10 ms·

I like Sausalito (pop 8,000), but I've come to think it should be covered in high-density housing, with a BART stop. Same for the vast areas of the Penninsula o

I like Sausalito (pop 8,000), but I've come to think it should be covered in high-density housing, with a BART stop. Same for the vast areas of the Penninsula owned by Stanford. If you drive from AT&T park southward, keeping close to the water, you will see an enormous amount of unused land. Drive through Palo Alto and you'll see McMansions with huge lawns where there should be apartment buildings. Drive up San Bruno Mountain and look around, and you'll see entire swathes of Visitacion Valley that are just empty wasteland. Colma is an entire city made of graveyards. What's missing is any kind of regional government capable of coming up with a housing and transit plan and finding the money to fund it. The result is no new homes in an area that is seeing a huge influx of workers, most of them in tech. Since those workers earn a lot of money, they price out other people. We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility.

justizin 12y ago
BART was originally intended to reach Marin, but fierce opposition kept it out. Sausalito doesn't have the infrastructure for high density living, there certainly isn't room for, say, 5x as many people to commute into SF. A lot more people need to start both living and working in the east bay, it's not tenable for most of the lucrative work to be isolated in downtown SF, leaving vast swaths of the bay area largely vacant during the day, with basically noone able to live near their work in the city. Those other communities have worries about gentrification and displacement as well, but the bay area as a whole would be better off if growth were spread more evenly. This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.
- packetslave 12y ago
  This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. That would require those cities allowing enough housing development to support the growth.
- pcwalton 12y ago
  > This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. The problem is that the residents of Palo Alto and Mountain View don't want more people to live there.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  Do you also oppose cars and public transportation? Those "luxury shuttles" are just a means of transport. There are far more Bay Area commuters traveling to work every day using cars and public transportation than Google buses. A lot of people don't want to live where their employers are based, and for a variety of reasons. If these folks want to waste two hours of their life each day sitting in traffic, or be shuttled around by their employers like elementary school students so that they can live in a location more desirable to them and their families, who are you to suggest that they shouldn't be able to?
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  Hmm, I think his first two example are parody to show how absurd the random development happening today has become. Sure, once Silicon Valley fills SF, it can go North and fill-in Marin instead of biting the bullet and building some damn high rises itself. Also, some National Parks need to be developed to feed that Valley-generated housing demand that the Vally itself has no intention of satisfying itself.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  I don't know why you refer to them as "luxury" shuttles. As far as I can tell, most of them don't even have working Wi-Fi. Those shuttles are keeping extra cars off the highway and the road. Why is that not a good thing? Also, not all of those shuttles are for Apple or Google, and many of them are not going anywhere near SF. They're going to areas of the South Bay where there are no practical public transport options. Even people that live in or near Mountain View take those shuttles (instead of driving) to places where they work in the South Bay. Same goes for Santa Clara caltrain and the Fremont BART station. Shuttles go from there to other places too. Personally, I think the shuttles would have been far less necessary or popular if the California Bay Area had a fast, efficient transport system that actually covered it. It's no wonder most people want to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto or Mountain View -- those locations all have some of the best public transport options and connections to other forms of transport as well. There are obviously other desirable aspects to those cities as well. As for your argument that people should live where they work -- there's not enough housing for that. Mountain View alone certainly doesn't have enough space for everyone that works at Google. Likewise, San Francisco doesn't have enough space for everyone that works there. Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house. So before you grouse about so-called Luxury shuttles, stop and think about what the real problem is.
  - idlewords 12y ago
    It literally says "LUXURY" on the side of some of these buses.
    - binarycrusader 12y ago
      Yeah, so do some of the bars of soap in the dollar store, but that doesn't make them "luxury" in the dictionary sense of the word.
    - samstave 12y ago
      Used the same way the USG uses the word "Freedom"
- batbomb 12y ago
  "If you want to work in fast food, you should be okay with the wages they provide". You are assuming people want to work there and that they have a large latitude of choice. Yes, it's not entirely the same because if you are educated, you do have some mobility and discretion at where you work, but there's much more available affordable housing in SF (all of SF, not just the popular places) then there is between Sunnyvale and SF combined. Just do a search of housing under $2k a month on Craigslist if you don't believe me. Available units for rent doesn't start picking up until you hit Santa Clara or Campbell. This is why I oppose people who oppose luxury shuttles: Because they should be putting their effort into increasing available housing for everyone in the bay area.
- pjlegato 12y ago
  There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately kept residential density very low. They want the economic benefits of big business while maintaining the physical characteristics of the quaint small towns that they were a century ago, or at least of the sleepy, low density semi-rural suburbs that they were 50 years ago. Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today. As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.
