Comment by peterwoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterwoo | Hacker News Reader

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This idea is absurd. First of all a high rise in this neighborhood is terrible city planning and would never work. This is the place we're talking about

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4142855,-122.129379,3a,75y,2...

You can't just drop a 40 story building onto a residential street, even apart from it being illegal due to city ordinances. The infrastructure is not here (and you can't build it in 19 days). If somehow you got it built it would only make everyone miserable. This street already gets kind of whack during the school year since it terminates at Gunn High School (which I guess they would simply make twice as big).

Second of all -- cut a deal with who? Not just Buena Vista residents, the whole city. Nobody wants that. A developer would have to be insane to even try.

A few years back in a nearby neighborhood they tried to replace a community orchard with new housing. Not even displacing people, just trying to develop affordable housing on top of peoples' PLANTS. It was pushed to a referendum and Palo Alto residents rejected it. The developer had already bought the land and had to sell it.

40 stories is probably more than a little absurd, but you can definitely take an area that size and build in high rise buildings.

Of course, you'd need do some infrastructure upgrades. It takes years to build high rise buildings. That is more than enough to add streets, buses that run to the nearest caltran stop.

>Second of all -- cut a deal with who? Not just Buena Vista residents, the whole city. Nobody wants that. A developer would have to be insane to even try.

That's sort my point. The whole bay area has a Luddite view on developing their cities. Zoning and permitting processes are designed to manage growth, but in California they are there to prevent it.

Talking about growth here is a red herring. The density in that trailer park is probably higher than any residential neighborhood in Palo Alto, and they're replacing ~400 residents with 184 luxury apartments. There will be some increase in density perhaps but not much.

You say if the city were smart it would tear it down and build high rises on the site. But does it make sense? There's a big park nearby with donkeys, sheep, and chicken coops. There's a community orchard nearby as I said. On the other side of Foothill Expressway you've got huge estates and vinyards. But the much higher density housing in Buena Vista must be razed?

I think you're making a larger argument here which is independent of what's going on in this neighborhood. It's certainly a valid point. But you need to separate it from the Buena Vista issue. The controversy is not about growth, it's about whether the people there deserve to live in Palo Alto.

Okay, maybe it shouldn't be exactly there. But we have to start building more vertically on the Peninsula -- we just have to.

And I understand fully that it's going to take a sea change in local sentiment before that can happen.

You want to build vertically in an earthquake prone area?

You need to move a bit east, friend. There _is_ going to be an earthquake.

Earthquake resistance isn't an immediate win for low-density housing. Tall buildings can be safer in an earthquake than single-family homes and low-rise townhouses, both due to a lower structural resonance frequency and the ability to spread the cost of advanced safety features (like mass dampers) across more tenants.

Yeah. We're going to disagree here.

Let's revisit this after the next big earthquake to see which buildings survived the event in a habitable condition and monitor which areas are without utilities the longest.

This is ridiculous. It's well-known how to build taller buildings in an earthquake-safe way -- San Francisco has plenty of them, as does LA.

Anyway, we don't need to go to 40 stories to be "vertical". The vast majority of residential structures around here are 1 or 2 stories. Even 8-story buildings would start to make a difference.

Of course, they would add to traffic...

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