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> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have beco
by bastawhiz 5y ago
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
> Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community.
I'm not sure what does alter the housing problem if not housing. It seems your position is "don't come here...unless you're rich" because the rich don't affect the "character" of the town.
You don't want lots of people. But your only option is to make it hard for people to move in, which constrains the supply of housing relative to demand. Which, in turn, makes prices go up. Which, in turn, forces out your blue collar resident friends. You can't have it both ways.
What you're doing with one unit honestly doesn't make much of a dent in any problem unless you're adding an order of magnitude more units. If anything, you're locking in that space to higher-but-still-very-low density. It's much easier to bulldoze a mansion than evict multiple families.
- ip26 5y agoI think the point is adding 10% more units to Point Reyes dramatically alters the town but increases the total housing supply of greater Marin County by zilch.
- crhulls 5y agoYes, exactly this. It doesn't really solve any problems (see my other comments - you can literally find affordable housing units propped up as vacation rentals on AirBnB). Putting huge apartment buildings in 1,000 person towns is very different than building upwards in city centers or along transportation corridors.
- bastawhiz 5y agoIt would seem to me that the people moving to Point Reyes aren't the sort of folks who want to live in an "affordable" studio apartment. So either the folks who'd live in those apartments are taking on a high cost of living with an absurd commute for the hell of it, or you don't actually care about the blue collar folks who are being gentrified out. If vacation rentals are actually a meaningful problem, have the city ban them. It's really that easy. Airbnb isn't a new phenomenon, and if anyone actually cared about the people being displaced instead of the buildings, they'd already be banned. The character of a town is more than just the buildings, it's the people who live there, too. It's obvious where the priorities are.