  - landryraccoon 12y ago
    I think this is still due to Prop 13. Businesses are easy to tax, residential is impossible. There is an incentive for cash strapped municipalities to zone retail and commercial over residential. If property taxes on residential were allowed to rise, you'd see a shift in the balance.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  Since most people are latching onto the throwaway sentence at the end about luxury shuttles, I'm going to thank you for pointing out that distributed growth should be part of the strategy. Downtown Oakland has the transportation infrastructure to handle higher density (in a way that Sausalito, or anywhere in Marin, would take billions in investment to match) and I think Oakland should openly court more taxpayers and taxpaying businesses relocating across the bridge.
  - samstave 12y ago
    The oakland city government is focused on being a police state/surveillance city. They worked closely with the USG against Occupy Wallstreet (where they were actively working with officials on how to handle the leaders of OWS) they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring. I can only assume that they are also a customer of the Stingray cell tower MIMs.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      "they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring." The Domain Awareness Center was originally supposed to be city-wide, but has been cut back to focus only on the port. http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center
- curun1r 12y ago
  > If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system). So Mountain View/Palo Alto residents and the elected officials that represent them all vote against any significant increase in housing all while approving a ton of new office space which raises the value of their houses by millions. Thanks to prop 13, their property taxes are capped, so that increase comes with zero down side. Repeal prop 13 and the current housing crisis will go away.
NoPiece 12y ago
Wouldn't make more sense to push employers to move jobs to existing urban areas (Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco) instead of trying to build more transit to suburbs, and creating even more urban sprawl?
- idlewords 12y ago
  It would make most sense to urbanize Silicon Valley
- afafsd 12y ago
  De-ghettofying Oakland would make a lot more sense than ruining Sausalito. Though it'll never happen, for the same reason -- local politicians depend for their livelihoods on keeping exactly the same class of people in there and voting for them. Perhaps what should really be done is to merge the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a single political unit (the City of San Francisco).
seanflyon 12y ago
Regional government doesn't even need a housing plan or funding. They just need to allow people to build.
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  Basically, regional government needs a big legal stick able to knock down all local objections to building more housing the regions where the jobs are. However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    Yep. But even the big stick doesn't always work. For example, Silicon Valley cities have managed to indefinitely delay the (approved and funded) state-level plans to upgrade the CalTrain link between San Francisco and San Jose to become a modern, high-speed train with frivolous lawsuits while they work on how to manage the cancellation.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  Some regional governments can't keep up with demand. For example, a month or so ago, the Mountain View department responsible for reviewing and approving new developments asked the council for a temporary moratorium. They had over 90 projects in review or development and simply couldn't keep up with them all. New (expensive) housing is popping up all over Mountain View right now...
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    They need to start building medium or high density apartments near public transport, not $2m low density McMansions.
    - 12y ago
capkutay 12y ago
> We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility. The most insane part is that the drive between SF and Palo Alto/MountainView on the MAIN highway (101) is surrounded by miles of uninhabited land. Especially just north of Redwood city. I have no idea why this is the case. Are they keeping prices astronomically high to preserve marsh fauna?
- svachalek 12y ago
  Yes. The SF Bay used to be surrounded by marshland but huge parts of it got landfilled and paved over. Turns out that leads to big problems with flooding etc. so most of the few wetlands that are left are now protected areas.
pessimizer 12y ago
What about the concerns of the actual people who live there, rather than the midwesterners who will be out there for the 5-10 years to start their career or figure out that they're not cut out for computers, then move either back home or somewhere that isn't a horrible place to live because it's covered in high-density housing?
- pjlegato 12y ago
  Unlike the Soviet Union or China, we do not have internal passports and residence permits in the United States. Residents are free to move whereever they can rent or buy a place to live. Who do you think is charging those insane rents for a hole in the wall? The people who already live there. Nobody's forcing them to do that. You also presume that high density housing is inherently bad. Many people disagree with you. Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. The problem is that Silicon Valley cities want high density offices but not high density houses. They reap the tax benefits of having big business in their city, but foist the problem of housing all of their workers off onto other nearby cities.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    Have I been red-baited? I'm not saying anything that you attribute to me. I'm saying that cities are destroying their current residents and cultures for the sake of rich tourists, and asking what will be left when they go back to Ohio because living where they live now is awful. >Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. And because people use overpriced real estate to launder money.

