Welcome to Houston! Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center started out that way. Ditto for NASA and League City. Currently we have Exxon in Spring, Igloo out west of Katy, all of the Woodlands (weird place), etc. It's not exactly good or bad, but it is a recipe for sprawl.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl.
  - jofer 7y ago
    That's a bit of a misnomer. Most cities inside/near Houston are zoned, and Houston itself is effectively zoned. Almost all of the sprawl is zoned. (E.g. Katy, Sugarland, Spring, etc all have zoning laws.) Land usage inside Houston city limits is mostly controlled through deed restrictions. E.g. I'm technically breaking the law by working from home as my deed is explicitly noncommercial. It's completely inflexible, as it was all set around 1900, but it is a form of zoning, nonetheless. Commercially-deeded lots are in planned areas that made sense at the time the property lines were drawn. There are also deeds that forbid residental development (often due to flooding, but again, it's inflexible). The key differences are that there aren't any real restrictions beyond commercial / non-commercial. As a result, you'll often see a shipping yard in the middle of a residential district or similarly impractical commercial developments in unlikely areas. Most of the examples people will dig up of flooding during Harvey that could have been prevented by zoning are actually in cities that _are_ zoned. The real issue is that developers get to dictate what the zoning laws are and get to develop however they want. For example, there's currently yet another development going up _inside_ the reservoirs on the west side of town. It's in a city that's zoned. They changed the zoning to allow the development there literally inside the reservoir, 10 ft vertically below the top of the dam. I'm not saying that zoning is bad, or that Houston doesn't have problems, but I am saying that zoning here wouldn't help. Developers have infinite political sway and get to change zoning at will. That's the real issue.
  - pertymcpert 7y ago
    No it doesn't.
  - aiisjustanif 7y ago
    "Houston" 100% has some sprawl issues, but that's why it's a metroplex now, Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, and the Woodlands and Sugar Land are zoned for lower density.
  - orangecat 7y ago
    Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl. In my experience the opposite is true. With relaxed zoning it's easier to live closer to work, and more likely that common destinations like grocery stores will be conveniently nearby.
danans 7y ago
> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an already developed area, like infill development on land previously zoned only for commercial purposes.
- sjg007 7y ago
  That land is also protected so good luck. There is a lot of land on the coast too, but good luck getting anywhere. The East bay may be a better option. Build a Google multiplex over there and then a push for transbay Bart or something.
stevenwoo 7y ago
Every time we get heavy rains which seems to occur more often these days, there are several slides in the open space above Woodside and some roads are unpassable for weeks or years in the case of the last slides on Skyline Drive and West Old La Honda. Evidence of how slide prone the area is is abundant on even gentle trails in every park along the ridge as well. Most of the housing currently there all the way to the coast subsists on well water and cisterns and use septic tanks for sewage until the flat areas, in the drought last year many wells ran dry. None of this scales up. It's not like the Oakland Hills where the East Bay water district supports the area. Crystal Springs reservoir and the basin that drains into it visible along 280 all the way to Woodside is reserved for the city of San Francisco water company which may not be obvious to a casual observer.
- sologoub 7y ago
  That’s not entirely correct - Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir supplies much of the coast: City of Half Moon Bay and a part of the unincorporated area of San Mateo County including Miramar, Princeton By The Sea and El Granada. http://www.coastsidewater.org/production.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/production.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/water-supply.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/water-supply.html Unfortunately, no new connections are currently available, but the already sold connections are not all 100% utilized and some are just assigned to parcels without use.
sfbathrowaway 7y ago
