Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

Typical HN response. If an area is basically built out (which most of Silicon Valley is), how do you build more housing?

And no, the answer is not change zoning laws and build apartment towers -- places like Mountain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Saratoga, even San Jose -- aren't going to suddenly build dense housing on residential lots.

View on HN

The concept of zoning laws are less than 100 years old, and their spread was mostly due to racist exclusionary policies in the 50s/60s. San Francisco just wrapped up changing the zoning of western SOMA. Mountain View has 28k new apartments in the pipeline, increasing the population of the city by 50% [0]. There are plans at the state level to remove local control of housing development from municipalities that fail to build enough housing [1].

"Zoning Laws" are not a static, immutable fact of life.

0. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/one-advocates-take-on-...

1. http://asmdc.org/members/a17/news-room/press-releases/assemb...

Why is the answer to not change zoning laws? Why is the answer not to remove local say over what gets built and whats not? Why should the area's property laws remain frozen to an arbitrary point in time?

Silicon valley is not "built out". Single family homes in what happens to be a big congregation point for workers in a high growth area like tech is just not the right idea. We dont have to go full Manhattan. Even if most Bay area cities developed like Barcelona or Paris(4ish stories) we would dramatically change the housing affordability.

"built out"

The hell it is!

Source: a number of years in Europe. And no, we're not talking skyscrapers, but more 2/3 story developments, perhaps with some businesses on the bottom floor on more frequented streets.

I've lived in Europe. I've lived in the east bay when the whole Fremont to Walnut Creek 680 corridor was orchards and fields. I lived in Almaden Valley when it was orchards.

My definition of built out is simple -- municipalities planned for X, implemented X, and we have X. Getting a community to go to Y, yeah, no.

Thought experiment - enforce denser building (maybe use eminent domain) in Atherton. What do you think will happen? (Extreme example). Apply that to Saratoga, Cupertino, etc. in the more rural residential areas, not the commercial areas. Commercial is building as they can and that won't be enough.

Well then municipalities will have to plan for X rising to Y and plan for and implement Y. Civic planning doesn't have to get frozen in time and population.

Explain to me how you get Saratoga, Cupertino, Atherton, etc to conform to Y. And why should they?

You get them to conform by passing laws at the state level to take power away from the local residents. I know they wont comply, we have already seen the problems that giving local control creates in this scenario, so the solution is to make a decision for the larger and long term good.

No, you have multimillionaires that won't sell and will fight change.

Well sure they will fight, but thats not a good enough reason to not do something. Hopefully the state government has enough political capital to deal with the fight that the relatively small population of homeowners will put up.

Because if Atherton doesn't build housing, Oaklanders will burn down Atherton for exporting the problem eastward as gentrification.

This is nonsense. You can't claim that municipalities are static, when you preface your comment about how the orchards went away. They aren't static. They never were.

I have never seen a claim from anyone who wants to block new housing that actually stood up to the slightest scrutiny. There is only ever one reason why people take this position: homeowners in California are hopelessly hooked on the Free Money™ from ever-increasing home prices. It's like a drug. Get your hands on a house and you're all set. With Prop 13, any risk is almost totally externalized. We see the result in action when cities allow additional office space to be built but not additional housing to go with it. The message is crystal clear: keep those home prices going up; keep the money flowing in. Screw anybody who hasn't bought yet.

When anyone proposes additional housing, all manner of excuses (and ugly accusations) come up: history, neighborhood character, the environment, claims that there are no more places to build, racism, classism, you name it. It's always a smoke screen. They are always lying. Always. None of the people blocking housing care at all about any of those things. It has always been about one and only one thing: the Free Money™. Anyone who says differently is lying.

...claims that there are no more places to build, racism, classism, you name it. It's always a smoke screen. They are always lying. Always. None of the people blocking housing care at all about any of those things.

Are you an aspiring mind reader or do you just enjoy making blanket statements?

I lived in a small 50,000 population Southern Ca. beach town that approved a massive 9000 resident master planned tract home/apartment community in 1999.

Character? It absolutely changed. We went from having essentially no big box stores to a Walmart, which beget more strip mall chains. Previous housing developments weren't on this scale, so yeah I'd argue thousands of semi-generic "tuscan villa" styled homes do change the aesthetics of a town.

Traffic? Went up significantly, as the whole community was built east of the existing city (and beach), meaning the main arteries were now quite full.

Classism/Racism? Doubtful. The town wasn't pristine to begin with. The majority of these new homes were more expensive than the existing housing stock complete with golf courses and swim clubs.

So now what?

More roads got built to alleviate traffic, a new outlet mall, new construction alongside the new roads. It's not helpful to act like these concerns are fake. California is a gorgeous state.

Not everyone wants to carve up every last canyon in the sake of making a miniature Irvine (or any strip mall, master planned lookalike community).

Doesn't have to be miniature Irvine, but growth needs to happen.

No it doesn't actually. It's a big country with plenty of space.

Of course some of these concerns are real. But your last statement could also be phrased "not everyone wants to change anything, in order to give people places to live".

So, you added 9000 units and the world did NOT in fact come to an end?

A multi billionaire could've bought all the land, displaced 50,000 residents, and the world still wouldn't come to an end.

There's a spacious middle ground between single family ranch-style houses, and "apartment towers". A handful of four-story buildings would make Mountain View a much nicer place. If there's a multi-story dwelling anywhere in Mountain View, I haven't seen it.

As for "built out", most of Silicon Valley consists of parking lots and freeway interchanges.

There are multi-storey apartment buildings all over Mountain View. Have you ever been there?

Office buildings. Not apartment ones.

