Neighbors Clash in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Neighbors Clash in Silicon Valley

wsj.com

19 pointsprostoalex20 comments

Build Baby Build! I was first aghast when I saw the new big apartment buildings coming up on El Camino Real and San Antonio Ave in Mountain View and Sunnyvale- with barely 1-5 feet set back from the the sidewalk. Then I realized which side of the table I was and I was like Fuck It. It may not be pretty, someone pulled a fast one on the Inspector/Panel/whoever but they are helping me with making more housing avbl and hopefully rents more affordable.

Setbacks are very often a complete waste of space. I think www.strongtowns.org has some articles explaining the details.

I believe these are streets with CalTrans right of way, which means the ROW extends the whole sidewalk. They (or MV) likely require the setback at property lines as a matter of course, and in turn the developer would want that space for balconies or bay windows or whatever that they can't hang over the line.

What's wrong with no/tiny setbacks? Seems inevitable that you'll use space more efficiently for stuff as an area gains population and densifies.

Plus it's a million times better than enormous parking lots in front of every business/strip mall. Those things are majorly hostile to any transportation mode other than cars.

No setbacks, in many people's opinion is that it creates a tunnel like effect on the street and cuts out light on the lower floors shops and offices. Its also not the norm in the Area.

I guess setbacks are a 'nice to have' if you are an owner in the area. As an overpaying renter, I couldn't care less.

http://archive.is/h939P Sans-paywall link

This seems like some sort of a strange failure of capitalism - I mean, the money is there, why can't it be allocated correctly? If the big brains in silicon valley riding the wave are unable or unwilling to set their egos/greed aside and figure this out, maybe the government should step in and take over allocation of taxes, where buildings are built, etc for the entire region. I'm pretty hard right but if capitalists can't get their shit together, bring on the central planning. But what if that fails? Tough luck, you had more money than you knew what to do with and plenty of time to do it, take it as a lesson to the next bubble.

There's nothing capitalist about zoning. What you are seeing is central planning in action.

Cities that are adding housing could enact taxes on residents who work outside of the city (or, more likely, exempt those that work in the city, are retired or self-/un-employed.) That would add a market force to both offset the cost of zoning residential over commercial as well as putting additional pressure on those cities that have not kept up with the demand for housing. It could even be sold as an environmental measure to discourage longer commutes.

This wouldn't make sense for suburbs where jobs are limited, but for San Francisco, Oakland or another city that does have available jobs, it would. Because otherwise, cities like Mountain View build nothing but commercial, make tons of money and shirk their responsibility to house the people working in those commercial developments.

In classic Libertarian fashion, you could argue we need only properly account for the externalities and the market will solve the problem. But when externalities are allowed to go unchecked, as is the case here, things get bad.

I'd rather use the word "Free Market" than Capitalism. Capitalism can also exist in situations where you don't have a real Free Market, and Capitalism can lead to Monopolies of means of production and ownership. Free Market ideals go against Monopolies and centralization of power in general.

"Central planning" meaning 100+ Bay Area cities acting independently?

Cities stand to collect higher revenues from businesses (sales tax, business licenses, property taxes) vs residents (property taxes), while the infrastructural load associated with industrial/retail is fairly minimized to roads and utilities, as opposed to scaling out infrastructure for residential zones, such as libraries, schools, parks on top of aforementioned roads and utilities.

Thus any city that can attract retail/commercial tenants and offload low-revenue residential tenants to some other municipality gets to win. The caveat being the tax breaks that cities have to hand out to attract such businesses in the first place.

In California tax breaks are rarely handed out to businesses to attract them. Contrast with Texas, where not only are tax breaks handed out to businesses but housing is taxed at exorbitant rates (roughly 3% of current value, assessed annually)

Huh? It isn't capitalism that is preventing high density housing from being built. The shortage of affordable housing is the inevitable result of regulation by government (zoning laws).

Agreed, I may be wrong, I guess maybe I have it backwards!

Either way, it's infuriatingly ridiculous, whoever is to blame is causing severe damage to a substantial percentage of a lot of people's lives.

Yes, developers would love to build more housing. Various regulations make it difficult, or even impossible (depending on the area).

The funny thing is that the bay area as a whole isn't even that dense. Yeah it's a metro of 7 million, but it's fairly spread out. There's plenty of room for more housing without resorting to high rises everywhere, but we can't get mid-rise or even low-rise most places.

It becomes ever more bizarre to me how resistant to increasing population density some people are the more time I spend in cities with comparatively high population density. Bangkok, Taipei, Tokyo etc.

Do you want to be able to walk to get your groceries, to eat out, to meet friends?

Do you want to have fast, efficient public transport?

Do you want to not have the expense of purchasing and maintaining a vehicle?

You need a few other ingredients of course but population density is a prerequisite for so many wonderful things.

As an aside, if you have never lived in an apartment building that has a supermarket or at least a convenience store actually in the building you are missing out on an amazing level of convenience.

Highly dense cities with beautiful public parks are wonderful in my opinion, most anything you need within a 5 minute walk, yes please.

From the article:

"San Jose last year estimated that for every 1,000 square feet of single-family housing, the city budget takes a net loss of $255 a year, compared with a gain of $1,064 for the same size commercial space."

I don't know enough about the details of property tax in California other than Prop 13 has some pretty strong side-effects and/or unintended consequences. And the tax implications of multi-tenant units might be entirely different than those for a single-family homes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com