>just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land And there are good reasons it's "completely undeveloped." Those include: * No public sewer. So you'll need septic tanks. And the county regs that took effect a few years ago made it more difficult to install a new septic tank even for a single-family home, let alone whatever high density project you're envisioning. * No public water. CalWater's Bear Gulch district (aka municipal water) extends only to the town boundaries on the east side of the hill. Skylonda Mutual on the west side of the hill keeps issuing boil-water notices when their (limited) water supply gets contaminated and out of compliance with state law. La Honda was trucking in water, or came close to it, during the recent drought. * No DSL or cable Internet. Even inside town limits there are some areas that don't have Comcast (low population density, hilly terrain) or AT&T DSL (too far from switch, but you can get POTS). Hope you enjoy wireless! * Limited access in the winter due to roads carved out of the hills over 100 years ago, not up to modern construction standards, that are prone to landslides. Skyline around route 9 was still one lane control last I checked because of last year's collapse, which was different from the previous collapse. * Prone to wildfires in the summer--there was a wildfire off of Bear Gulch Road a year or two ago. * No public transport. * Distance from employers. I can't think of any large employers west of I-280, so you'd have to cross the peninsula on gridlocked surface streets or join I-280 gridlock north or south. Probably an hour drive to Google or almost that to Facebook. * NIMBYites among the locals, who already say it's too congested. * Subject to excessive zoning restrictions if inside town limits. This is only inside Portola Valley, Woodside, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, etc., and it's true that most of the land is county, but some of those town boundaries stretch to Skyline. If you're inside town limits, you'll need something like 5-acre to 15-acre parcels for a single family home. This is the very definition of low-density housing. * Prone to landslides. The San Andreas fault runs along the base of the hill, and the Pilarcitos Fault and others spiderweb through the hills. This can be solved with the application of funds, but it raises building costs. * The big one, if they can find a way to screw with you, is the California Coastal Commission, which views every act as illegal "development." And it has a bigger budget than you. You will not win. State law is not on your side. https://pacificlegal.org/commission-creep-rule-dis-functional-coastal-agency-every-act-illegal-development/ https://pacificlegal.org/commission-creep-rule-dis-functiona... But good luck!
robbyking 7y ago
>> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I first moved to SF in 1998, and in my experience it's San Franciscans who moved to the city to work in tech who don't want to see growth. The people who moved there for the culture of art, music, and radical self expression saw the writing on the way pretty early, and have been advocating for affordable, high density housing for decades now.
avocado4 7y ago
The problem is the weather sucks everywhere else.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  The problem is the weather sucks everywhere else. Only if you've never been anywhere else. San Diego is the paragon of lovely weather in California, not the Bay Area. SF is enshrined in a song made famous by Sinatra with the line, "She hates California/It's cold and it's damp."
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - clairity 7y ago
    yup, LA beats SF and the bay area by a mile on weather, but san diego edges out LA in both weather and lush greenery.
    - baddox 7y ago
      LA summers are ridiculously hot, but by all means live wherever you enjoy the weather.
      - clairity 7y ago
        it depends on where you live. the (san fernando) valley and inland are ridiculously hot, the coastal cities not so much. the 10-15 really hot days we have center around august, with some spillover into july and september. but it's nothing compared to texas heat, for example.
        baddox 7y ago
        Oh yeah, nothing like Texas heat, or even the Missouri heat I grew up with. I could definitely enjoy Santa Monica weather year-round, but I still prefer the slightly cooler San Francisco weather.
raldi 7y ago
"Poll: Two-thirds of California voters back SB 50 housing bill" https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/17/18629809/sb-50-housing-transit-poll-crisis-ca-yimby https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/17/18629809/sb-50-housing-trans...
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  SB-50 would have just led to displacement and more homeless people, exacerbating how much it sucks to live in the city. We need better quality bills than Weiner's.
  - gradys 7y ago
    Why would it lead to those things? Building more housing seems like it would lead to fewer homeless people in the long run.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      > Building more housing seems like it would lead to fewer homeless people in the long run. This implies a bad investment.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
> ...it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot! wait. why would that be? looking back at cost overruns on transportation projects from LA's metro red line to the Bay Bridge rebuild to California's high speed railway, i don't feel confident at all that an effective transportation system would be a lot cheaper. that has to come out of government budgets and go to government employees and union scale labor. that's expensive. and it might require new taxes. IDK -- are you talking about a bus line on a two lane road or something?
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. That's silly, there are more than two sides to this discussion. Development without allocations for affordable and public housing is just throwing money at developers and hoping for the best.