justizin 12y ago

BART was originally intended to reach Marin, but fierce opposition kept it out. Sausalito doesn't have the infrastructure for high density living, there certainly isn't room for, say, 5x as many people to commute into SF. A lot more people need to start both living and working in the east bay, it's not tenable for most of the lucrative work to be isolated in downtown SF, leaving vast swaths of the bay area largely vacant during the day, with basically noone able to live near their work in the city. Those other communities have worries about gentrification and displacement as well, but the bay area as a whole would be better off if growth were spread more evenly. This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.

packetslave 12y ago
This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. That would require those cities allowing enough housing development to support the growth.
pcwalton 12y ago
> This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. The problem is that the residents of Palo Alto and Mountain View don't want more people to live there.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
Do you also oppose cars and public transportation? Those "luxury shuttles" are just a means of transport. There are far more Bay Area commuters traveling to work every day using cars and public transportation than Google buses. A lot of people don't want to live where their employers are based, and for a variety of reasons. If these folks want to waste two hours of their life each day sitting in traffic, or be shuttled around by their employers like elementary school students so that they can live in a location more desirable to them and their families, who are you to suggest that they shouldn't be able to?
joe_the_user 12y ago
Hmm, I think his first two example are parody to show how absurd the random development happening today has become. Sure, once Silicon Valley fills SF, it can go North and fill-in Marin instead of biting the bullet and building some damn high rises itself. Also, some National Parks need to be developed to feed that Valley-generated housing demand that the Vally itself has no intention of satisfying itself.
binarycrusader 12y ago
I don't know why you refer to them as "luxury" shuttles. As far as I can tell, most of them don't even have working Wi-Fi. Those shuttles are keeping extra cars off the highway and the road. Why is that not a good thing? Also, not all of those shuttles are for Apple or Google, and many of them are not going anywhere near SF. They're going to areas of the South Bay where there are no practical public transport options. Even people that live in or near Mountain View take those shuttles (instead of driving) to places where they work in the South Bay. Same goes for Santa Clara caltrain and the Fremont BART station. Shuttles go from there to other places too. Personally, I think the shuttles would have been far less necessary or popular if the California Bay Area had a fast, efficient transport system that actually covered it. It's no wonder most people want to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto or Mountain View -- those locations all have some of the best public transport options and connections to other forms of transport as well. There are obviously other desirable aspects to those cities as well. As for your argument that people should live where they work -- there's not enough housing for that. Mountain View alone certainly doesn't have enough space for everyone that works at Google. Likewise, San Francisco doesn't have enough space for everyone that works there. Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house. So before you grouse about so-called Luxury shuttles, stop and think about what the real problem is.
- idlewords 12y ago
  It literally says "LUXURY" on the side of some of these buses.
  - binarycrusader 12y ago
    Yeah, so do some of the bars of soap in the dollar store, but that doesn't make them "luxury" in the dictionary sense of the word.
  - samstave 12y ago
    Used the same way the USG uses the word "Freedom"
batbomb 12y ago
"If you want to work in fast food, you should be okay with the wages they provide". You are assuming people want to work there and that they have a large latitude of choice. Yes, it's not entirely the same because if you are educated, you do have some mobility and discretion at where you work, but there's much more available affordable housing in SF (all of SF, not just the popular places) then there is between Sunnyvale and SF combined. Just do a search of housing under $2k a month on Craigslist if you don't believe me. Available units for rent doesn't start picking up until you hit Santa Clara or Campbell. This is why I oppose people who oppose luxury shuttles: Because they should be putting their effort into increasing available housing for everyone in the bay area.
pjlegato 12y ago
There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately kept residential density very low. They want the economic benefits of big business while maintaining the physical characteristics of the quaint small towns that they were a century ago, or at least of the sleepy, low density semi-rural suburbs that they were 50 years ago. Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today. As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.
- landryraccoon 12y ago
  I think this is still due to Prop 13. Businesses are easy to tax, residential is impossible. There is an incentive for cash strapped municipalities to zone retail and commercial over residential. If property taxes on residential were allowed to rise, you'd see a shift in the balance.
eastbayjake 12y ago
Since most people are latching onto the throwaway sentence at the end about luxury shuttles, I'm going to thank you for pointing out that distributed growth should be part of the strategy. Downtown Oakland has the transportation infrastructure to handle higher density (in a way that Sausalito, or anywhere in Marin, would take billions in investment to match) and I think Oakland should openly court more taxpayers and taxpaying businesses relocating across the bridge.
- samstave 12y ago
  The oakland city government is focused on being a police state/surveillance city. They worked closely with the USG against Occupy Wallstreet (where they were actively working with officials on how to handle the leaders of OWS) they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring. I can only assume that they are also a customer of the Stingray cell tower MIMs.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring." The Domain Awareness Center was originally supposed to be city-wide, but has been cut back to focus only on the port. http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center
curun1r 12y ago
> If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system). So Mountain View/Palo Alto residents and the elected officials that represent them all vote against any significant increase in housing all while approving a ton of new office space which raises the value of their houses by millions. Thanks to prop 13, their property taxes are capped, so that increase comes with zero down side. Repeal prop 13 and the current housing crisis will go away.

