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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There is a fair amount of rumbling about upzoning single-family lots to permit mid-rise apartment buildings, i.e. SB827.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are tons of American cities where the suburban dream can be maintained, but the Bay area is not one of them.