"multi-story" => "two stories tall maximum, and half of ground space is parking lot"

Places like Paris are entirely (or nearly entirely) 4-5 stories tall, with no parking lots. This allows incredible density simultaneously with great livability (especially for pedestrians). (See [1])

So technically the gp was incorrect, but I would posit there are few (any?) places in Mountain View, or even most of the bay, with a floor area ratio (FAR) > 1.0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris#Cityscape

"Paris" and "liveability" together is weird.

The only reason people move to Paris is because the country is hyper-centralised and 'all' the jobs are in Paris. That's also the only reason that limits the rate at which people are moving away from Paris. Housing in Paris is unaffordable for low wages. People who can get rid of their job move to smaller cities across the country, people who cannot move to suburbs and undergo more and more commuting.

Concentration of jobs in the same place, unaffordable housing, does this ring a bell? :-)

100 Moffett, Mariposa Heights, and 1101 West are all four-story of greater condo complexes. There are probably others that I'm not aware of (I work in Mountain View but don't live there).

Yeah, and 100 Moffett is $3700-4500/month for a one bedroom.

1101 West isn't even built yet, and nobody has been living at 100 Moffett for more than a month. These seem like odd choices for your examples. But yes, these are better than what we had. Within 1000 feet of the train station there are chiefly 1-story buildings and parking lots. Replacing just that zone with dwellings over retail would transform Mountain View into a place worth visiting.

Why not? Seattle is built out, but apartment buildings are going up regardless. In West Seattle, they are going up near commercial areas and will spread out from there.

(I'm not particularly happy that so many people are flooding into the city at an unsustainable rate, but it's not like the city wants to clamp down on Amazon for increasing their tax base.)

For history sake, before everything from Almaden up to Page Mill was basically built out, Highway 85 between 17 opened up (realistically) around 1994. Within about a month of it opening, if you were driving from the south on 17, it was faster to go 17->280 instead of 17->85->280.

Then if you want o talk 87/101 down near Almaden Valley... the addition of 87 and 85 turned upper middle class neighborhoods (with good schools) into way less desirable neighborhoods and the track records of the schools dropped significantly. (I lived down there pre-85/87).

Sigh. I'll stop but the "we should do X" without thinking about reality around certain situations on here really reminds me that we can be wicked smart and successful in an area and completely clueless in another.

Exactly. And people keep forgetting about more common things like parking and traffic. If you increase the number of people in the area, then traffic is going to suffer exponentially without a proper mass transit system. But the Bay Area doesn't have even a half-way competent MTS. BART is basically end of life, and it doesn't connect effectively with Caltrain. It requires multi-billion dollar investments in MTS, but there has been none since BART in the 60s, which is inadequate and run down now.

It is true that traffic problems could suffer temporarity as density increases and the infrastructure does not keep up. However, if it can be anticipated, and in SV it is, that the demand will be continue to be high, the municipalities can plan for increased public transportation with better service schedule for everyone. This includes larger investments like roads and subways in the long run.

In particular, increased tax base from new homeowners and commercial properties can be earmarked to support mass transit infrastructure and schools.

This is a bit of chicken and egg. There is very little appetite for building mass transit until there is density and thus cost effectiveness, but your point is how can you increase density without first building out mass transit. So they would have to go hand in hand, where you build up and increase mass transit at the same time. Obviously mass transit is going to take longer to build than housing, so there is going to be short term pain.

I'm assuming by "short term" you're talking geological time, because in the 20+ years I've lived in Silicon Valley, I've seen almost zero improvements to the Mass Transit. I've seen some minor upgrades, but it's still generally terrible. So unless concerted effort and a lot of taxpayer money is dumped into Mass Transit, I don't think anything is going to happen. The simple fact that BART still doesn't go down to San Jose yet, or extend out to Tracy is embarrassing, but it's been talked about for decades.

Evict every land rentier (aka "homeowner") in Palo Alto and Atherton, seize their idiotic ranch properties, and build dense apartment buildings.

You can't talk about a housing shortage in an area where most of the land is spent on quarter-acre, single-family, one-floor suburbia.

Down vote with no comment on reality of Bay Area housing dynamics? I'm a native, lived from the east bay down to Santa Cruz.

The answer to every housing problem is not build more density. Sorry, the valley was built as a suburban sprawl and you have generations of families on parcels as well as recently purchased.

Newly constructed housing in Morgan Hill, an hour+ commute to Silicon Valley during peak rush hour is still $1M plus.

Love the down votes without comment.

> The answer to every housing problem is not build more density. Sorry, the valley was built as a suburban sprawl and you have generations of families on parcels as well as recently purchased.

Sorry the answer to every housing crisis is build more housing your attitude is the exact reason why housing is so expensive in the bay area. I mean you could try to reduce demand but good luck with that, and if you can't reduce demand you have to increase supply.

Your perspective as a native and long-term resident is of some interest, but it doesn't mean you automatically understand the economics of the situation.

I don't think anyone imagines that the needed changes are going to be politically easy. But as long as more and more people want to live here -- a trend that shows no sign of slowing down -- our only choices are to bulid more housing or tolerate ever-higher housing costs. There is no third option.

I'm a native of San Francisco, a lifelong resident. But I'm also a millennial raised with both a conservative concern for the long term and an optimism for the future via science. And the big story is that the suburbs are unsustainable in every way.

Preserving neighborhood character feels nice, but life is change. Preventing old houses from being torn down does not prevent old residents from leaving. You want preservation, then you better be prepared to pay for it. But the middle class suburbs, all those miles of pipes and miles of roads and miles of wires, are fundamentally insolvent. Even before you consider Proposition 13.

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/10/10/suburban-salva...

Silicon Valley is not built out. Silicon Valley needs to be torn down and replaced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com