NoPiece 12y ago

Wouldn't make more sense to push employers to move jobs to existing urban areas (Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco) instead of trying to build more transit to suburbs, and creating even more urban sprawl?

idlewords 12y ago
It would make most sense to urbanize Silicon Valley
afafsd 12y ago
De-ghettofying Oakland would make a lot more sense than ruining Sausalito. Though it'll never happen, for the same reason -- local politicians depend for their livelihoods on keeping exactly the same class of people in there and voting for them. Perhaps what should really be done is to merge the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a single political unit (the City of San Francisco).

seanflyon 12y ago

Regional government doesn't even need a housing plan or funding. They just need to allow people to build.

joe_the_user 12y ago
Basically, regional government needs a big legal stick able to knock down all local objections to building more housing the regions where the jobs are. However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
- pjlegato 12y ago
  Yep. But even the big stick doesn't always work. For example, Silicon Valley cities have managed to indefinitely delay the (approved and funded) state-level plans to upgrade the CalTrain link between San Francisco and San Jose to become a modern, high-speed train with frivolous lawsuits while they work on how to manage the cancellation.
binarycrusader 12y ago
Some regional governments can't keep up with demand. For example, a month or so ago, the Mountain View department responsible for reviewing and approving new developments asked the council for a temporary moratorium. They had over 90 projects in review or development and simply couldn't keep up with them all. New (expensive) housing is popping up all over Mountain View right now...
- pjlegato 12y ago
  They need to start building medium or high density apartments near public transport, not $2m low density McMansions.
  - 12y ago

capkutay 12y ago

> We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility. The most insane part is that the drive between SF and Palo Alto/MountainView on the MAIN highway (101) is surrounded by miles of uninhabited land. Especially just north of Redwood city. I have no idea why this is the case. Are they keeping prices astronomically high to preserve marsh fauna?

svachalek 12y ago
Yes. The SF Bay used to be surrounded by marshland but huge parts of it got landfilled and paved over. Turns out that leads to big problems with flooding etc. so most of the few wetlands that are left are now protected areas.

pessimizer 12y ago

What about the concerns of the actual people who live there, rather than the midwesterners who will be out there for the 5-10 years to start their career or figure out that they're not cut out for computers, then move either back home or somewhere that isn't a horrible place to live because it's covered in high-density housing?

pjlegato 12y ago
Unlike the Soviet Union or China, we do not have internal passports and residence permits in the United States. Residents are free to move whereever they can rent or buy a place to live. Who do you think is charging those insane rents for a hole in the wall? The people who already live there. Nobody's forcing them to do that. You also presume that high density housing is inherently bad. Many people disagree with you. Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. The problem is that Silicon Valley cities want high density offices but not high density houses. They reap the tax benefits of having big business in their city, but foist the problem of housing all of their workers off onto other nearby cities.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Have I been red-baited? I'm not saying anything that you attribute to me. I'm saying that cities are destroying their current residents and cultures for the sake of rich tourists, and asking what will be left when they go back to Ohio because living where they live now is awful. >Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. And because people use overpriced real estate to launder money.