http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/47/72/11/10461791/3/920x920.jpg
Sure, it's near a waste processing plant. But the fact that the area around it is just a square mile of shrubs and dirt is ridiculous. They could probably fit 2000 homes there right by the train station, 15 minutes from San Francisco, 10 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from Milbrae BART. Other vastly under-built areas like Belmont also raise questions.
However, Hillsdale and Redwood City have done a good job building dense housing right around their respective stations.
The obvious answer is to build high density housing and offices there. Low density suburban anything would be a tragedy.
Cities want more offices and less housing because housing requires costly services that aren't covered by property taxes, especially if it's high-density rental housing which rarely changes owners. Remember, parcel taxes are assessed per parcel, not per unit. A 1000 unit for-sale condo complex generates 1000 parcel taxes. A 1000 unit rental complex on the same parcel generates 1 parcel tax. And the apartment owner lobby (CAA) fights successfully to keep this system in place.
Cities like retail because of the sales tax revenue, but developers don't like it because retail is less profitable than commercial office or rental housing.
Anytime something seems obvious, there is probably a good reason why there's more to it than meets the eye.
Solving these issues is so hard because the developers have the money to lobby legislators to avoid any solution that would impact them financially.
One site near my home just had a casino built on it, which will require active ventilation of wells sunk in the ground for years to prevent toxic gas buildup.
A number of Manhattan neighborhoods are built on former rail yards. On mobile but I believe there is even a wikipedia page on it.
If the demand is high enough developers would love to clean it up. SF prices are at that level.
Around every station in the bay area, I see nothing more than 3 to 5 stories at the most, or even less.
Is there actually no news about superfund sites or have I been accidentally not paying attention to a profound degree for over a decade and a half?
Re-use is complicated by needed environmental remediation, the town border cutting through the Baylands, and the (largely deserved) poor reputation of the nearby Viz as an unsafe and undesirable area. However, the land value is there, and construction could have come much faster if the local governments approach to housing development was not obstructionist first.
And further up Geneva Ave, a 10-15 minute walk away there is a relatively new apartment complex with 'now leasing' signs.
I mean living in LA, who would want to pay ton of money for a box of living space with no yard, and yet share subway with the less desirables (not my view of course). And the public transportation systems in LA doesn't really have the reach either.
Add to that, poor choices to build at grade reduce the effectiveness of light rail. In Pasadena the Gold Line crossing was put at grade across a major artery; should have continued underground for just another mile. This creates a daily traffic jam that lasts for about 2-3 hours.
And then through Highland Park, the rail is at grade through a residential street, making it go 5 MPH and it has to obey traffic signals at the same priority as cars. The end result is a 35 minute commute time Downtown for a trip that takes 20 minutes in no traffic, 35 in typical rush hour traffic and maybe 45-50 worst case. People choose to drive instead just to save time...including my best friend who lives two blocks from a Gold Line stop.
Seriously, look at some transit maps:
1920 Silicon Valley: http://www.sociecity.com//wp-content/uploads/silicon-valey-s...
2012 Silicon Valley: http://www.sociecity.com//wp-content/uploads/silicon-valey-s...
And these were for-profit, privately run lines in most cases.
A good article at http://sociecity.com/rethink/death-and-life-of-american-stre....
Of course, the problem could just be ignored for another 50. Maybe people will simply leave LA.
Funds for transit should come from fuel taxes, vehicle license fees, and development fees. Sales tax increases are very regressive and a terrible way to pay for transit. But that's always what the Silicon Valley Non-Leadership Group favors because it avoids their members having to ante up for the transportation problems they create.
Glad the NYT article author at least quoted me correctly. He was going to characterize me as "anti-growth," which is completely false. Growth is just fine as long as it's sustainable growth with transportation, housing, and school impact taken into consideration. But developers don't want to take a systems view and look at the long-term impact of their projects.
One of the biggest contributors to high housing cost in San Francisco is rent control. It benefits some tenants, but it results in more and more rental housing being turned into TIC buildings under the Ellis Act.
My wife's family had a four unit apartment building in SF and they had to sell it because with rent control, and de-facto vacancy control, it was a money-losing proposition since there was no way they could maintain the building and pay the mortgage with the rents they were getting. My wife may have married me for the free handyman services I provided to them. I'm sure that the new owner did a TIC conversion. In a way it's good that more people become owners rather than renters, but it does not increase the supply of housing or lower the cost.
There are also a lot of houses in San Francisco with empty in-law units because the homeowners are scared to rent them out because of all the laws on rental housing, even in the cases where the in-law unit is not covered by rent control. So we're in the odd situation of having a housing shortage with tens of thousands of unoccupied housing units.
Then when I entered the family, suddenly I could repair appliances, replace plumbing fixtures, replace outlets and switches, install lighting, it never ends. Many trips to San Francisco from Silicon Valley for repairs.
I think if they could have raised the rents when tenants changed, and have been allowed 3-4% annual increases, instead of 2% or less, then it would have been sustainable. But tenants passed on the apartments to friends and relatives, and the rent was delivered in cash to our house.
A lot of apartment building owners in San Francisco aren't wealthy, and own just one small building. The lesson that was learned is that it's a really bad idea to own rental property in a city with such confiscatory rent control. And this rent control only on older properties ends up driving up prices on non-rent controlled properties because it constricts the market-rate supply.
