just. build. more. housing. units.
Meanwhile, the following should happen:
* Firefighters, teachers, etc., who receive a salary from the local government should be paid enough to live within a reasonable distance. It's fair to them and it's necessary for them to do their (crucial) jobs properly.
* Their salaries must rise until they are high enough.
* Taxes must be raised until the local government can pay those higher salaries.
* Most of those taxes should be on the various multi-billion corporations, because no one else can bear them. Those corporations are also the main cause of the rise in rent, so this is logical in that sense as well: taxes can keep rising until they slow down in bringing people here and raising rents. In other words, raise taxes until growth slows down to the rate at which we are building units.
But I don't see why you would think that the teen suicide rate would have anything to do with how desirable it is to live in Palo Alto. People get depressed for all kinds of reasons, but how nice your neighborhood is is very rarely one of them. The high suicide rate in PA is tragic. But it doesn't change the fact that PA is a nice place to live if you can afford it, and one of the things that makes it a nice place to live is that the density is low but the wealth concentration is high.
And what's wrong with turning communities into country clubs? Country clubs are very pleasant places to be. Why not make your community like one if you can?
Natural selection?
The more more development restrictions there are, the more people will be kept out. At a certain point, the people who are kept out are will include people who you wouldn't otherwise want to keep out, however, you define that. And this doesn't have to be a result of increasing the restrictions on development. For example if there are more 'desirable' people who want to move to the area than there are available houses/new developments, then some of the desirable people will be forced out.
Of course, there's also the major untrue assumption that you make that the only way to maintain open space and desirability is to restrict development. Higher density infill housing doesn't intrude on the existing open space, sicne by definition it's slotting in between buildings in already developed areas. And of course, places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, and New York City are proofs by existence that desirability and less restrictive development are not mutually exclusive.
But let's get back to 'riff-raff' and keeping that out. That's just racist and classist.
Yes, that's kind of the whole point of the original article.
> Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, and New York City
I have been to all of those places, and while they are all wonderful to visit I would not want to live in any of them in large part because of how dense they are. Building more housing is not a no-brainer. You're just trading one set of problems for a different set of problems.
> But let's get back to 'riff-raff' and keeping that out. That's just racist and classist.
It was intended as ironic humor. But I apologize if you were offended.