In this particular case most people opposed it because they didn't want a nine story building. I didn't actually mind, even though I would literally live in it's shadow.
But I voted against it too because the they were apartments, not condos, which means that they will send their kids to the schools but not pay for them. Actually worse, their rent would have been higher because of the schools, but the schools would never see any of that money since apartments don't pay parcel taxes, which is where a good chunk of the school funding comes from.
But my main point is that almost all of my neighbors opposed it because "they don't want high density housing to ruin the neighborhood".
I hate to break it to these people, but they said the same thing in the 1960s when their houses were being built.
In all likelihood they probably just don't want more supply driving down prices.
If you've got a $1 million mortgage on a $1.4 million bungalow you're not exactly going to be pleased if the housing crisis comes to an abrupt end and you're plunged deep into negative equity.
There seems to be some tiptoeing around this elephant when it comes to the politics of land development though.
This was an issue in my city recently too. People didn't want a medium-density condo project to go in, and the mayor came out and said "I lived here when your houses were built and people said the same thing... you wouldn't be here if we didn't build them".
The property is taxed; the landlord pays the tax directly, the tenants absorb this cost in their rent.
Fortunately, the developments went on as planned and 3 years and 400 housing units later, traffic isn't noticeably worse than it was before the developments, and I see a lot more people walking to Caltrain.
Cities love to welcome office space, but they are loathe to welcome residential space, yet at the same time, people complain that people are being forced out of the community due to the price of housing.
The cure to high housing prices is more housing, not rent control.
Basically people see it as a magical portal that brings downtown Oakland and San Francisco to them, with all of the attendant problems of those areas. Not entirely untrue, but it also contributes to the inability to ever improve things in the bay area.
But anyway, I don’t think it would be inherently terrible to have relatively low density suburbs.
The problem is that all the towns in the peninsula love building massive amounts of new office space, but don’t build enough housing for the workers to live there. As a result, the workers all live in SF and commute daily to the peninsula by car or corporate shuttle. This is a horrible planning pattern for everyone. (Except for the peninsula towns who get big tax revenue from the office space and don’t have to pay for any of the costs of housing the workers’ families.)
It’s plausible that increasing the housing supply in Silicon Valley suburbs would even decrease commute-hours traffic. (I’m not enough of an expert to predict precisely.)
By contrast, a suburb full of real housing can be far denser. For example, Somerville, MA, a suburb of Boston, has about 19,000 people per square mile. It’s entirely unnecessary to fill the whole of the Bay Area with 30+ floor high rises in order to increase density by a factor of 2 or more; all we need is to re-zone a fraction of the land to allow 3–6 story low rise apartment buildings in mixed-use neighborhoods instead of only allowing single family detached houses on large lots and scattered strip malls and outrageous numbers of parking spaces everywhere.
Kowloon has a density of more than 100,000 people per square mile. The Bay Area does not need anything near the density of Hong Kong to meet its housing needs.
I'd much rather see balanced communities with parks, retail/entertainment and office space so many residents don't have to travel outside of their community for every day needs.