jofer 7y ago

> If we start a new town or city and put a major employer in the middle, people will move there. Welcome to Houston! Seriously, the typical model for growth here has been for a major employer to make a new campus out in the middle of nowhere away from town, then things spring up around it. As a result, we have lots of urban clusters with skyscrapers a long way from downtown. The energy corridor and the med center started out that way. Ditto for NASA and League City. Currently we have Exxon in Spring, Igloo out west of Katy, all of the Woodlands (weird place), etc. It's not exactly good or bad, but it is a recipe for sprawl.

enraged_camel 7y ago
Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl.
- jofer 7y ago
  That's a bit of a misnomer. Most cities inside/near Houston are zoned, and Houston itself is effectively zoned. Almost all of the sprawl is zoned. (E.g. Katy, Sugarland, Spring, etc all have zoning laws.) Land usage inside Houston city limits is mostly controlled through deed restrictions. E.g. I'm technically breaking the law by working from home as my deed is explicitly noncommercial. It's completely inflexible, as it was all set around 1900, but it is a form of zoning, nonetheless. Commercially-deeded lots are in planned areas that made sense at the time the property lines were drawn. There are also deeds that forbid residental development (often due to flooding, but again, it's inflexible). The key differences are that there aren't any real restrictions beyond commercial / non-commercial. As a result, you'll often see a shipping yard in the middle of a residential district or similarly impractical commercial developments in unlikely areas. Most of the examples people will dig up of flooding during Harvey that could have been prevented by zoning are actually in cities that _are_ zoned. The real issue is that developers get to dictate what the zoning laws are and get to develop however they want. For example, there's currently yet another development going up _inside_ the reservoirs on the west side of town. It's in a city that's zoned. They changed the zoning to allow the development there literally inside the reservoir, 10 ft vertically below the top of the dam. I'm not saying that zoning is bad, or that Houston doesn't have problems, but I am saying that zoning here wouldn't help. Developers have infinite political sway and get to change zoning at will. That's the real issue.
- pertymcpert 7y ago
  No it doesn't.
- aiisjustanif 7y ago
  "Houston" 100% has some sprawl issues, but that's why it's a metroplex now, Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, and the Woodlands and Sugar Land are zoned for lower density.
- orangecat 7y ago
  Houston also famously has no zoning laws, which massively exacerbates problems associated with sprawl. In my experience the opposite is true. With relaxed zoning it's easier to live closer to work, and more likely that common destinations like grocery stores will be conveniently nearby.

danans 7y ago

> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an already developed area, like infill development on land previously zoned only for commercial purposes.

sjg007 7y ago
That land is also protected so good luck. There is a lot of land on the coast too, but good luck getting anywhere. The East bay may be a better option. Build a Google multiplex over there and then a push for transbay Bart or something.

stevenwoo 7y ago

Every time we get heavy rains which seems to occur more often these days, there are several slides in the open space above Woodside and some roads are unpassable for weeks or years in the case of the last slides on Skyline Drive and West Old La Honda. Evidence of how slide prone the area is is abundant on even gentle trails in every park along the ridge as well. Most of the housing currently there all the way to the coast subsists on well water and cisterns and use septic tanks for sewage until the flat areas, in the drought last year many wells ran dry. None of this scales up. It's not like the Oakland Hills where the East Bay water district supports the area. Crystal Springs reservoir and the basin that drains into it visible along 280 all the way to Woodside is reserved for the city of San Francisco water company which may not be obvious to a casual observer.

sologoub 7y ago
That’s not entirely correct - Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir supplies much of the coast: City of Half Moon Bay and a part of the unincorporated area of San Mateo County including Miramar, Princeton By The Sea and El Granada. http://www.coastsidewater.org/production.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/production.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/water-supply.html http://www.coastsidewater.org/water-supply.html Unfortunately, no new connections are currently available, but the already sold connections are not all 100% utilized and some are just assigned to parcels without use.

