5 ms·

As a new immigrant to US and Bay Area I am totally amused to see that there is so much vacant land everywhere and yet so little housing. Dont see why cupertino,

by tn13 12y ago

As a new immigrant to US and Bay Area I am totally amused to see that there is so much vacant land everywhere and yet so little housing. Dont see why cupertino, MV, Sunnyvale cant have 10 floored housing complexes.

djloche 12y ago
There is a fear of earthquakes destroying property and lives in California.
- patio11 12y ago
  Please point Californians who think this at a photo of Tokyo.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    Fears are often not rational, and such fears do play a minor role in feelings against certain structures in California. Talk to some people for a while and it comes up. Having said that, it's not the main driver preventing development in the Bay Area. Citizens with money, influence, and established interests want lower-density development, and so that's what exists.
  - davidw 12y ago
    Or photos of the very much intact skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake.
  - djloche 12y ago
    For whatever the reasons - the Japanese government decided that opportunities of building taller buildings outweighs the risks involved. Both California and Japan have a long history of earthquakes and know the danger involved. When you look at the numbers, more people have died due to earthquakes in Japan than in California. Prime example: CA 1994 Northridge earthquake (6.7 magnitude, 70 people died, $20B in damage) vs Hanshin earthquake (6.8 magnitude, 6400+ died, $100 billion in damage). Are the fears irrational? Each culture has a different approach. I agree with other comments though - fear of earthquakes is a minor footnote in the grand scheme of property development in California.
    - rsynnott 12y ago
      Most deaths in the Hanshin earthquake were caused by collapse of older buildings; modern highrises were largely unaffected.
  - WalterSear 12y ago
    Fwiw, they don't actually think this.
- baddox 12y ago
  I don't know how strong that fear is, considering that 12% of the US population lives in California.
CalRobert 12y ago
It's cars, mostly. Many of California's cities have laws requiring massive, incredibly wasteful amounts of parking to be built even in supposedly high-density or transit-oriented communities. In addition, there are rules saying houses have to be set back a certain distance from the road, which takes a good deal of space. Finally, most places also require that roads meet a certain (high) "Level Of Service", meaning lots of cars can move through very quickly. Nevermind the fact that by building things like this you are forcing them to go much, much FARTHER. Have you noticed that driving through LA (or San Jose for that matter) is mostly driving through a sea of parking lots and wide streets? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_service for more. There is also a cultural preference for lots of land; I'm bemused by how many people mock "McMansions" for having small yards but never spend any time in their own yards. This is less true in the bay (and not at all in SF) than other parts of the state (looking at you LA) but it remains a problem. Also, areas where the majority of the population are homeowners tend to vote against new housing construction. This increases the value of their own homes at the cost of strangling newcomers to the area and making the cost of living exorbitant. Of course, without new housing those areas will continue to consist primarily of homeowners, so the cycle continues. Even in supposedly lefty places you see people oppose construction that would help increase housing supply, presumably because it's bad for the environment or will damage neighborhood character. I'm sympathetic to those claims, but making people commute from 40 miles away (if they're LUCKY it'll be on BART or Caltrain, but probably not) can't be good for those things either. I wonder if it's time we reconsidered whether it makes sense for highly interdependent neighboring communities to be separate cities. Would we have a more integrated and efficient transportation, housing, and office infrastructure if the bay from San Mateo up to Mill Valley and east to 680 were the same city? Quite possibly. It would at least mean, to some small extent, that they couldn't say "we'll take your companies but housing the plebs is somebody else's problem - only huge single-family homes for us, thank you!".
- Shivetya 12y ago
  there is also a lot of, we like our town and we don't want others here. Hence throw up building codes, regulations, and such, to keep housing from being built. You can use all sorts of PC buzzwords to make it palatable, from environment to maintaining historic sites. When large scale housing is built it usually is where people don't want to be.
muzz 12y ago
New construction is being built taller than previous (but not necessarily 10 stories). The problem is that getting around in that part of the Bay Area still requires a car, so units with no available parking are much less desirable. Having 1 parking spot per unit, and 1 level of parking, effectively limits the height to ~4 floors of marketable residential units (a second level of parking would be more expensive than the first, and allow for ~8 floors of marketable units).