For us, it was not sustainable financially because we didn't have the resources or the will to challenge the "vacancy control." I'm sure the new owner solved the problem or converted it to a TIC.
I like the Ellis Act and TIC concept since it makes more people property owners, and owners will maintain the property better than tenants or absentee landlords.
OMG I sound like a Republican even though I am quite the progressive.
OMG I sound like a Republican even though I am quite the progressive.
Unless it replaces parking, in which case less dense housing gets WAY cheaper but also much less useful.
Sensible and sustainable growth needs to avoid tunnel-vision. But cities are so controlled by developers that they rarely want to take a systems view when rezoning land. In Palo Alto, they realized that there is no way they can build enough housing and schools to offset more office space, and that housing, especially rental housing, is impractical financially because of the crazy parcel tax system and Prop 13. In San Jose, they desperately want more commercial and retail because they have have too much housing and not enough businesses, which causes more congestion, as well as financial problems since taxes on housing don't pay for city services.
There are two policy changes needed at the state level:
1. Prop 13 should apply ONLY to owner-occupied residential housing. Owners of rental property and owners of commercial property will prevent this from ever happening in our lifetimes.
2. Parcel taxes should be assessed per housing unit, not per parcel. The CAA (California Apartment Association) has fought successfully against this.
What's happening now in Cupertino is a developer spending tens of million of dollars on ballot measure that bypasses the CEQA required EIR, so he can build 2 million square feet of Class A office space, and a few hundred luxury apartments. He'll make out like a bandit, and the city will be left to deal with the traffic, pollution, school impact, and future ABAG housing mandates. It's extremely short-sighted, but of course the developer doesn't care. It's the same developer being fined by Palo Alto for failing to fulfill a CBA (Community Benefits Agreement), the same developer responsible for the abandoned Sunnyvale Town Center, the same developer responsible for Mowry Crossing. These little suburban cities don't have the expertise to craft development agreements that can be enforced, and they get screwed every time. Look at Santa Clara and the Levi's stadium fiasco.
Also, given the overall large area served by a single Caltrain station, parking lots next to them is arguably better and more egalitarian since people can drive in, and take the train more easily. The Park N ride concept is also not just a Bay Area thing, I believe it's quite successful in New Jersey and New York for people commuting to Manhattan to work.
I think you might be comparing to the subway systems in places like Manhattan or Barcelona or Paris, but the population and station density of those places is very different.
Obviously not everyone can bicycle to the train, and it's more of a hassle than Park & Ride, but it also saves money, and often time, on each end. In SF, once the new Muni line opens that will make the SF end of Caltrain more accessible to more people.
I think that I'm the only candidate for Cupertino City Council that actually ever uses transit! And I am very much opposed to Measure B, which is mainly money for more roads, which won't solve the congestion problem.
An apartment close by is much more likely to generate ridership. Walking is the cheapest form of transportation available, so no need to own vehicles that cost thousands off dollars to reach the station.
Also, increasing the supply of housing in general means more access.
I'd be willing to bet that housing would allow more people per square foot to ride than a parking garage. Cars take up huge amounts of space. Truly tremendous amounts.
Move people and goods, not cars.
>I'd be willing to bet that housing would allow more people per square foot to ride than a parking garage
A parking lot requires about 300sqft per car. A stacker system should cut that roughly in half, but to be generous with the fixed costs let's say 200sqft.
Every person we serve with a modest 600sqft 1-bedroom within walking distance is 2 people who can't get to the train effectively at all.
Drivers can live arbitrarily far away, at whatever cost:space:time tradeoff makes sense for them, and still take the train. If all 3 drivers decide they'd like to sell their cars and walk, the price on apartments within walking distance must rise until 2 of them back off.
Bulldozing the parking delivers an awesome lifestyle for the one guy who can afford the housing that replaces it, but at great expense to him and greater expense to the other 2 guys, who now can't get to the train effectively at all.
This is why park-n-ride is egalitarian and hip urban development is elitist. Even though you're adding housing, you're increasing the cost to be able to get to the station easily (rent > transportation costs by a long shot) and decreasing the number of people who can do it (unless you're suggesting we live in car-sized apartments).
If we want to demolish the walking-distance parking, we need to replace it with something approximately as good for as many people at approximately the same cost. Apartments are better, but they fail the other two tests. Self-driving Uber, bike racks, motorcycle/scooter spaces, all of the above, whatever.
On days when it's raining or I'm feeling too tired to walk, I can Lyft to the station or ride a commute.org shuttle that gets to Caltrain and has a pickup/dropoff spot a block from my apartment.
Which is a good thing, because the parking lot at the Caltrain station is completely full by the time I wake up (and shifting my schedule 2-3 hours earlier would take away my ability to actually work with the people I work with).
That's brutal and insane. We should not have to live this way.
When I have a contract in SF, I use Caltrain. I have a gig in Fremont now, and I drive. I tried combining a bicycle ride with VTA light rail, and it was really terrible, taking two hours, rather than a 25-30 minute drive. A large industrial area in southern Fremont, with no VTA bus from the light rail station on Tasman, and no A/C transit bus from BART. Maybe when the BART extension opens they'll add a bus from the station over to the industrial park area.
Apartments are quite a bit bigger than parking spaces. Fewer people can live in a given amount of space than can park in it, unless we're talking dorm-room sized apartments.
Preferably over the track and with the station exiting right into the main entrance areas for the services.
You know what you'd have then!?!? You'd have Tokyo urban design :-)