sfbathrowaway 7y ago

>just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land And there are good reasons it's "completely undeveloped." Those include: * No public sewer. So you'll need septic tanks. And the county regs that took effect a few years ago made it more difficult to install a new septic tank even for a single-family home, let alone whatever high density project you're envisioning. * No public water. CalWater's Bear Gulch district (aka municipal water) extends only to the town boundaries on the east side of the hill. Skylonda Mutual on the west side of the hill keeps issuing boil-water notices when their (limited) water supply gets contaminated and out of compliance with state law. La Honda was trucking in water, or came close to it, during the recent drought. * No DSL or cable Internet. Even inside town limits there are some areas that don't have Comcast (low population density, hilly terrain) or AT&T DSL (too far from switch, but you can get POTS). Hope you enjoy wireless! * Limited access in the winter due to roads carved out of the hills over 100 years ago, not up to modern construction standards, that are prone to landslides. Skyline around route 9 was still one lane control last I checked because of last year's collapse, which was different from the previous collapse. * Prone to wildfires in the summer--there was a wildfire off of Bear Gulch Road a year or two ago. * No public transport. * Distance from employers. I can't think of any large employers west of I-280, so you'd have to cross the peninsula on gridlocked surface streets or join I-280 gridlock north or south. Probably an hour drive to Google or almost that to Facebook. * NIMBYites among the locals, who already say it's too congested. * Subject to excessive zoning restrictions if inside town limits. This is only inside Portola Valley, Woodside, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, etc., and it's true that most of the land is county, but some of those town boundaries stretch to Skyline. If you're inside town limits, you'll need something like 5-acre to 15-acre parcels for a single family home. This is the very definition of low-density housing. * Prone to landslides. The San Andreas fault runs along the base of the hill, and the Pilarcitos Fault and others spiderweb through the hills. This can be solved with the application of funds, but it raises building costs. * The big one, if they can find a way to screw with you, is the California Coastal Commission, which views every act as illegal "development." And it has a bigger budget than you. You will not win. State law is not on your side. https://pacificlegal.org/commission-creep-rule-dis-functional-coastal-agency-every-act-illegal-development/ https://pacificlegal.org/commission-creep-rule-dis-functiona... But good luck!

robbyking 7y ago

>> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I first moved to SF in 1998, and in my experience it's San Franciscans who moved to the city to work in tech who don't want to see growth. The people who moved there for the culture of art, music, and radical self expression saw the writing on the way pretty early, and have been advocating for affordable, high density housing for decades now.

avocado4 7y ago

The problem is the weather sucks everywhere else.

reaperducer 7y ago
The problem is the weather sucks everywhere else. Only if you've never been anywhere else. San Diego is the paragon of lovely weather in California, not the Bay Area. SF is enshrined in a song made famous by Sinatra with the line, "She hates California/It's cold and it's damp."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- clairity 7y ago
  yup, LA beats SF and the bay area by a mile on weather, but san diego edges out LA in both weather and lush greenery.
  - baddox 7y ago
    LA summers are ridiculously hot, but by all means live wherever you enjoy the weather.
    - clairity 7y ago
      it depends on where you live. the (san fernando) valley and inland are ridiculously hot, the coastal cities not so much. the 10-15 really hot days we have center around august, with some spillover into july and september. but it's nothing compared to texas heat, for example.
      - baddox 7y ago
        Oh yeah, nothing like Texas heat, or even the Missouri heat I grew up with. I could definitely enjoy Santa Monica weather year-round, but I still prefer the slightly cooler San Francisco weather.

raldi 7y ago

"Poll: Two-thirds of California voters back SB 50 housing bill" https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/17/18629809/sb-50-housing-transit-poll-crisis-ca-yimby https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/17/18629809/sb-50-housing-trans...

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
SB-50 would have just led to displacement and more homeless people, exacerbating how much it sucks to live in the city. We need better quality bills than Weiner's.
- gradys 7y ago
  Why would it lead to those things? Building more housing seems like it would lead to fewer homeless people in the long run.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    > Building more housing seems like it would lead to fewer homeless people in the long run. This implies a bad investment.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

> ...it would be a lot cheaper to create a highly effective transportation system then spending 1.5 million dollars per lot! wait. why would that be? looking back at cost overruns on transportation projects from LA's metro red line to the Bay Bridge rebuild to California's high speed railway, i don't feel confident at all that an effective transportation system would be a lot cheaper. that has to come out of government budgets and go to government employees and union scale labor. that's expensive. and it might require new taxes. IDK -- are you talking about a bus line on a two lane road or something?

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth. That's silly, there are more than two sides to this discussion. Development without allocations for affordable and public housing is just throwing money at developers and hoping for the best.