Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz have anti-housing factions similar to everywhere else in the Bay Area, and the pro-housing faction is in earlier stages of organization than in the Bay Area. Scotts Valley City Council actually had a member say in open meeting that they don't want "those type of people" living there, in reference to renters and presumably others without the means to buy a home. Santa Cruz is similarly non-inclusive, and both are extremely homogenous communities that tend to scare away the typical racial diversity seen in a tech company. Many people of color in tech I've met say they simply don't feel welcome here like they do in the Bay Area.

Santa Cruz also has a green belt. But instead of encouraging density and all the environmental benefits of density, the aging political crew that enacted it now prefer sprawl, since they have their single family single story homes that continue to appreciate at astronomical rates. (At least until the homes are bought as tear-downs and replaced with single-family two story homes that extend to all corners of the property to maximize square footage.)

But if anybody can change attitudes, it's probably Apple or Google.

why can't someone buy enough land and incorporate their own city?

you mean like how Disney made Disneyland?

you'd need quite a large amount.

I'm hoping there will be more land-reclamation projects from the Pacific or even inside the Bay itself.

Maybe that's Ellon's plan: use Tunnel Boring machines to make transport tunnels, and use the extracted earth to push back the coastline to make more habitable land!

No let's not wreck the marine environment. The coastal waters are a very sensitive ecosystem. People can live elsewhere.

> why can't someone buy enough land and incorporate their own city?

Because you can't just incorporate your own city because you own land. In California, you need to convince the Local Agency Formation Commission for the county you are in, and, if your land is in an existing city, also a supermajority of the residents both of the land you own and the existing city from which you are splitting.

I would stand up and oppose dense urban housing plopped down in the middle my suburban single-family home neighborhood, too. I guess that makes me an evil, dirty NIMBY, but oh well, I'll live with the label.

When your message is "dense urban is the only acceptable way to live" don't be surprised when people who don't want their neighborhoods to turn into apartment complexes push back.

Yikes, stop with straw men. Live however you want! Nobody istearing down your house. Nobody is making you move. And NOBODY is plopping down density in the middle of single family homes, or even proposing that.

But please just let me live the way I and many others want. Just stop interfering with mixed use buildings in the middle of commercially zoned areas. So you might drive by a commercial area that has housing on top of retail, in a commercially zoned areas. What skin off your back is that?

And yes, it really is one of those small evils to make up crap like this in order to deny others housing, or a chance at opportunity like previous generations had.

I wish it were a straw man. Whenever one of these threads starts here, half the responses are "we need high rise condos, town homes, and dense urban units everywhere in the bay area!". If that's not the message intended to be sent, it's often the message received.

I don't care what you do to an already-urbanized area. Build housing on top of retail, knock yourself out. Pack another apartment high-rise next to the last one. Just please respect the desires of people who went out of their way to find one of the fewer and fewer affordable single family neighborhoods in the Bay Area to hang on to their lifestyle, too.

The places where people are proposing new development are almost always along existing transit corridors or adjacent to job centers, like El Camino Real or Caltrain.

Even those projects generate opposition. San Mateo just rejected a 10-unit, 35 foot condo building fronting El Camino Real, that had 26 parking spaces, because... it was "too tall."

Millbrae residents fiercely oppose 5 and 8 story buildings located... adjacent to the Caltrain and BART station we paid $400 million for two decades ago.

The original comment was about someone in Scotts Valley opposing urban development. Why does Scotts Valley need urban housing, when there are plenty of already-urban areas in the Bay Area that can continue to be built up? It makes much more sense to build up in front of El Camino Real or Caltrain.

I don't live in Scotts Valley, so don't have a horse in that race--I'm merely picturing myself in that person's shoes. Is it that surprising that someone who went out of their way to move somewhere far from an urban area, probably having to suffer a 2 hour commute because of it, would oppose nearby urban development?

No, read again, it wasn't "urban development" it was "renters." And that was truly the objection. It wasn't even a high density project.

This is the type of false exaggeration and straw men that is endemic to the discussion. And such straw men have to be made up, because otherwise there is no sensible objection to these projects. However the city council member wasn't being sensible, they were being bigoted. What was surprising was that they were open about the bigotry against those with less than <$300k/year incomes, usually there's at least a fig leaf of propriety.

Alright then, fine--I wrongly assumed you were talking about a development project since that's what the article was about. So he was objecting to renters moving into existing suburban housing. I'll concede that's not right.

What do you count as urban development? Would a duplex count as urban development? how about a 4-unit condo building? or a 10-unit building?