by tn13 12y ago

djloche 12y ago

There is a fear of earthquakes destroying property and lives in California.

patio11 12y ago
Please point Californians who think this at a photo of Tokyo.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Fears are often not rational, and such fears do play a minor role in feelings against certain structures in California. Talk to some people for a while and it comes up. Having said that, it's not the main driver preventing development in the Bay Area. Citizens with money, influence, and established interests want lower-density development, and so that's what exists.
- davidw 12y ago
  Or photos of the very much intact skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake.
- djloche 12y ago
  For whatever the reasons - the Japanese government decided that opportunities of building taller buildings outweighs the risks involved. Both California and Japan have a long history of earthquakes and know the danger involved. When you look at the numbers, more people have died due to earthquakes in Japan than in California. Prime example: CA 1994 Northridge earthquake (6.7 magnitude, 70 people died, $20B in damage) vs Hanshin earthquake (6.8 magnitude, 6400+ died, $100 billion in damage). Are the fears irrational? Each culture has a different approach. I agree with other comments though - fear of earthquakes is a minor footnote in the grand scheme of property development in California.
  - rsynnott 12y ago
    Most deaths in the Hanshin earthquake were caused by collapse of older buildings; modern highrises were largely unaffected.
- WalterSear 12y ago
  Fwiw, they don't actually think this.
baddox 12y ago
I don't know how strong that fear is, considering that 12% of the US population lives in California.

CalRobert 12y ago

It's cars, mostly. Many of California's cities have laws requiring massive, incredibly wasteful amounts of parking to be built even in supposedly high-density or transit-oriented communities. In addition, there are rules saying houses have to be set back a certain distance from the road, which takes a good deal of space. Finally, most places also require that roads meet a certain (high) "Level Of Service", meaning lots of cars can move through very quickly. Nevermind the fact that by building things like this you are forcing them to go much, much FARTHER. Have you noticed that driving through LA (or San Jose for that matter) is mostly driving through a sea of parking lots and wide streets? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_service for more. There is also a cultural preference for lots of land; I'm bemused by how many people mock "McMansions" for having small yards but never spend any time in their own yards. This is less true in the bay (and not at all in SF) than other parts of the state (looking at you LA) but it remains a problem. Also, areas where the majority of the population are homeowners tend to vote against new housing construction. This increases the value of their own homes at the cost of strangling newcomers to the area and making the cost of living exorbitant. Of course, without new housing those areas will continue to consist primarily of homeowners, so the cycle continues. Even in supposedly lefty places you see people oppose construction that would help increase housing supply, presumably because it's bad for the environment or will damage neighborhood character. I'm sympathetic to those claims, but making people commute from 40 miles away (if they're LUCKY it'll be on BART or Caltrain, but probably not) can't be good for those things either. I wonder if it's time we reconsidered whether it makes sense for highly interdependent neighboring communities to be separate cities. Would we have a more integrated and efficient transportation, housing, and office infrastructure if the bay from San Mateo up to Mill Valley and east to 680 were the same city? Quite possibly. It would at least mean, to some small extent, that they couldn't say "we'll take your companies but housing the plebs is somebody else's problem - only huge single-family homes for us, thank you!".

Shivetya 12y ago
there is also a lot of, we like our town and we don't want others here. Hence throw up building codes, regulations, and such, to keep housing from being built. You can use all sorts of PC buzzwords to make it palatable, from environment to maintaining historic sites. When large scale housing is built it usually is where people don't want to be.

muzz 12y ago

New construction is being built taller than previous (but not necessarily 10 stories). The problem is that getting around in that part of the Bay Area still requires a car, so units with no available parking are much less desirable. Having 1 parking spot per unit, and 1 level of parking, effectively limits the height to ~4 floors of marketable residential units (a second level of parking would be more expensive than the first, and allow for ~8 floors of marketable units).