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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

>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.

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