Reasons to build more densely there would include

- accounting for a growing population,

- senior citizens who want to live with their adult kids/walk to downtown

- increased property tax revenue from construction with a 2018 basis to offset budget deterioration under Prop 13

- an increased number of school students (pretty much every city on the Peninsula is slowly aging, and many are dealing with budget crises/school closures)

- provision of BMR housing (if you can build it) for city staff and other service employees, which is cheaper to build as part of a larger structure than as single family units.

It's subjective--I suppose I'd count as "urban" anything that would significantly increase already congested automobile traffic and/or significantly increase neighborhood population (noise). Duplexes? Probably not so much. Townhomes, apartments, multi-unit buildings? Absolutely.

What will significantly increase already congested automobile traffic is more suburbia, more doubling down on the idea that people must live equidistant from each other and drive everywhere.

The proposed bill I've seen people supporting - SB 827, by the SF state senator - defined "along existing transit corridors" so broadly that it covered the entirety of San Francisco and anywhere else with a vaguely functional bus service, and used state preemption of local laws to set a minimum height, remove parking minimums, and require local planners to allow dense mid-rise apartment buildings in the entire area. Its more keen proponents insist that it's absurd to call this radical in any way because it's obvious that dense buildings around transit hubs is the way to go.

>local laws to set a minimum height,

This may be a typo, but that's now what it does. It sets a minimum on the maximum height; people can still build below that.

SF isn't a real city but pretends to be. SB 827 will make it one.

I mean, if you want to live in a suburb, don't live in San Francisco?

> And NOBODY is plopping down density in the middle of single family homes, or even proposing that.

There is a fair amount of rumbling about upzoning single-family lots to permit mid-rise apartment buildings, i.e. SB827.

Those are along transit corridors, so it would be along busy routes, not in the middle of single family homes.

Along rail and the very busiest bus routes is exactly where we need and want apartments that have 3-4 stories. It would make no sense to put them in the middle of single family housing because those are deserts unless you have a car, and most people that would appreciate density would love to be able to do most of their tasks without a car. That's the appeal of density.

And we shouldn't be building rail without such density, because otherwise the rail is going to underutilized. Similarly with bus routes; why send tons of buses along a route if there's no possibility to pick up lots of people?

SB827 is about fixing planning processes to allow such density where it works, and letting the sprawl stay sprawl.

Take a look at the map. Most of what’s covered is exclusively or predominantly single family housing today. In SF the houses are much closer to each other than in postwar suburbia, but all along our transit corridors, it’s mostly houses. The only neighborhoods this avoid are those which don’t even have bus service.

Upzoning is needed and transit is the right place to start, but we have to acknowledge that this would certainly have a massive effect on many single family neighborhoods.

I wouldn't say "many" single family neighborhoods, it's really only San Francisco, a city. Even where there are pockets of single family houses, it's not what people usually think of as "single family home neighborhoods." Dual-unit buildings are extremely common, especially in the avenues. And in the Avenues there are plenty of tall apartment buildings sprinkled throughout the neighborhoods, they just had to be built long ago because they are illegal to build today.

>And we shouldn't be building rail without such density, because otherwise the rail is going to underutilized. Similarly with bus routes; why send tons of buses along a route if there's no possibility to pick up lots of people?

Park and ride is a thing. That said you need whatever the "ride" is to be cost competitive for people to take advantage of that and that's a tall order given the quality of local government in many places.

Yeah, park and ride may make sense as gathering points from exurbs, but on the flip side, putting parking close to train stations also prevents putting housing close to it. The only place where I've seen park and ride work is for some places in New Jersey, where you commute to a Manhattan density area. Not sure if, for example, Millbrae BART is as well utilized as that.

And as you ride those NJ lines, you see how many more people are supported at stops that have housing instead of parking. Parking is >200sq ft. that could be used for living instead.

A lot of my feelings are about my personal experience though, and I wouldn't want to stop park and ride if it works for enough people to support a train stop. For me, driving, then parking, then traversing a long ugly parking lot is a significantly worse experience than living there and walking out.

>For me, driving, then parking, then traversing a long ugly parking lot is a significantly worse experience than living there and walking out.

This assumes that "there" isn't a terrible place to live and also affordable.

Your NJ example is exactly the use case I was thinking of. It makes sense when density is uniform and job distribution is not because it's effectively a spur or extension of the mass transit line.

Not just an evil, dirty NIMBY, but an ignorant, misinformed NIMBY. Nobody is suggesting that they are going to tear down the house next to yours and put in a high-rise condo.

It does get hairy when people start throwing eminent domain into the mix.

Honestly, you live in the wrong place if you want to be in a cheap suburban, single-family home. There's just too much demand for housing, and something is going to give. The markets will drive housing density up, whether though building of multi-family units, or just having multiple families living in SF homes.

There are tons of American cities where the suburban dream can be maintained, but the Bay area is not one of them.

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